Just like a Masters achievement is penultimate for golfers, there are the Sailing World Cup achievements for sailors.
Indeed, to win gold medal in sailing is one of the highest achievements for a sailor and is a respected achievement indeed when it is part of the World Cup series. However, this year the World of sailing seems to have left out Robert Scheidt’s name from the series of invitees for the Hyeres event that was held recently in France. Indeed, the last news about Robert was his switch from the laser to the 49er category in Miami. Being an Olympic medalist five times in a row definitely brings him in the limelight no matter what he does. However, his absence at the recent World Cup Series in Hyeres was found strange by many.
Robert has been seen practicing with other sailors on Lake Garda along with others who were also not part of the French leg this year.
The World Sailing body had invited sailors of international acclaim from all over and hence, what could be the reason that Robert was not part of that list of names? This could be due to the selecting bases being winning Sailing World Cup Final and not the championships. The Olympic Sailing has more of a commercial approach while World Sailing has certain items on which they execute direct control such as size of regattas. However, there seems to be a conflict in how they select sailors from the different World Cup Series. Indeed, there is a need to make the rules simpler with less of qualifying series and scoreboards that are simple to make sense of. Indeed, that is what is apparent from Robert’s and other’s absence from the French World Cup Series that was recently held and should have had a larger base of competitive world sailors.