We are sorry the IRC Board has expressed shock and disappointment about our decision with YCCS to issue the Notice of Race for next year’s ORC Worlds and chosen to misrepresent our dialogue in their press release.
An email was sent on 4 October explaining to them our frustration over their insistence to replicate what we knew was a failed solution of averaging scores in ORC and IRC, as done in 2018 in The Hague. The feedback from the sailors at this event was very negative, and even the minutes of the 2021 IRC Congress admits this as well.
We feel we need to listen to the sailors on what is acceptable to them and not use an ineffectual scoring solution based purely in politics. Our proposal of using ORC scoring for inshore races and IRC scoring for offshore races seems the appropriate solution and we still believe would be acceptable to the constituency.
We therefore fail to see why the decision by YCCS and ORC to issue the ORC Worlds 2022 Notice of Race on 21 October could be a surprise: this is only 8 months prior to the start of this event. We also informed them of this on 4 October, their IRC Board meeting was on 6 October, and the IRC Congress was held on 16 October, and yet we still heard nothing from them before our announcement.
Regardless, we are available to re-engage on these discussions for a combined ORC/IRC event in 2023.
