The ILCA 7 men sailed their World Championship in Dún Laoghaire from 23 to 30 August, hosted by the Royal St George and National yacht clubs. Hungary’s Jonatán Vadnai won it by a single point from Australia’s Matt Wearn, with Great Britain’s Michael Beckett third on the same score as Wearn. The title was settled on the final leg of the thirteenth and last race.

The reason it matters to us is the format. The ILCA fleet used a two-race final for the top ten with every point halved going in, which is close to what our own classes used in Quiberon in May. Both produced the same ending. Here is what happened, and what we think it means.

ILCA and Down Under Sail streamed the final day live, called by 2016 Olympic silver medallist Annalise Murphy with Nile Kelly reporting from the water. It is worth two hours of anyone’s time.

Biggest difference maker

Two world championships this year. Two titles decided by one point in the last race of the regatta.

Quiberon in May: Pia Dahl Andersen and Nora Edland (NOR) won the closing 49erFX race to finish level on points with the defending champions Paula Barceló and Maria Cantero (ESP), and took gold on the tiebreak. Aleksandra Melzacka and Sandra Jankowiak (POL) came from eighth that morning to bronze. We wrote it up at the time: Three first-time World Champions in the Olympic cat and skiffs.

Dún Laoghaire in August: Vadnai 47, Wearn 48, Beckett 48.

Different class, different country, same shape of format, same ending.

Once is a good regatta. Twice starts to look like the format doing what it was built to do.

How the ILCA format worked
Five qualifying races across three fleets, then a six-race elimination series, then the top ten into a two-race final with every score halved on the way in.

Elliot Hanson (GBR) came out of the elimination series on 62 net, two clear of Ryan Lo (SGP) and ten clear of Beckett. Halved, that became 31 against Lo’s 32 and Beckett’s 36. Vadnai sat on 42, eleven points off the lead with two races to sail.

He found them. A 4 and a 1, while Hanson sailed an 8 and a 10.

Beckett, in an interview recorded for the broadcast before racing began: “I don’t remember a Worlds where you’ve got the top ten within so few points, and that’s before they’ve been halved. Going in today it’s basically just two races almost from a clean slate.”

Best thing the new world champion said

Speaking to Nile Kelly on the water, minutes after finishing and before the result was official, Vadnai was asked how it felt.

“Yesterday I had a super tough day and thanks to this new format, I was back in the game and I just went for it.”

Nobody had asked him about the format. Ask a sailor who has just lost whether compressing the points is fair and you know roughly what you will get. The man who won volunteered that it was the reason he was still in a championship he had already lost.

Biggest distinction in the whole argument   

There are two ways to close up a scoreline before a final series, and they are not the same thing. Lewis Smith of The Foil set the difference out clearly on The Foil Podcast the following week.

One method caps the gaps. Take the net points, run a calculation, and make sure nobody’s deficit is larger than some fixed number. That is what the 470s used at their championship. The podcast calls it the Robin Hood method and describes the arithmetic as wizardry.

The other divides. Halve every score. The order does not move and the gaps stay proportional. They just get smaller. As Smith put it: “By halving the points, you still keep the relative gaps in between the sailors, but it shrinks. I think it’s a really fair way to do it.”

Capping punishes a sailor for having been too good. Win the week by a mile and the system confiscates the mile. Halving lets you keep what you earned, at half scale. By Smith’s account, Dún Laoghaire was the first championship since the format changed to divide rather than cap.

Best convert
The most useful verdict on the format came from a The Foil Podcast host who had spent months attacking it, and who tuned in deliberately as a sceptic.

“I’ve been really critical of the new Olympic proposed formats, and I tuned in on that final day and I was like, right, I’m going to watch this as Joe Public. And I didn’t hate it. It actually kind of worked,” said Freddie Carr of the Foil.

Later in the same conversation: “It was an absolute delight to watch that format work, which I’ve been critical of. And maybe that’s because we didn’t have the squashing of the points.”

Biggest hole in our own case
Smith raised the counter-argument himself, and it is a fair one.

“They maybe did get away with it slightly as well with the venue. Everybody in that top ten had a real discard, like a forty-odd point.” Hanson had also been disqualified from one elimination race for hitting a mark. Strip those out, give the leader a clean and consistent week, and the halved gap might have been big enough to settle the title before the final day.

Which is the thing the format exists to prevent.

So the honest claim is that a divisor can produce a finish like this, not that it always will. Anyone arguing for it, ourselves included, should say so before somebody else says it for them.

Best mistake
The race that decided the world championship started with two boats over the line early. The overnight leader and the double Olympic champion.

Hanson went back, never recovered, and finished tenth.

Wearn went back, rounded the first windward mark last or close to it, caught the left shift on the second beat, led at the top of it, and crossed the line second.

Same error, ninety seconds apart, and the difference between a silver medal and fifth place. It is Wearn’s seventh ILCA 7 Worlds medal, taken from ninth of the ten on adjusted points.

Best ten minutes of somebody else’s championship
Beckett led the final race off the first beat and held it down the run. The commentary had him with a hand and a half on the world title.

Then the last downwind went light and patchy, five knots in the lulls against eight in the puffs, and five boats compressed into a line.

Beckett rounded third and finished level with Wearn on 48, taking bronze on the tiebreak. Third overnight, third at the end, and world champion for about ten minutes in between.

Best explanation of the winning move, from the man who made it
Vadnai, again to Nile Kelly, asked to talk through the last downwind:

“The downwind before, I was not enough on the side. I was in the middle and I was without the wind. And then for the next one I just decided to really play my side best as possible, and in the end I could come back with the waves and it worked very well.”

The side was the right of the course looking upwind, which is the left of it as you look down. Half the reports of that run say right and half say left, and both are correct, which tells you plenty about why this sport is hard to describe to people who do not sail.

One run. One decision about which side to commit to, taken by a sailor who had got the same decision wrong on the run before, with nine other boats still able to win the championship.

Biggest number nobody is quoting
Smith, who worked on the broadcast of the 2023 World Sailing Championships, put some figures on the audience. The ILCA medal race video from that event has reached about 140,000 views. The 2012 Olympic medal race sits at around 1.3 million.

Dún Laoghaire was the first live stream of an ILCA 7 medal race in three years.

His argument for pointing a camera at this fleet is not sentiment. Almost everybody who sails learned in a boat like this one, so almost everybody watching can judge exactly how hard what they are seeing is. A foiling catamaran does not give an audience that.

Best sign of where race management is going
Every boat carried a Vakaros unit, so a sailor over the line early saw it on his own screen and went back with no individual recall signalled. The marks were GPS-positioned with propellers underneath, moved electronically rather than dragged on an anchor.

Twenty seconds before the start of the deciding race the breeze went right, 160 to 180 degrees. Race officer Con Murphy postponed, moved the course, and restarted on 170.

On anchored marks that is an afternoon. Here it cost a few minutes.

Best ending
Vadnai left his boat capsized where it lay, jumped off the coach boat into Dublin Bay, and was asked how he planned to celebrate.

“I have to have a Guinness. I mean, it’s mandatory.”

Where to go deeper
The Foil Podcast took the regatta and the format apart with Lewis Smith in episode 36. The ILCA section starts around 54 minutes.