History

Sailing was first contested at the 1900 Olympic Games, made its next Olympic appearance in 1908, and has featured at every Games since.

It is one of the oldest sports on the Olympic programme and its Olympic history is littered with many heroes, including some of the sporting world’s great figures.

Interestingly, the sport was not known as Sailing at the Games until Sydney 2000 – it was called Yachting up until then, and became the first Olympic sport to make a name change.

In the early Olympic Games, sailing was dominated by bigger boats, sometimes with as many as 10-12 sailors, and time handicaps were used to adjudicate the races. Starting from 1924, and increasingly from the 1950s onwards, the trend has been towards smaller one-design boats with fewer crew members. In the last 20 years, equipment trials have resulted in several new boats reflecting the latest developments in the sport.

During the 2008 Beijing Games, only one event had a three-person crew (Yngling), with five events contested by lone sailors. The line-up of classes at Tokyo 2020 was a suitable mixture of older boats with rich history, such as the Finn and the 470, those reflecting the design and technology advances in the sport, like the 49er/49erFX and the Nacra 17, and modern disciplines like windsurfing. Paris 2024 will build on this legacy and introduces new equipment with kiteboarding represented for the first time and foiling in half of the events.

Women have always been allowed to compete in Olympic sailing with men – in fact, the first ever woman to win an Olympic gold medal was a sailor. At Paris 1900, Hélène de Pourtalès (SUI) was a crew member on board Lérina, which won gold in the first race and silver in the second race in the 1-to-2-ton class. In 1988, separate sailing events were introduced exclusively for women.

As the sport strives for gender equity in all areas, it is worth noting that Tokyo 2020 saw a 60/40 split, with five men’s events, four women’s events and one mixed event, and Paris 2024 will be the first Olympic Games to have achieved gender equity at event and athlete level.