UKLA Chair Blog # 82

What tribe are you in?  If a tribe is a community which has shared interests and provides support to its members and you are getting this email, then you are probably in the tribe of ILCA sailors in the UK. Or it could also be club-based tribe or even a group of ex-university sailing friends.

I wrote some weeks go about the selection of Micky Beckett and Hannah Snellgrove as the men’s and women’s single-handed sailing representatives of TeamGB at the Paris Olympics this summer. I said of course, their selection is mostly down to individual dedication with the support of their coaches, but we all have had a part to play. These sailors have come up through our class over many years and competed and trained in many of our clubs around the country and many of us will have raced against them. We should consider ourselves part of their team and we need to think how we can support them at the Games. So we are all in this same tribe – we have some common interests, we try to share those through the umbrella of the UKLA and also provide support to those just joining to the tribe.

The way ILCA sailing works is that you become a member of the District where you normally sail (in our case the District is Great Britain) but this has nothing to do with nationality or residency and in fact some Districts are not based on country boundaries at all. In essence we are all one community that sails together. This came to a head for me at the 2018 Masters Worlds in Dun Laoghaire. In the previous 15 years, almost all my sailing was club based at Queen Mary (in fact my Laser never left the club for 13 years) until I went to Hayling Island for the Masters Nationals in 2017 and started doing some UKLA events in the build up to 2018. Then off I went to the Worlds in Dublin with a bunch of friends and fellow sailors from Queen Mary and around the UK. As a member of UKLA, I had GBR on my sail (they are the rules) and that’s when the fun started, after all there I was racing on the waters where I had spent the first 25 years of my sailing and where many of the volunteers at the event were people I knew – why was I sailing under GBR?  Of course, my UKLA friends couldn’t understand why I was being claimed by the Irish as I was entered under GBR. Luckily at the prizing-giving Jeff Martin has the sense to announce the results as “Mark Lyttle – GBR…and Ireland” otherwise there might have been a riot! The reality is that I happen to be in both tribes.

Our UKLA community is bound by who normally sails here and we have diaspora from around the world. Last weekend David Surkov was racing, and he is well known for his Ukrainian heritage but off the top of head we have sailors from Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Canada, Ireland, Thailand amongst others who sail regularly with us. In the nineties, Nik Burfoot entered and won the World Championship in New Zealand as a GBR sailor as he was living and sailing in our fleet but he is most definitely a New Zealander (he also won the Nationals) – subsequently he won the Worlds again with NZL on his sail after he returned to New Zealand! We welcome sailors who come to work or study here as it adds to the inclusive nature of our class but of course they need to conform to the rules of the tribe!

While entry to international ILCA events is really based on District membership (where you normally sail) rather than country representation (i.e. there is no nationality check), many sports wrestle with this the issue, rugby being one example. At the 2015 World Cup, it was reported, Argentina was the only team where the full squad was born in Argentina. Rules on representing your country in sport can be complex and vary by sport. Your nationality, where you were born, where you live and whether you have represented another country before are often factors. Indeed, rules may even differ by competition with the Olympic Games often have different criteria than for example the World Championship in a sport – this is certainly true of ILCA racing.

Some say your right to represent your country should be driven by your nationality. But that’s not so easy – does it also apply if you were born somewhere else and have gained nationality by living in that country for a long time? Or what if you are a national of one country but emigrated to another country when you were a baby or even born in another country but entitled to nationality because of your parents or even grandparents, when you may never have even visited that country? Or are we really saying you must be born and bred in a country and be a national to “qualify”?  Nationality, it seems, is a course criterion.

But so is residency. For example, if you have lived in a country for a long time and are a permanent resident, surely you should be allowed represent your country. But how long is a long time? 10 years or 3 years? Any length of time you pick is going to have people on the wrong side of threshold.

Luckily for ILCA sailing in the UK we don’t need to wrestle with this, but in any case, for me what really defines your identity is (guess what) what you identify with. So I have (at least) two tribes, one associated with the group of sailors I grew up with and represented at the Olympics but another tribe around ILCA sailing in the UK and the UKLA where I have been for 25 years. And as part of that community where Micky and Hannah have grown and developed, we will all be doing our best to support them at Paris 24.