The first of Oman Sail’s 2014 season of ranking races to determine the best young Optimist sailors in the Sultanate will take place this week in Mussanah as part of the Oman Sail Omantel Youth Programme, sponsored by Omantel and co-sponsored by Oman Shipping Company. Around 36 young sailors from Oman Sail’s three sailing centres at Mussanah, The Wave Muscat and Marina Bandar Al Rowdha have been preparing all year for the event, which will feature six races over two days starting on Friday April 25.
All of the talented youngsters, aged under 15, are Oman Sail Race Club members and active on the performance pathway that underpins Oman Sail's acclaimed Youth Programme. Most will have started out in the community sailing events such as “Try Sailing” and moved onto Sailing School Youth Clubs and Sailing School Race Clubs designed for children who show promise and enthusiasm.
Members of the Race Clubs can train three times a week at each sailing centre and compete at local inter club regattas but success in this first ranking regatta of the year, which will be followed by two others in June and August, could form the basis of their selection in Oman’s National Youth Squad.
“All the youngsters have been preparing and training hard for these events because the results will form one of the criteria for selection of the national squad so they are very important,” said Abdul Aziz Al Shidi, Oman Sail’s Youth Pathway Coach. “Their performance on the water matters because it is a reflection of their preparation and their attitude. The youngsters will already have been observed during training but this is ‘show off’ time where they can demonstrate everything they’ve learned. It is an opportunity for them to measure their skills and abilities against sailors from other sailing centres and for us to see how the sailing centres have been working and where they can improve.”
Selection to the National Youth Squad, which was first established in February last year, is a gateway to international competition, with teams from Oman already starting to participate in regional and world championships in the Optimist class. Four members of the current National Youth Squad carved their own slice of history recently by becoming the first ever Omanis to compete at the International Optimist Dinghy Association (IODA) Asian Championships. At the 2014 IODA Asian championships in Bahrain, they performed well enough for Oman to emerge as the most successful of the GCC nation with three sailors finishing in the top 50% of the fleet.
