Men's and Women's Skiff | Olympic Sailing Explained

The men's and women's skiff events will use the 49er and 49er FX at the Paris Olympics. Francis Erwin Fischer and Clément Pékin and Dutch duo Odile Van Arnholt and Annette Duets give us the lowdown on the boats they'll be racing this summer. The 49er is a double-ended men's skiff at Paris 2024. The 49er FX is the women's skiff. The 49er FX and the 49er class are pretty similar. We sail the exact same hull but because the men are heavier and taller they have a longer mast and bigger sail area. The boat has three sails. We use the mainsail and the jib always and we use the colourful gennaker to sail on the downwinds. While I'm sailing I'm looking about the wind shift. We speak together to take some decisions where we tack, where we gybe. We can trim our boats for any wind there is. When there are light winds we try to make the sails as powerful as possible so we can hike into it and have pressure and when it gets very windy we want to decrease that power, have flat sails so we can keep going fast. The 49er is very tiring so we need to have a good physical preparation. If there's not so much breeze we do a lot of leg bending and we need to have really strong legs and if it's windy we need to have really strong arms to pull ourselves in the boat from the trapeze. We use trapeze harnesses which allow us to stand farther outside of the boat and make the boat go really fast. Paris 2024 we will have 19 boats on the starting line and we will have four days of racing on fleet. And on the fifth day we have the medal race with the top 10 competitors to decide who wins the medals. In Marseille there are lots of mountains and islands around so the wind's very funky. Sometimes we have some sea breeze, very light and choppy conditions. We can also have some mistral, strong wind with a big wave so we can have like the forecast around 20 to 30 knots maybe more. We have a really good fleet so there are a lot of medal contenders but among them are Sweden, Brazil, USA, Norway, Poland, Spain, Italy. And us hopefully. I think maybe eight boats can get the medal. Bart Lambrix and Floris van der Werkel who are very good. They won three times the world championships and we have the Spanish boat, Kiwis, Croatian guys. We have a lot of boats that can manage to get a medal.