Olympics: US Sailing calls for investigation into capsize that injured Bora Gulari (USA)
NEWPORT, RI – U.S. Sailing has asked World Sailing and the Nacra 17 class association to investigate a capsize in which Olympian Bora Gulari of Detroit lost parts of three fingers on his right hand. Malcolm Page (AUS), chief of USA Olympic sailing, says U.S. Sailing wants to know if the catamarans, which recently were upgraded to allow foiling, can be made safer. Page also said that he’s asked the Italian sailing team to see a video of the accident. Gulari told The Associated Press that the capsize happened so fast that he wasn’t sure if the tips of three fingers were severed because his hand was caught in a line that controls the boom [main traveler – TFE] or if they were cut by a hydrofoil. –The AP's Bernie Wilson in a wire story that he filed this afternoon and is being picked up across the USA and beyond. Full story via the Washington Post
Our initial Sailing Illustrated report on the accident on Wednesday is here.
Meanwhile, Lars Grael of the famously good Brazilian sailing family, and brother of Torben Grael who is on the World Sailing Executive Committee, has assailed World Sailing and the Nacra Class in a statement this afternoon that was translated from the original Portuguese to Italian and carried by the Italian website Farevela here. You can get the gist of it via a Google translation to English here. So it's a double translation, and we will have a better translation from the original Portuguese in due course; e.g., "mast" comes through as "tree" in a few places.
USA Olympian Bora Gulari (Detroit, left) as he was leaving a hospital in Montpelier, France Wednesday night after doctors repaired the tips of three of his fingers that were severed when the foiling Nacra 17 he and crew, and fellow USA Olympian, Helena Scutt (Kirkland, WA) were sailing in preparation for next week's Nacra 17 Worlds capsized earlier Wednesday. Photo courtesy of their training partner, Riley Gibbs (center, Long Beach, CA) from his Facebook page.