Polish Match Racing growing in strenght

Hello Everyone,

it has been a long time since I last wrote on MATCHRACE.CH. Now I come back to you with fresh news that stole the past few months of my life...

Match Racing is undoubtfully growing all around the world. More and more events are organized every year and more sailors around the globe found the adventure with match racing attractive enough to do it internationally. Nevertheless, this widespread growth starts at the grass roots level which is the basis both for implemeting this format of racing on national field and also creating new teams that join the Match Racing family.

And for this reason I am more than happy to announce that Polish Match Racing is running through the immediate growth and is presently being widespread among whole country.
To give you the short background - Polish Match Racing has been truely started by the Sopot Match Racing Center which is run by Polish Match Racer Przemyslaw Tarnacki. Since 2004 SMRC is organizing the ISAF Graded Events, starting with Grade 2 in 2004 and following by Sopot Match Race Grade 1 in 2005 and 2006. This year SMRC is organizing the EUROSAF Match Race Europeans which is another top project of this Center.

Organizing events on the highest level does not however helps you that much to develop match racing and encourage new local and national competitors. For this purspose we have created Polish Match Racing Committee within Polish Yachting Association structures which is responsible to step few levels down and attract the grass roots to do match racing. Thanks to the great effort and tremendous work of the whole committee Polish Match Racing Cup was brought into life consisting of 9 events. All the events got the ISAF Grade 4 status and Polish Nationals were granted ISAF Grade 3.

12-13.05 - Zegrze Match Race I
16-17.06 - Zegrze Match Race II
23-24.06 - Lajkonik Match Race Cup
7-8.07 - Delphia 24 Match Race
14-15.07 - Płock Match Race 2007
28-29.07 - MT Partners YKP Gdynia Grand Prix
15-16.09 - Zegrze Match Race III
22-23.09 - Zegrze Match Race IV
5-7.10 - I Polish National Championship in Match Racing

This is just the beginning of our national stategic plan but even at this stage we do encourage other MNAs to increase their activity in the match racing field as this is surely the future of sailing in terms of media and sponsors attractivness and also fastly growing temptation for sailors.

I welcome all your comments regarding how match racing can be developed on national field. Let's share the opinions and experience and work together on the growth of Match Racing into strenght.

Best regards,
Sofia