The J/80 World Championship 2023 is to be held September 18 to 24 in Baiona, Spain, under the organization of the Monte Real Club de Yates (MRCYB). This is the nautical event of the year in the Galician community and will bring together 80 sailboats from five continents for a week in the Rías Baixas. Baiona will be the meeting place for nearly 500 athletes and coaches, many of them accompanied by their families, turning it into a melting pot of languages and cultures united by the love of the sport of sailing. This week of events organized under the umbrella of the MRCYB will include five days of competition at the highest level aboard 8-meter monotypes.

The scoring races will be held September 20 to 24, with the previous days will be reserved for crew registration, boat assembly, equipment control and other issues related to the rules of the competition. There will also be several training trials so that the fleet can learn the race course, and on Tuesday, September 19, at 8:00pm, all the teams will gather to participate in the opening ceremony. Breakfasts, barbecues, concerts, giant screens and a village in the gardens of Monte Real will make up the more leisurely aspects of the event that will be underway until September 24 at 7:00pm, when the trophies will be awarded to the winners.

The final classification will come out of a program in which a total of 15 races divided into three tasks per day are planned, although the possibility of sailing one more race each day is open, to be determined by the race committee. From the sixth race onwards, the crews will be able to discard their worst result. Depending on the number of boats participating in the competition, two different phases could be put into play, a first round of preliminary races on the first three days of competition, and a final phase on the last two days. This will be decided in the days before the championship starts, in addition to the location of the race course, for which the preference is the Cies Islands; the model of the courses, which could be windward-leeward or trapezoidal, will in both cases use inflatable beacons to mark the required passages.

The J80s will compete in real time on short and intense courses, so exciting races are expected for all the categories in contention, which could be up to four: a general, a mixed (with a minimum of 40% of the crew to be of the opposite sex), a youth (for teams with crew under 25 years) and a Corinthian. On the water, half a dozen teams of juries, both national and international, will be in charge of checking that the equipment complies with all the rules. On land, there will be a special area for raising and measuring boats, and another area where sails will be measured.

As part of the organization of the event, the MRCYB has made four boats available to overseas teams to rent and participate in the event, for which it has already received requests from Indonesia, Canada and the United States. The club is also working to obtain more boats to rent to crews from other countries who wish to participate, and has also taken the necessary steps to facilitate the transfer of boats from different parts of Europe to the participants through freighters.

More information can be found online HERE >>.