U.S. Olympic Sailing Trials : Opener Canceled on Foggy Day at Newport, R.I.

NEWPORT, R.I. —  This place must have inspired Andersen’s split pea soup. If it were London, they’d name a raincoat after it.

“Fog?” asked Bob Hobbs, Newport’s Olympic Yachting Committee representative, mockingly incredulous. “In Newport?”

Steve Rosenberg is a Flying Dutchman contender from Long Beach, here for the Olympic sailing trials that were supposed to start Tuesday. He claimed he couldn’t see far enough to determine where he was.

“Looked like San Francisco (with the) fog coming over the hills,” Rosenberg said.

But he knew it wasn’t Long Beach.

“No way. (At) Long Beach, we’d have 18 knots of wind and a clear day. That’s where it should have been in the first place.”

With his brother Ron and all of the other competitors in five classes, Rosenberg was towed out of the harbor from the Ft. Adams compound Tuesday, met a wall of fog and spent a couple of more hours being towed around, waiting for the fog to lift.

Then they were all towed back, sarcasm dripping. Olympic boats don’t have motors.

If there’s enough wind, the boats reach the race courses under their own sail power. But, of course, there is seldom enough wind at Newport--a point of complaint for many of the competitors, who realized late last summer that the Olympic sailing at Pusan on the tip of South Korea will probably be a lot more windy than anyone expected.

Newport, the site of many America’s Cup defenses through 1983, is notorious for light wind, but fog now looms as an even greater threat to these trials.

Said Tom Chadwick, the chairman of the trials committee who has sailed these waters for 20 years: “Unless we get some breeze, we could see the same thing tomorrow. We won’t even leave the beach tomorrow if it looks like it did today. We’ll send somebody out (to check).”

The men’s and women’s 470s, the FDs and the Tornados are all sailing out of Ft. Adams across Newport Harbor from the town. The sailboards are based at First Beach on the backside of the town. They didn’t even leave the beach Tuesday.

The cancellation means the boats will be racing Sunday instead of having that day off before starting the second week of competition Tuesday. Monday will still be a day off, no matter what happens.

Organizers had planned 10 days of racing, with competitors allowed to throw out their worst two races in the scoring.