2012 Sailing Olympics

Weymouth Bay and Portland Harbour are widely recognised as the finest sailing waters in the UK. This together with purpose built, on-shore facilities resulted in the Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy (WPNSA) being selected as the venue for the London 2012 Olympic sailing events. WPNSA not only offers its superb venue for events and training, but also hosts a successful sailing school (run by SailLaser). It has an active members' club and has a policy of welcoming everyone to enjoy its facilities.

A sheltered harbour and more challenging meteorological and tidal conditions out in the bay, offering the combination of clean winds, sheltered waters and weak tides, is unique and this new World Class facility set in the centre of the Jurassic Coast, the only Natural World Heritage Site on the UK mainland, provides an unrivalled venue for training / sailing competitions and is committed to protecting the local environment.

The Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy (WPNSA) has announced new information on international team training access to the venue during 2010. The opportunity for International teams to train at the venue was announced earlier in the season and teams from across Europe including Italy, Spain and Sweden as well as the more distant shores of Japan and Brazil have already been honing their skills on the waters of Weymouth and Portland. With just under 1000 days to go to the start of the Games, mapping training programmes and booking venues is an important element to campaigns.

A range of packages, depending on the size of the team has been developed and these are available either on a 12 monthly basis from July to June in the following year, or on an arrangement for the whole period to the end of June, 2012. WPNSA is the first sailing venue in recent history to welcome international sailors to train and compete at the completed venue prior to the Games. This is an important step, giving elite level sailors and windsurfers the opportunity to use the actual London 2012 on-shore facilities and race courses for training purposes, prior to them being used by both the Olympic and Paralympic competitors.

Queries on access should be directed to Rachel Sadler at WPNSA.

The ten sailing events in the 2012 Olympic Sailing Competition are:

Men
One person dinghy
One person dinghy
Two person dinghy
Two person dinghy high performance
Windsurfer
Keelboat

Women
One person dinghy
Two person dinghy
Keelboat match racing
Windsurfer