Origin
The Optimist was designed in 1947 by American Clark Mills, inspired by the Soap-box Derby program that is sponsored by Optimist International service club to encourage father/son construction of gravity powered cars for down-hill competition. Mills home town of Clearwater, Florida has no hills so he designed a simple pram that could be built from a single sheet of plywood, and donated the plan to the Optimists. The design was slightly modified and introduced to Europe by the Dane, Axel Damsgaard, and spread outwards across Europe from Scandinavia. The design was standardized in 1960 and became a strict one-design in 1995.
The International Optimist is sailed in over 120 countries by over 160,000 skippers and it is one of only two yachts approved by the International Sailing Federation exclusively for sailors under 16. At the London Olympics, nearly 80% of all boat skippers were former Optimist dinghy sailors, most of them having reached international level in the Class.
Read more about this topic: Optimist (dinghy)
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