OK, let's get realistic.

Leaving the politics and money factors out of the equation for the sake of this discussion...

For the skipper and tactician positions: It is widely known that all of the teams strongly believe that it is wiser/easier/faster to take a good match racer and turn him into a cat sailor than the other way around. While there are very few good match racers (on any type of boat) in this age range, kids that have come up through the Opti/college route will try to make a strong case that they understand rules and tactics better that a typical cat sailor.

For the crew positions: These are (very) physical boats. For these positions, they need physical sailors first, smart/cat-experienced second. You could argue that they don't even need to be sailors in the first place.

There will be an application process, so I doubt they would put non-sailors on these teams. There will also need to be some practice, and we've had some discussion about what that might look like.

I would say that if we're lucky, we'd see a maximum of one experienced cat sailor per team.

Mike

EDIT: BTW, the Alter Cup has absoulely no relevance to this event or the Olympics, and likely never will.