The Soling is an open keelboat that holds the World Sailing "International class" status.

Besides the Olympic career of the Soling the boat is used for international and local regattas as well as for recreational sailing.

[6] The boats are one-design originating from an authorized single plug and mould system and made of fiberglass.

[1] Solings last a long time, and boats produced in the early days are still in competition today (more than 50 years after being built).

At the 2019 North American Championship the fifth place was taken by the German team sailing a refurbished Soling which had been built in 1968.

[8][9] The search was for four classes: After the announcement, Yachting started to gather design sketches for a three persons keelboat to be used in a presentation at the November IYRU meeting.

After Jan Herman Linge and Finn Ferner were satisfied with the prototype (in wood) it was transformed into a plug to create a mould for production in fiberglass.

Some sixty boats were produced, sold and sailed in Scandinavia as a local class even before the trials took place.

Trials were held with some new boats, a fiberglass Shillalah II and the Soling plus a Dragon and 5.5 Metre for speed reference.

The first Soling European Championship was held in Skovshoved, Denmark and won by the team of Per Spelling from Norway.

In this period the first Soling World Championship was held in 1969 in which 87 boats participated off the coast of Copenhagen, and won by the team of Paul Elvstrøm, Niels Jensen and Poul Mik-Meyer.

[8] The team had put a lot of systems and hiking gear into their boat to make it sail faster.

Later that year changes were made to the class rules so that racing floors/double bottoms, or as they are called officially "Cockpit Soles" became legal.

The first winners of an Olympic Soling gold medal,[10] Buddy Melges, Bill Allen and Bill Bentsen[11] from the United States made the boat "Simple" by putting a lot of the systems below deck and removing the winches and shroud tracks.

Early 1972 Jack van Dyke from the United States became president of the ISA and he made sure that the Soling construction became under control.

Poul Richard Høj Jensen, Valdemar Bandolowski and Erik Hansen from Denmark[12] took the Gold medal during the 1976 Olympics in Kingston, Ontario.

Due to the high level of National and local competition the Battle for Olympic selection became more and more intense.

This meant that rules were implemented for World and continental championships to keep the large fleet events fair.

Poul Richard Høj Jensen, Valdemar Bandolowski and Erik Hansen,[14] this time sailing under the flag of the IOC, became the 1980 Olympic Champions.

Karl Haist had two major objectives for his presidency: First he wanted a large Soling event in Eastern Europe.

The second objective, bringing the operational cost of the Soling down by reducing the number of sails during a championship, took more time.

[19] The Gold medals were won by the East Germany team of Jochen Schümann, Thomas Flach and Bernd Jäkel.

The German team of Jochen Schüman, Thomas Flach and Bernd Jäkel[24] won their second gold medal in the Soling during the 1996 Olympics.

The 1997 Worlds in Rungsted, Denmark did not produce enough races to constitute a valid championship due to weather conditions.

Finally the Danish team of Jesper Bank, Henrik Blakskjær and Thomas Jacobsen took the gold medal.

And the Soling had to face the fact that many of her top sailors had disappeared to other Olympic disciplines or had quit sailing in general within a few months.

Rose Hoeksema, United States took over as president and did a good job of holding the International and National Soling sailors within the class as well as possible.

In 2017 it became clear that there were no longer vendors of suitable aluminum Soling spars any more world wide.

Han van Veen, The Netherlands, created and executed a plan to introduce Carbon spars for the Soling.