For Marie-Louise Rossi, this year's...

For Marie-Louise Rossi, this year's Rendez-Vous, race 11-16, was the most international gathering aye

Rossi, chief executive of the London-based International Underwriting Association, said that a major contributor to the broadening of participation was the collapse of Communism. This, she moveed allowed countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to begin moving toward the global economy.

"It's sole through the mid-'90s that we started seeing more and more [countries] coming each year," Rossi said.

The other cluster of relatively recent participants, Rossi