Tower trapezing

It isn't a sport at all, at least not from any definition of 'sport' I have ever heard

The 100m is one of the major events of the games, and is simple in the extreme. Not sure gimmicks make an Olympic sport, but simple, human endeavour and greatness. For me, the great sports are those with history. The athletics don't chop and change, saying that the 100m is out of date. Stick with some classic events where history shines through.

The attraction of the Olympics is in the variety and diversity of sporting endeavour on display, reducing it all to a spectacle is missing the point (yes, ok, I know that's what to was when the Greeks and Romans were doing it but.....). There are plenty os 'spectacle sports' available without destroying the principles of Olympic competition.

Rupert,

How right you are! The early Mk 1 Rondars could be a pig and if you really had an early one, with the x-profile traveller track running right across the cockpit, then you will still be carrying the scars to today! Yet the Contender was a game changer, then in quite quick succession you had the 600, then the 700/MPS - each changed the game in it's own way. But the important thing in all of this - as I stressed in the talk, was that these superb boats represented something of a step function. 

So yes, you could tweak the MPS or, as I alluded to, come up with something even more extreme, but the reality of the sport today is that further step functions just aren't there anymore (unless you subscribe to the I-GRF belief in building boats from exotic materials such as floatarium).The proof comes from the International Moths who went down this route, as boats got ever more extreme (I was there when Ian Ridge made a hull out of the remains of a Unicorn hull) and in a recent thread elsewhere, it was widely accepted that these super-skinny lowriders, with an alloy rig, were the hardest of all the dinghies to sail....but as you pointed out, people did master them eventually. However, without suspending the laws of nature, I can't see where anything else is going to come from!

Dougal

Riv (as original poster)…..this was pretty much the 'meat' in my topic at the Dinghy Show, when I was discussing the development of the performance single hander.  The conclusion was a question - in boats such as the Musto Skiff, have single handers reached a final plateau of development. You can't add in any more sail, because there is not a lot more in the way of righting moment to be had. Way back in the day, Elvstrom did try a single hander that had a massively long plank, but very quickly binned the idea as 'unsailable'. There was talk a couple of years ago of a boat based on the B14 hull that would have wide racks... I don't think it went very far and I can't say if it used the trapeze as well, but the physics suggest against it, As you move further outboard from the centreline, the angle subtended between the trapeze wire and the mast increases, with being out on the wire becoming ever more difficult. Right back in the early days, the Coronet (which begat the 5o5) had a trapeze, but with the take off for the wires being at spreader height, which simply didn't work. In the famous Round the Island dinghy race, Coronet lost out big time to Osprey, which had the trapeze wires taken up to the hounds and John Westell, who was crewing on Coronet, had to watch at the ease with which Cliff Norbury on Osprey could trapeze and tack  as they slogged along the beat from St. Cats Point to Sandown. So back to that all important question - could you make an even more extreme single handed boat.... yes of course, but who would actually be able to sail such a boat? Why look at a boat that is only applicable to a small number of super elite sailors, when boats like the IC and MPS offer peak performance today as part of an established international circuit!

Dougal