Now the revolution's here, how is the sport going?

Originally posted by davidyacht

The recent fiasco in the AC triggered a quote (from Pete Melvin, IIRC) saying that the speed of AC boats had quadrupled in a couple of years. Many other people have been burbling with enthusiasm about the way that performance had leapt ahead recently.  
For many years many people have been saying "sailing has to go high tech and high performance to keep up with the times and attract kids who are used to video games*". OK, so now we seem to have arrived at the promised land; lots of craft are going faster than we ever dreamed possible.

So has anyone seen the big surge of participation in the sport that we were promised that high-speed sailing would deliver? By my normal measure (national titles attendances) there seems to have been a dip lately (although I haven't run actual figures recently).  

We've got foiling cats in the AC, foiling Moths on the covers, (tiny) kite fleets at Olympic events, the speed records lie in shreds all over the oceans - so where are the hordes of new sailors that we were told would be attracted by these feats ?  Sailing in general still seems to be losing numbers, with no trend towards faster boats being more popular.  Sure, we have vast fleets of Optis, Toppers, Fevas, 4.7s, Radials etc, but most of the kids I know in such classes seem to be no more obsessed with speed than my generation was, and arguably these kids are showing that what they really want are accessible boats. 

And if the hordes of new sailors still haven't arrived, at what stage will those who keep on promoting inaccessible high-performance craft as "the future of sailing" actually admit that they were wrong, and that their route just hasn't delivered?  

* By the way, are there many keen gamers here, or parents/sibs of keen gamers?  My kids seem to spend hours playing video games, and so do many other people - so where is the evidence that that gamers have short attention spans and need 'crash and burn' sailing.

Of course, those who say "we need to promote crash and burn sailing for kids because they have short attention spans" seem to be unable to explain exactly how people with short attention spans will learn how to sail well enough to blast around on a 9er or foiler, let alone how their short attention spans will handle the extra rigging and travelling that normally comes with high performance sailing. But the whole concept that high performance is the way forward seems to be full of such gaps.

Edited by Chris 249 - 03 Apr 15 at 1:27pm