T.V.

'End results may not matter' Rupert but congratulations on your win!

Agree totally with the above, the sport suffers exactly the same way a very expensive Agency once declared windsurfings problems, Inaccessible, Elitist, Expensive and too difficult to bother with anyway.

The latter shouldn't be the case and I'm pleased to see new boats these days addressing that, but it's still a way to go. Heavy poly boring resort boats are not the answer, they are just too heavy for anyone to lift about.

So unless these points are addressed and more people do the sport, nobody will want to watch it on Telly anyway, so nobody to advertise to and at our level do we even care?

Well nobody cared in the windsurfing community so what happened? Numbers fell, manufacturing quantities dropped, prices rocketed and an even more viscous circle of inaccessibly resulted.

So we should care, we should all do our bit to encourage new comers, there should also be more done centrally to 'market' the sport. I know it's my pet beef, but that damned handicap system needs sorting out so it has more grounding in logic rather than anarchy, it doesn't serve our cause when trying to encourage newcomers into the racing environment.

Easy boats like the Icon & Alto should be advantaged, not penalised in petty mindedness, Double handers are the best route to attract newcomers, the moment my Trev experienced his first three sail reach on the plane he was hooked forever. Hook a grown up and you have him and his disposable income for life, press gang a kid and you have him until he gets a driving license and spots an alternative use for his dangly bit. He may return later, but it's not a definite in some instances they (kids) get inoculated against ever sailing again if they experience the full horrors the RYA are capable of chucking at them.

It's a beautiful multi faceted fantastic sport, with more folk doing more to discourage participation than I can throw a stick at, I'm surprised it's still with us.

Edited by iGRF - 08 Jul 14 at 10:36am

That's funny, I have had conversations with a number of my friends about perhaps trying sailing.  They all think it's an incredibly boring sport to watch, they don't understand the rules, or how the 'circuit' works, they don't think it's a physically demanding sport and to quote one of my close friends.  'I just don't get it' this question is usually followed up by how much is your boat worth and then a massive chuckle.  

With the exception of football - it should neither be done nor watched...

Originally posted by Chris 249 Aren't the vast majority of televised sports ones that the average person can relate to? Most people have ridden a bike or kicked a ball so they can relate to footie or the Tour. In contrast, even the typical sailor has not sailed a foiler. I'm also not sure that foilers are all that spectacular to non-sailors; there's no flying spray and the tiny hulls and clear sails are not all that distinctive against a broken background.  It's interesting to see the minutes of the International class AGM. The fleet numbers overall really aren't increasing much outside the UK; the last AGM said that there were just 122 new "official" boats last year, relatively flat membership growth and pretty small membership numbers in many countries (5 in Austria, 20 in France, 30 in the USA, only 10-15 boats expected or hoped to attend the 6 German regattas or Swiss racing, good growth in Italy, and no class in NZ any more). The boats are amazing, the PR is fantastic, the sponsorship and hype is enormous, the sailors are great, millions have been lost in promoting the class - and yet the growth is far smaller than in other classes. That seems to say a lot about where growth in sailing can come from - surely it's not to be found in the extreme classes.  People like the head of Eurosaf call such classes the future of the sport but if that's the case, the sport is dead. Thank god grass roots classes are thriving.