Olympic Funding article

Though that's a complex issue in itself.

How do you define participation? What if your sport has a huge recreational base that has little to do with a tiny competitive side (e.g. kayaking)? Or if it's clouded even further by transport, recreational and competitive aspects (e.g. cycling).

Also isn't it to a degree like trying to hit a moving target? As sports develop those managing it are most often drawn from the keenest/most skilled end of the spectrum and tend to only see things through their own experience. So inexorably the sport shifts away from the accessible middle ground. 

Today's popular participation sport is tomorrow's elitist one; SUP is off down the same path that kayaking took - no waterline beam restriction - so boards are getting narrower and narrower, with a predictable outcome.

Or motorsport if you include transport participation.. 

Yep, those are interesting points. I'm assuming that participation will be tracked using the existing national censuses and similar databases. It's not too hard to do things like separating cycling into "sport" and "transportation" forms - it's done in our census or similar studies down here.

Wouldn't the funding bodies see kayaking as a poster child for what they are trying to achieve and would tell other sports to go out and encourage a similarly huge recreational base? Kayaking could also seem to be a classic example of a sport where the huge recreational base and the small competitive cadre are so separate that it proves that the old funding model was a failure, in that few people seemed to be turned onto kayaking by looking at the Olympians.

You're dead right, IMHO, about the trend to elitism in sports officials and equipment. Those trends have been very bad for mass participation so surely it's a good thing if officials and manufacturers now have more incentive to ensure that the gear they select for comps is also more closely linked to what the masses can use to get active on the weekend. I know in the '80s some people inside windsurfing warned about the trend to elitism, so we know that some people can foresee it. Now the administrators jobs will depend on looking out for it! We also know that sports as large as cycling spotted the issue and brought in rules that mean that even the major events are done on mass-participation gear, so it can be done.

IMHO this is a healthy trend. Those who actually study these things have spent decades saying that funding the elite does not encourage fitness. Now there is also, finally, some sign that causes like technological overshoot are being studied. Hopefully this could see sailing, and other sports, grow once again.