New Olympic events.

I was definitely 'non elite' when I raced boards but, while I had resisted pumping before it was made legal, I did pump a lot when racing. But, much as iGRF says and not continuously around the whole course. In the North West we had retained the 7.5m class or I would have stopped sooner. As it was I returned to dinghies for entirely different reasons 10 years ago.

Edited by Cirrus - 10 Nov 18 at 2:15pm

igrf, I'm pretty sure there are many of us who sail who don't approve of the Finns and others pumping. To me, the point is to use the natural conditions.

There were lots of reasons like that I remember taking my daughter down to Weymouth for the youth and masters nationals on raceboards and a friend of mines wife took her son down he was sailing formula, they didn't get to race until just as we were packing up to leave and then having got them on the water, they cancelled as the wind dropped back under the minimum again, you can imagine how she felt and wether they ever went again.

My daughter learned how to pump, in fact did it so well she won then got hauled off to join the RYA squad following which after just one of their events she never went again and gave up windsurfing.

Ironically it was the Olympics which drove that squad system and the Olympics which killed that class we'd built with the assistance of the Carlsberg sponsorship. The fact was, it was not only a racing class but big on parties, talent contests, alternative comedy nights, all sorts of stuff used to go on thanks to the Carlsberg budget. So imagine the absolute horror of half the fleet being marched off to bed at seven or eight and confined to Orange juice, even the stalwarts stopped going so it also died as a stand alone class in the mid nineties.

It seems to me that the guys arguing against pumping back in the day were ex dinghy sailors like me. The guys who came into windsurfing without any dinghy background were pretty much all pro pumping. I suspect most of those would have given up racing sooner had pumping remained outlawed.