Olympic 'finals' proposal

well i suppose...

I think that television is going to kill the sport if we're not careful. It happened to windsurfing. As the boards got better and faster, and more televised people watch it and think 'wow, thats really cool, but i could never do that'. Showing the skiffs wiping out and jumping off waves is fine, but do we risk turning it into an extreme sport like windsurfing, where people are put off by the size and speed of these machines.

I refer to windsurfing because my dad used to very good at it (or so he says!), and he says that you could get 150 boards plus at events. He went to one at bala a couple of years ago an only ten others turned up. No one goes windsurfing now because its to extreme. We have loads of beginner boats, but if no one knows what they are what hope have we got?

Originally posted by Sam Knight ] another point is the onboard cameras. Surely, in a class like the 49er where they are obsesed with weight, right down to tapered ropes and rope trapezes 'wires', they aren't going to be happy strapping a camera to the mast?

Didnt the 49ers have camera on during the athens games, i remember watching a clip from on board the boat

Originally posted by Stefan Lloyd [QUOTE=Mags Actually, we are collectively watching less TV than we used to, especially the ABC1s the advertisers are interested in. More and more channels, fewer and fewer viewers.

Where did you get this from? You work for Mori?

OK Cheeky, how do the numbers in the Moths back up your theory that we need to "evolve"????

How strongly is the class growing? Not very.

Is it growing as quickly as (say) Radials? No way. What about Toppers?

The most popular sort of Moth in the UK is the 1930s one design British Moth. The most popular sort of Moth worldwide is the 1960s one design Europe Moth. The most popular Moth in the US and France is the 1960s Classic Moth. The most popular sort of Moth in New Zealand is the 1950s one design NZ Moth. The most popular single type in the class' other main stronghold (NSW Australia) is the 1970s style scow Moth AIUI.

So even inside the Moth class, the very wonderful and amazing high-performance International Moth is a minority.

Given that the frozen old one design Moths are much more popular than the high performance International Moths, how can you say sailing "has" to evolve towards higher performance?

How much has evolution towards higher performance helped the Moths? When I was a kid Mothie we had something like 300 registered Moths where I live. Now it's about 30.....

Is that the evolution you reckon we "need"???

I'm not knocking performance boats, I'd love to get more people to sail the high performance classes I'm into (faster than the average Moth by some way). BUT the simple fact is that most people do NOT sail performance boats, do not WANT to sail performance boats, will NOT sail performance boats. That applies even when 16' and 18' skiffs are being given away.

Look at the Y&Y nationals attendance charts over the past 5 years or the past 30 years, it's the slow boats that are actually doing better and no amount of bluster will change that.

You can insult people as much as you want with the blue blazer talk, but those are the facts. These people are not idiots, they are not cowards, they are not insecure (racing a big Laser fleet is much tougher on the ego than racing a small fleet in high-performance boats), they are not bad sailors, they just like what they like for damn good reasons. If the high-performance classes stopped throwing around insults and actually started looking and listening to people who sail the popular classes, we may actually start growing again. But I know insulting them is easier and more fun......

The fact that people from performance classes continually attack the classes that most people sail is probably THE biggest problem facing sailing.




Apologies to any Mothies, they're damn wonderful boats, and like the classes I sail could and should become much more popular IF they don't insult  those who sail the popular classes. It's not the best sales method, is it?


Edited by Chris 249

Fair comment Dennis, but the first post in this thread that raised the question of classes was the following one (edited for brevity).

"the BBC used to do a pretty good job of televising Ultra 30's and 18 foot Skiffs a few years back. Perhaps what we need to do is revise the classes sailed to make it more visually exciting and reflect what is happening in the sport.

We could probably benefit from ceasing to use boats designed in the 50's and embracing modern designs. Perhaps the adoption of a single design of foiling Moth for the lightweight singlehanders, Musto Skiffs for the bigger boys, 49ers and 18 foot skiffs for mixed events etc?

Dress it up however you like it, watching a Finn isn't exciting."

So the criticism of classes (as so often happens) came from the high-performance "side" first.

Of note,  fully-televised skiff sailing with ratings (allegedly) greater than that of the cricket tests was around years ago. The 18s crashed and burned badly after that.

Like the windsurfing pro/Hawaii wavesailing era, what the 18 series showed was that sailing was an exciting sport for fit, expert, mature-age highly-experienced males who wanted to crash and burn. IE the message is that sailing is only the sport for a small % of the population.

We have something like 150,000 live spectators on teh headland for the Hobart start. Live TV. And the fleet is dwindling. Just like the 18s did. Just like "high-performance" windsurfing did.

There's a national survey here which comes to the conclusion that there is basically not a strong correlation between the amount of publicity and sponsorship a sport receives, and the number of participants.

PS here the traditional skiff classes have been around much LONGER here than the other classes, and the skiff classes have the backing of clubs that often provide free storage, beer/boat money, subsidies for travel, help arrange sponsorship, and can just hand you over a skiff.

Yet the long term trend shows that the skiffs are in retreat - many clubs, even skiff clubs themselves (Balmain, Greenwich, Abbotsford, Hunters Hill, DAC, Yarra Bay, Gosford, North Harbour etc) have lost their skiffs over the past couple of decades. The 18s have died in NZ (although they are trying to revive them), WA, Queensland which had them for many, many decades.So even when it's not a question of the skiff classes being newer, they still remain less popular than other boats.

This is a complete bummer and we are a world away, but it's also a fact.

I bring it up not to diss skiffs, but to point out that the minority status of skiffs in some areas may not be due to their recent introduction, as they are a minority class even where they have been for 100 years.

Edited by Chris 249