Top dog

Originally posted by Ruscoe I think the OP was more about had anyone taken more nationals titles the Andy 'Taxi' Davis in one single year.  Not sure its anymore complicated then that.  4 is a pretty impressive shout, but he has since won the Dutch Solo nationals making it 5!!    He really is a man on top of his game.  Sure he is basically a professional, who cares.  I like the fact that i can race against the top performers in my sport, i like the fact that they are not put on a pedestal and protected from racing numpties like me.  Its whats great about our sport.  Its one of the main reasons i am attracted to the 5oh fleet.  Just look at the regular circuit racers int he fleet, each one feeds back down the fleet and i learn so so much.

Originally posted by Rupert Love the fact we can race against the best (and loose, but maybe not...).

I do too, but then I'm not in regular contention anyway. I do wonder if commercial interest ought to at least be declared and a prize awarded to first fully paid up owner in certain classes. This is the 21st century after all and the 'true' top amateur sports event is clearly the preserve of the professional these days.

Secondly maybe something like the Endeavour (which does try to answer this question about 'top dog') might want to consider an exclusion on industry employees and team riders? It's just a thought... as Russ says, opening up other avenues and viewpoints can be interesting.

Originally posted by Ruscoe I think the OP was more about had anyone taken more nationals titles the Andy 'Taxi' Davis in one single year.  Not sure its anymore complicated then that.  4 is a pretty impressive shout, but he has since won the Dutch Solo nationals making it 5!!    He really is a man on top of his game.  Sure he is basically a professional, who cares.  I like the fact that i can race against the top performers in my sport, i like the fact that they are not put on a pedestal and protected from racing numpties like me.  Its whats great about our sport.

The ISAF classification system would exclude industry pros racing in their own time using their own money. This is inevitable because of the mass of cheating and abuses that existed before the system was setup... usually with leadmine racing, rather than dinghies to be fair.

Some background: 30 or 40 years ago sailing was allegedly an amateur sport and no pros were permitted. However people who worked in the industry were welcome when sailing in their own time. So what happened was that the major sailmaking companies employed loads of "sailmakers" who never seemed to get anywhere near a sewing machine or a pair of scissors, and indeed never seemed to have to do much work at all. However in their "time off" they did an awful lot of sailing, and completely coincidentally they seemed to do all that sailing on boats that had bought complete and rather overpriced sail inventories from the company that employed the "sailmaker". Of course this was cheating, but it was also completely impossible to prove.

A few years later pro sailors were allowed. That was inevitable: after all they were out there anyway. So many leadmine classes introduced rules about how many professionals were permitted on a boat and what defined a professional. Every class' rules were different, and no-one knew who counted as a pro and who didn't and there was complete damn chaos...

So to resolve the chaos ISAF introduced their own classification rule and legislated that it was completely up to the classes what restrictions on pros they could have, but the definitions of whao was or was not a pro had to be the ISAF one. This was an improvement because everyone at least knew who was a pro or not and didn't have to try and understand SIs and so on.

But the downside of the ISAF classification is that it doesn't distinguish industry pros sailing their own boats in their own time and using their own money from paid to race sailors. There doesn't seem to be any way of doing this when you consider all the lying and cheating that went on in the amateur era.

So I for one would be opposed to using the classification system in the classes I'm involved in, but I'm certainly not smart enough to think of a better alternative bearing in mind the abuses that have existed in the past... Fortunately the boats I sail don't seem to be especially attractive to works teams...

Edited by JimC - 06 Sep 11 at 11:11am

I tend to agree with Ruscoe, I'm now told by a bike Guru I visited recently that I'm a 'kinetic' learner, can't be told, but learn by imitation, this I know to be true, so for me the only way to progress is in the company of good guys, watch what they do and copy it. So the ability to be able to compete alongside the best is paramount.