I'm doing a bit of research about this and I'm trying to create a list of all the Australians who have competed there since the start of the circuit so if anyone knows something about this topic (results,news,links...) please post here! Thanks a lot
Start here?
www.pwaworldtour.com/index.php?id=7
Theres 13 pagers of pwa profiles, including something like 30 australians?
More info on each rider on their page.
Oh thanks! What's happened to Jaeger Stone and Steven Stratfold, are they still competing?
It's sad to see that in the last events there are almost no Aussies in the Wave category, what's your ideas about this?
I think the main reason there isn't so many of us over there is because the events are quite spaced apart and in difficult to get to and expensive locations. I compare this to the formula tour where you can do a good stack of events (although there's not many of them now) in a row in mainland Europe where the travel costs aren't so going from event to event as you can drive or get lifts and there isn't 2 months in between events.
If I look at the PWA slalom tour this year, there's 5 events on (technically) 4 different continents all 1-2 months apart. Each time you fly to Europe it's another $2,500 ticket, so you could drop +$12,000 just on flights if you wanted to do the whole tour...
Also I think it's traditionally been much harder to find corporate sponsorship in Australia as windsurfing isn't as high profile as it is in Europe; then European sponsors are generally reluctant to sponsor non-Europeans.
That being said there's a few of us kicking around doing sporadic events. I'll be hitting Korea next week for the PWA World Cup Slalom! - yay!
