Windsurfing on Sixty Minutes

Anyone catch the extreme surfing on Sixty Minutes last night. It was awesome.

My question: Why doesn't windsurfing ever get any air time?

This is a quote from a forum on www.coastview.com.au, and highlights another perspective. Great footage though.


"Well I’ve just watched the 60 Minutes expose on Pedra and all I can say is that Marti, Ty and Big Jim were totally stiffed by the corporate imperatives of Tom,Ross Clarke, Red Bull and Discovery.
This was clearly a promotional vehicle for Tom and Ross and displayed less than zero respect for the Tassie guys out there. This is a sham that needs to be seen through and exposed. Tom and Ross have balls of steel and the Tas guys were just somewhere on the periphary - a first hand account calls that the Tas guys more than held there own and may have taken on Pedra with less overt fear than at least one of the two LEGENDS. 60 Minutes of scam.

Posted by the captain on 10/26 at 10:29 PM"

lads you dont need money to promote a sport on tv! You need a good story and a catchy press release, thats it!

If for example I said I was going to set the world windsurfing speed limit and blah blah the press would eat it up.

I was actively involved in rider management in downhill mountain biking and motocross/supercross, I never failed in getting press interest in any story, including local news, national news, sports tonight, papers, magazines etc.

The sport needs active people who know how the press works.

Its not rocket science, I have witnessed exactly what you are saying here happen in other non-main stream sports. Everyone sits back and asks why are we not on tv? Because no-one is out creating news worthy stories.

Do you really think 60 minutes went looking for that wave story!

Ross Clarke Jones would have worked the right angle and made the story look exclusive in a 1 page press release to chanel 9, easy to do.

md74 I think you hit the nail on the head. So who should the "active people" be? Should it be our representative associations, retailers, or interested individuals?

Thought this might be relevant and help the coverage of windsurfing:

Hi Everyone,

Just a quick email to thank Eventscorp wa for coming on board as the naming rights sponsor for the 2009 eventcorps lancelin ocean classsic. This a big step for the Lancelin Ocean Classic as having Eventscorp and Tourism WA behind it will bring a huge amount of out of industry coverage for not only the event but also the sport of Windsurfing.

As you know it is very hard to get out of industry support so we are very grateful.

If any of you have time can you please contact eventscorp at the below link. All you need to wirte is "thanks for supporting the lancelin ocean classic":

www.tourism.wa.gov.au/Pages/ContactUs.aspx

With all of your support I am sure we can have eventscorp involved with the event for many years to come.

All the best,

Rob Goyen
LOC

evil what i meant was you dont need to pay for the publicity.

Look at most of the RedBull stuff, its pretty cool, a rider I helped with mountain bike career is Nathan Rennie, he did the worlds longest mtb jump and got world wide coverage, thanks to his sponsor RedBull coming up with the concept and getting the word out there, sure, they did shoot their own 1 hour doco on it, but it still got world wide news coverage, same goes for the wing guy, etc etc, and yest the speed windsurfing should get some cool publicity.

No way, our gear costs way too much as it is.
It's such a small market here the big names arent going to fork out to promote it.
The TV Networks would say "whats windsurfing? wasnt that around in the 80's??"

The representative associations would LOVE to have someone hop on board to promote the sport.

That would give the rest of us in the associations more time to train kids, liaise with the sailing bodies for funding, put our own cash out for event T-shirts, licenses, trophies and club fees in the hope of getting it back if we spend enough time organising the event and getting publicity out, run websites promoting the sport, find gear for newbies, etc etc etc etc etc.

You don't have to worry about anything bringing mass consumerism to windsurfing - it's dead now. However if you get out of your personal world, there are very few places that are actually overcrowded. And I don't remember danger and accidents when there were 5x the crowd we have now (a while ago). Don't know what you're talking about. I don't remember people being idiots, as you say.

And we can't compare windsurfing to kiting as you do. Yes we all know one is dangerous, the other never really was.

Personally I don't mind people, I like the social aspects of the crowd. I like the fact that my fellow peer gets off his/her arse and does something with him/herself.

Plus economically, the more sailors, the lower the prices. Current prices are a scam IMO.

But worry not, your nearly misanthropic view of the world is safe: windsurfing numbers will not increase.

There was some windsurfing on the news this time last year in QLD, during one of those windy weeks...anyone rememeber? A couple of the local lads were on for a few seconds. And a photo in the paper, too. Jeez, it was HONKING, too windy for any other newsworthy stuff to happen!!

Maybe work on both ends of the windsurfing spectrum

'Sailboarding' i.e. easy sailing in light winds for everyone as a great non-fuel alternative to those jet-skis

With a wind-upgrade to the more 'extreme' high wind/wave/speed/etc windsurfing for those in teen years or looking for the adrenaline

Why not both? They are complimentary. Everyone who wants to do the 'extreme' side of the sport starts off in the floating around having fun in the sun side of the sport

In two minds about the popularity of the sport.

Want cheap gear but not limits to doing it set by politicians seeing stupid people do silly things in the sport (i.e: kiting).

I'm pretty sure we can get a heap more windsurfers before we get crowded!

Stranger on beach: Oh hey, you're windsurfing.

Question #1: Hey have you ever tried that kitesurfing?

Question #2: How much does all that gear cost?

followed by:

In case anyone missed it here it is from the General Section:

Good points, but all of motorsport is less popular (in terms of participation) than sailing which is much less spectacular, and the motorsport industry has vastly more marketing money and pull than we'll ever have. Maybe it's not working for them all that well.

Sure, we don't see club level NRL on TV, we see the pros - and League attracts fewer participants across Australia than (for example) sailing, despite the fact that League gets vastly more coverage.

We don't see clubman go karting, but again motor racing (despite a parent industry that is so huge that even the tiny percentage of its turnover that goes to racing becomes a massive amount of bucks) is no more popular than sailing in terms of participants.

If it doesn't work for league, karts or bikes, why would it work for sailing?

The most popular sports and outdoor activities are things like walking, fishing, netball - activities that get very little coverage compared to the spectator sports. It's the same story in the USA, France, and the UK; extreme sports aren't very popular.

The guy who runs the biggest national survey on sports participation, sponsorship and viewing makes the point that more publicity does NOT tend to equal more participation. That's not estimating, that's from expensive national surveys, paid for by marketing businesses and sports companies, which pretty much agree with national surveys by the Australian Bureau of Statistics etc.

Look at sea kayaking and sit-on-top kayaks; they sell in their hundreds and yet they get very little coverage as an 'extreme' sport. The catalogues of the builders tell the story - they tend to show families having fun, or people going cruising, rather than pics of people in big waves or white water. That's what's selling many more people on getting onto the water than windsurfing is, and their gear is bulkier and heavier and goes slower.

The way they do it could be an inspiration for us - don't just promote the stuff that gives the perception that the sport is just for a fit, dedicated, group of experts - promote the stuff that says everyone can windsurf.

Why does windsurfing cost a lot? Because we are promoting the extreme, high-performance and costly end of the sport. The gear I normally use, two or three times a week, cost about $350 about three years ago. That's cheap.

We've had indoor windsurfing showing grandstands full of people looping; we've had 125,000 Euros on a beach watching wavesailing. We've held the sailing speed record. We go faster than the boats - and we've been losing participant numbers just about all through this period.

Even Svein Rasmussen has come out publicly and said that the performance/high wind promotion was the wrong way, according to some reports.

Answer is always the same: when I retire from sport, I might take it up.


Right answer is: needs not be expensive, good starter 2nd gear is cheap nowadays, bla-bla.

What hurts the sport are answers like: you need 3 brand new boards and 7 sails for at least ten grands to even start enjoying... blabla. I hear that from the local "pros", and I've seen it in shops. What a ****, I wonder why people don't join...

The main thing that brought MotoX and the like back into vogue (and I have had bikes for nearly 35 years) is the entry level stuff being made by China at a low cost. It may not be "good" quality and last all that long but it enables cash strapped dad to buy a bike for the kids and himself after all those years and the cycle starts again.
For an outlay of a couple of thousand dollars for cheap Chinese you can get 2 bikes but if you want Japanese or Euro try 3 times the amount for one.
Cheap and appropriate entry level is what is required and then as kids (or adults for that matter) progress they start to aspire to the more upmarket stuff as they can afford it - as long as they are still enjoying it. And the cycle goes on hopefully.

Windsurfing has had it's boom time, as have skateboarding and surfing. Right now it's kiting that's the big thing. Who wants to go back to the 80s, with hundreds of newbies at every beach?? No thanks. It's great when people want to start, but it's not up to us to recruit them.

I agree with those who say we're lucky it's kind of under-the-radar; it's better for all of us I reckon. If the manufacturers really want to make heaps of money, they can just make kite gear, like Naish!! But there are enough dedicated windsurfing participants to provide some kind of viable existence for the current bunch of manufacturers and retailers. 10 years from now there won't be nearly so much money in kiting as there is now, and the number of retailers/manufacturers will have been whittled down to a few diehards, like with windsurfing...