What about kiting in the olympics?

[PinkNorthPride]

I can't give details without compromising my source, a cop out I know, but the fact it came up at a business meeting of sail cloth suppliers and sailmakers suggests there's more to it than just smoke and mirrors. The Olympic 'Medal' is irrelevant as far as which personality wins it. Let's face it can you name any Windsurfing Olympic champions? Other than the first and last, I can't say I can but they are both dutch so it doesn't count. Olympics are about Politics, Money, TV rights, Big Finance and all the player but small porns in a much wider and totally corrupt game. We need to stay clear of it.

[longwhitecloud]

Optimist format, build your own boards/ foils even, none of this "authorised manufaturer$" only deal

Measured and weighed in.

There is a $reason$ there are 150 000+ optimists registered in the world, and yet the youth Olympic games had to entice any kiting youth they could find at all ( very few) that had never even raced before in a newly made up discipline designed for Olympic advertising money , let alone qualified for the event.

Wow, we never even raced before and we are heading to the youth Olympic games after an advert our parents saw asking for competitors -possible future career for 2 people from each country on earth!, no experience necessary.

100+ rescues shows the experience level.

[ChickenD!ken]

The anti-doping system in sport is a good indicator of how much corruption sport faces. Just read about Chris Froome’s possible positive from his Vuelta participation this summer. So if true, that would mean the latest multiple Tour winner (he has 4!) is just another doper. So we’ve probably not seen a clean winner in cycling since some time in the early 90s. Think about that for a while..

Of course Kiteboarding doesn’t exactly face the same kind of performance enhancements, but why anyone even bothers to worship at the altar of pro sports anymore is a bit of a mystery. The system is broken. Completely broken and the IOC is the most powerful sports organisation in history. Why would we want anything to do with such an inept body of crony thieves?

[james]

Building on PNPs post.

The meeting happened, the company I worked for at the time were invited, it has been denied point blank by people from NP when I questioned the timing on their Face book post.

I can’t get past that when they lie so clearly.

CRX May well never make it to the Olympics, or even the jumior Olympics but it will be positioned as the perfect feeder class, Hell it already is.

So faced with who is going to supply the equipment for the new kite medal, is it going to be Neil Pryde with a proven track record of supply, infrastructure,marketing clout and manufacturing capability who also happen quite selflessly invested Hundrds of thousands of dollars into a global feeder series


OR

Will it be a super high end foil builder from SanFran
Or an Italian who has a great foil design but keeps getting fucked by the guys that build it for him


We all know the answer,to pretend otherwise is laughable or your just not allowed to lift the embargo from the NP press office yet.

As an aside, NP have gone to the trouble of building a parallel foiling program for the RSX (windsurfer) just to be sure that they have both bases covered. It’s not a passion project, it’s about revenue generation.

[evan]

Was this posted here already?

https://www.sailingillustrated.com/sing ... ntsclasses


"Men's Classes (all singlehanded)
1) Finn – no change, but open manufacture as opposed to previously supplied boats/sails.
2) Laser – no change except for a new carbon topmast; monopoly manufacture but widespread and time-tested.
3) New foiling kite – to be determined, monopoly manufacture.

This 2024 lineup eliminates the two Windsurfer classes (RS:X men and women), as well as cutting back the dinghy (470) and skiff (49er) to just one mixed-gender event instead separate men's and women's events as in the past. Elimination of these four events makes way for the four new events above while keeping Sailing within the 10-event/medal limit imposed by the IOC."

[Mossy 757]

The doping thing is undeniable, if anyone reading this thread hasn't watched "Icarus" on Netflix, it's a must-watch for Olympic enthusiasts. The basic premise is that 100% of the medals from Sochi were bullshit and that most of the other medals for at least the last 40 years are likely all bullshit as well. Every. Athlete. Dopes.

That being said, I guess I'm just more of an optimist. If some mid grade foil and old-design kite ends up the class for the Olympics (despite none of the riders wanting that), great, who cares. People who build low quality equipment for the masses will continue to do so and the gear will trickle down to smaller dingy programs around the country and at Boy Scout camps and stuff and maybe instead of young people saying, "yeah I sailed a Laser once, no big deal," they'll say, "man, I learned how to kiteboard at sailing camp this summer and now I'm really getting into it as a serious sport!"

Maybe another way to say that is to ask a rhetorical question: If a kid tries ice skating on shitty rental skates and decides he wants nothing else in life than to get into playing ice hockey, is it a bad thing that he probably won't be good for a long time and will be using shitty entry-level gear until he gets into a serious high school/club team much later on? Or, is it a good thing that there's gear that's cheap enough for any middle class family to own that might some day get replaced by a Mike's Lab foil and some Diablos? Should all young people wishing to get into a sport be on the same open-class high end composite race gear the pros use?

I've got no problem with a company like NP addressing the central 60% section of the kiteboard market bell curve if it overall increases the area under the curve...they should make money for doing so, that's how economies work. The question is, did they do it by political maneuvering and scheming or did they do it because they offered the most competitive goods and services to the market place? I don't think anyone here is arguing against more people getting into kiting more easily, except the old-school anarchist types that seem to wish nobody else kited and that it was still deadly dangerous so they could feel cool. I think the point is whether or not corporations have hijacked the sport and are using the Olympics to extract revenue. That's a big *YAWN* for me because there are a couple of different tours out there doing it the right way on exciting gear in compelling locations. If the only thing the Olympics does is pump resources into the kiting community, I say the more the merrier.

[Cab Driver]

If I was a betting man, my guess would be that there's not a name in the sport of open class kite racing that would qualify for the Olympics, if there is eventually a one-design racing class for kiting.

[james]

Not without some of your coaching anyway

[Cab Driver]

Not without some of your coaching anyway

...As long as someone wants to be coached to a loss, I'm your man!

[DWX]

I don’t think the Olympics is a gd idea. It’s a deeply narcissistic platform where athletes wreck their bodies for fame and money. Their retirement consists of painkillers and endless physio... no fun! I’ve seen it firsthand, not to mention the neuroses the family has to deal with... for what?! Besides, Olympic level performance requires extreme bodily discipline & specialization. These athletes are like subordinate scientists who have no life outside their narrow specialization, no other loyalties, no chance to develop any other interests, let alone indulge the pleasures of vita contemplativa!

The Olympics don’t fit the leisure-adventure-entertainment formats of kiteboarding and generally, in my observations, the better a kiteboarder the more caring, selfless, and generous his personality, definitely not the narcissistic Olympic god type. The pros I’ve run into are some of the kindest people I know & a real joy to be around. Why ruin them with Olympic expectations? They are pretty phenomenal anyway.