How do we make Catamaran Sailing a legitimate sport, suitable for Olympic competition?
Bottom line; we need funding. Lots of funding and advertising revenue is undoubtedly the best way to obtain it.
Sailing is exciting, interesting, spectacular and healthy.
Sailing is good to watch if presented well.
Catamaran racing is very exciting, very interesting, very spectacular, very healthy, and very good to watch if presented well.
Sailing venues are very pleasant places to be. Sailing clubs occupy some of the best real-estate in the world.
What we have here is a very unique sport with enormous potential for development into a very marketable, and profitable enterprise.
Of all the sporting equipment, a sailboat probably has the largest and most suitable area for carrying advertising and a cat carries the biggest sail for it's length of all sailing boats.
To attract advertising revenue we need to;
get more people involved in sailing catamarans including sailors, spectators, and in particular, good sponsors. The more people we attract, and the more popular sailing becomes, the more marketable it will be.
develop sailing into a product which can be offered to the general public as a legitimate form of entertainment.
develop sailing into a suitable Telesport [television] Television is the single most important vehicle we have to promote sailing and raise revenues. Presently there are some initiatives being investigated and developed to make Catamaran racing, television friendly. These initiatives include developing sailing specific filming strategies and training sailing savvy directors, producers and commentators. Imagine presenting an NRL game on television but using directors, producers and commentators who know very little about Rugby League! This is happening with sailing. Even at Olympic level our best directors and commentators are seriously incompetent. It's no wonder the general public have no idea what's going on when they watch a sailboat race. We need to find the Ray Warrens, Frank Hydes and Phil Liggetts of sailing. These people are probably responsible, more than any for giving their prospective sports legendery status in the homes of the general public.
We need to attract/find good managers to make this happen. Sailors generally, and Catamaran sailors specifically, by their typical renegade nature don't often do well as managers, [turn up, race and go home] as is often evidenced by the lack of direction in many Cat clubs. It's possible that unpaid management of clubs has become a thing of the past. We need to be much more professional at club level and we should work toward employing managers IMO. The funding revenue is there if we could better organise ourselves and sell our product.
ATTRACTING GENERAL INTEREST
There are many initiatives which can be investigated and implemented to attract people to sailing. These include club training programs targeting the local area population with advertising. School sports activities can include a sailing option. We need to develop club training programs, specifically targeting youth. We need to work toward putting at least two training cats into every sailing club in Australia and encourage accredited coaches to help us. There are plenty of suitable, small, locally made catamarans available in Australia to support this endeavour. This will build the numbers of sailors and YA and YNSW should be vigorously active in fostering this activity particularly at club level
Further along the track we could organise and run an interclub round robin' style competition which might even develop into a league similar to football where sailing clubs enter teams which compete against each other on a regular basis at selected suitable venues, competitions like the NRL, NFL, Cricket Aust. etc. and Sydney Harbour and the Parramatta river are ideal locations for this as are the many lakes we have within close proximity to Sydney and it's environs.
ATTRACTING SPECTATORS.
Sailing clubs need to be aware that attracting spectators to their sport is critical to achieving their goals. Clubs can easily double or triple the involvement of people in sailing by providing facilities for spectators. Clubs should provide facilities such as decks, ferries, canteens, video coverage of racing etc. Sailboat racing needs to be held in areas which are spectator friendly where possible.
Where possible, video coverage should be provided for spectators in the clubs to give supporters an interest in events. Even better, a good, descriptive and sensible commentry could accompany the video coverage. [Is it any wonder spouses and other family members aren't interested when they aren't included, catered to or provided for].
ATTRACTING SPONSORS
Sponsors need exposure. To give sponsors exposure, sailing needs to be developed into a good spectator sport. The best exposure that can be offered to a sponsor is television coverage. Television coverage of sailing requires significant development in equipment, technology and production processes. This can be done but we need to get the interested parties involved. We desperately need some good promoters and managers.
With all the television channels now desperate for content, and considering the enormous value of our commodity, we should be a very wealthy enterprise.
In summary, there's plenty of potential to make sailing a very viable product similar to any other high profile spectator sport, we just need some direction and effort from as many good people as we can attract.
Now if we could pull this off, IOC would be kicking our door down to have us, and no more forlock tugging at ISAF.
Bern Leslie.