Josh,
the whole point is to stop people buy specially designed masts of alloy that are of limited availability. This creates an unfair competition. Also, the fact the top teams spend big bucks on numerous alloy section masts until they find a few they like (extrusion inconsistency), makes it quite expensive to be competitive.
Finally, equipment costs of an olympic campaign are a drop in the bucket with respect to the costs of training/travelling globally for at least a few years. Greg Scace, a USA campaigner until recently, told me his teams budget two years ago was $100,000 USD for ONE YEAR!!!...and that would ramp up significantly the year prior to the games. His main sponsor (and employer) got caught in the dot-com burst and dropped their committment. His olympic dreams died that day.
This i'm sure is just barely relevant to the subject, but as someone who has just become part of a partnership to start racing in the olympic class with an old, albiet still new in packaging tornado, this is kinda dismaying, because when this becomes the standard we will not be able to afford the change. The price of entering this game is daunting enough already, how much can the cost go up before you virtually eliminate new sailors entering your class?
