Extreme approach will not revive sailing

At Scuttlebutt HQ, we consistently cringe at the claim that ‘foiling is the future’ as we know the expense, complexity, and skill required is not how to sustain a sport. Australian Chris Thompson dives further into the topic:

We cannot keep on hoping that a hyper-performance elite approach will revive sailing.

That has been the party line of World Sailing since they started squeezing popular types out of the Olympics in favor of tiny niche types like foiling cats; the approach taken up by the America’s Cup since it went from monohulls and into classes that create far smaller fleets; and the approach taken by much of the industry and sailing media over the past 25 years.

During that time, there has been enormous promotion of high-performance sailing as the future of the sport. High speed sailing is great (I’ve done it for many years) but excessive promotion of the inaccessible and expensive side of the sport clearly is NOT working.

It’s time to check the numbers that prove that “extreme” sailing is not popular (look at the tiny number of extreme boats racing or selling) and return to promoting the types that can actually become popular enough to sustain the sport…

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