lunny74 said..Geez i dont know how I'm supposed to feel about their comments.
How dare i advance, take up foiling and go fast on their old boards
All i really got out of that was maybe they annoyed some people, times got competitive and tough, lets criticise them and lets have a crack at starting all over again.
Bring back the 80s!
Maybe i misread?
The biatching about board types was pretty much started by companies that promoted shortboards against longboarders, eons ago. It got to the stage where World Cup champions were publically heckled and abused if they dared to show up on something over 8 ft long, and it ended up with the sport 1/10th as big as it was. It was specifically and directly intended to make people feel bad about sailing anything but a shortboard in high winds. So if slinging **** around is a bad thing (and IMHO it is) then the shortboard side of the sport would be hypocritical if it complained.
The difference now is that no one is pouring **** on foiling. All some of us are saying is that it's not for everyone or for every time, and that promoting foiling (or high wind high performance) in a way that ignores or denigrates the rest of the sport isn't productive. Look at the people who are now promoting longboards - many of them (Tomas from Mistral, Robby, Bruce from Cobra, Svein) are World Cup sailors who, like the rest of us, love and sail shortboards.
The piece on the Mistral site isn't slinging **** at anything - it's saying that excessively pushing the extreme side of a sport isn't good for the overall sport, which is a different issue. And it's the product of research and study of what has really happened and why people really get into certain activities and ignore others - as many of them have been ignoring windsurfing.
Yes, bring back the '80s, when there were 500,000 boards sold each year, when every third household in some countries had a windsurfer, when there were shops all over the place, when the pros did well, when the sport got lots of publicity. What's so bad about that?
