We use to wag school to go and watch this down at Long Reef.

Apart from the high quality of sailing on very primitive gear, the thing that I really notice are the main stream sponsors of the sailors. That just doesn't exist anymore

Yes, i don't know what the prize money is like nowaday, this comp offered the total of $50,000 and $20,000 for first place.

Not the first footage of 80s windsurfing with a van halen / David lee Roth backing track.

Certainly the go to track for Wide World of Sports for a long time.

Hoped it was going to be an event in a NE'r because I hear it used to get windy back in those days, and wanted to see what it was like....

We are heading back to Long Reef this season...Should be fun!

That's Mark Paul at the beginning riding a Bombora New Toy....

I did the first three Sonys. We had 3 of the top 4 in the world in each discipline in one of them; robby, Bjorne, mike waltz etc. I think it was 86 when we had the slalom in a big southeaster and robby reckoned it was the best surf slal ever

Events like that also stuffed he sport because it put the emphasis on a type of sailing that very, very few of the 100,000 active windsurfers in the country could actually do. Great fun for some of us, though

Excuse the spelling in this post, I'm in Venice on a crappy old phone after riding the French alps and doing the Italian windsurfer nats on lake garda

Sony event, November 1984, Long Reef, Sydney, Australia.
Robby Naish + others in the surf marathon & slalom races.

Amazing photos. Thanks for posting

For all the amazing jumps in this vid I still find myself almost more impressed by the gybes on the face of the waves and how long they are holding on Clew 1st....

Reminds me of the crazy turn Naish does at 1:36 in

I think its to do with the 'flow' - how effortless it looks and how uninterrupted the movement is of the rider and water, big jumps are great but the landing is so stagnate, I think its the one thing kiting air has over sailing. Fully love a planning landing!

Wicked pics, thanks for posting them.

Ahh the good old days! A photo of me taken by Stu Clover was used for the promo poster at event t shirt. Still got a shirt poster and original print! Will try put it up on this post ....Allan McClintock

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Chris 249 said...
I did the first three Sonys. We had 3 of the top 4 in the world in each discipline in one of them; robby, Bjorne, mike waltz etc. I think it was 86 when we had the slalom in a big southeaster and robby reckoned it was the best surf slal ever

Events like that also stuffed he sport because it put the emphasis on a type of sailing that very, very few of the 100,000 active windsurfers in the country could actually do. Great fun for some of us, though

Excuse the spelling in this post, I'm in Venice on a crappy old phone after riding the French alps and doing the Italian windsurfer nats on lake garda

Disagree with you that "events like this stuffed the sport"!

Imo these events made the sport grow exponentially and were exciting with the rapid improvement of skills and equipment.

I remember how excited I was getting the 8'2" Hot Buttered shown in the video from Scotty O'Conner. Also entered the final Sony Comp.

I've seen your version of history posted over the years on here Chris 249 and remember you being a good sailor on a longboard but pretty hopeless on a short board

I was always in the top half in the wave performance and slalom at the Sony and similar contests (or close to it) and 17th in the slalom worlds, which isn't "hopeless". Sure, I wasn't the world's best wavesailor but I've always just tried to be an all-rounder rather than a specialist shortboard windsurfer.

If I was "hopeless" then so were 95%+ of people. If just about everyone was "hopeless" then it was hardly the foundation for a strong sport, which sort of proves that a sport based on sailing in waves will not be enormously popular.

It's not just "my version of history" - it's based on numbers of boards sold, official stats from several countries, and the experience of people in the industry. There are lots of other people who reckon that the shift to high-performance high-wind sailing harmed the popularity of the sport, including people like Svein Rasmussen ("Like it or not, windsurfing was a sport in decline from 1985 until 2012"), Remi Vila, Barry Spanier and others. We don't have formal records of actual numbers of sailors and boards sold in Australia but I have got information about the decline from guys like Johnnsy. In Europe they kept records of the numbers of boards sold each year, and from 1985 there was a major decline. Sure, the emphasis on performance that started in that era was great for hot young sailors like you, and for people like me - but it arguably turned off a lot of others. It's a a pity that it's a sensitive topic to people who prefer certain areas of the sport, but then again some of the same people are pretty insensitive in their remarks when the history of the sport is discussed.

Wavesailing etc is fantastic, I've never said it wasn't. My issue is the negative way that other parts of the sports were treated, sometimes in a targeted effort to turn people off them so they'd buy new boards and keep the production lines churning.

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