From a thread in the kite forum www.seabreeze.com.au/forums/Kitesurfing/General/IKA-replies-to-ISAF-Olympic-Committe/http://www.waterhound.com/ika-to-isaf-olympic-committe-heres-how-you-do-it.html
What do you guys think
Great letter!
I would like to see the inclusion of both, however I would imagine that if it was one or the other then Windsurfing would probably get the job given its history.
Kiting has a future in the Olympics, buts has still got that youngster X games stigma attached that will make the old fogies making the decisions cringe.
I would like to see what the follow up to the letter will be!
Its hard to imagine the Olympic committee including an event that had a minimum wind requirement in the program though the inner workings of the IOC seem a little shrouded in mystery. I imagine that you would need a constant six or seven knots for a kite race maybe even a little more.
I feel That Al's comment About Kiteings X games iimage is Incorrect. The Winter Olympics included Half pipe snowboarding. One of the IOC's stated objectives is to include more Youth orientated sport. I think that bods well for freestyle sailboarding and Kiteing
jermldan's comment About minimum wind is also incorrect. All sail sports have minimum wind requirements as race will be rerun if no one finishes in a required time
i'm not against kiteboarding in the olympics, but given starboards attempt to get formula one design in the olympics flopped due to the minimum wind requirement I'd expect kite boarding to follow the same path. Looks like we will be stuck with an olympic discipline rarely followed by recreational sailors....
I agree, at least windsurfers float when the wind stops and they can hump the sail to the finish line..
What are the kites supposed to do when its 3-6 knots?.. They could probably swim the course, and then they would beat the windsurfing fleet around as well.. I reckon Phelps could beat the windsurfing fleet in most races... Which is why the whole Olympics thing is a joke and nobody cares!!
I'm going to get flamed for this but anyway,
Sailing is a minority sport and can thank its prestige and novelty value for its spot in the Olympics. Rich men run the Olympics and rich men in general like yachting (not kiteboarding). Windsurfing and kitesurfing even if you added them together are only a small percentage of the sailing sport. The biggest dinghy club in each capital city would get more competitors on a random Saturday than the biggest wind or kitesurfing event of the year. Dont get me wrong after many years of regular sailing I'd be the last to bang thier drum for them it's just the truth. Even if you counted all the random people who dont participate in events we would still be the minority. The organisation and infrastructure level of traditional sailing is worlds ahead of anything that Kite or windsurfing could hope for.
Kite surfing will battle to make the Olympics for all the reasons other people have mentioned. The one other reason that will be the biggest hurdle is that the IOC and ISAF have seen many other sports or diciplines come and go. All claim to be the best and "fastest growing" (which is usually the end for any sport). Think of all the other sports that have taken off like kiteboarding. Hanggliding, squash, wakeboarding, windsurfing, diving (OK not a sport but anyway) you get my point. They all die off quite quickly once they get going not completely but something replaces them for a lot of people. I am not saying this will happen to kiteboarding at all, but it might and the IOC and ISAF would be silly to take the chance on such a new sport with so little comparative participation.
The professional yachting circuit dwarfs the wind and kitesurfing ones by an astonishing amount, both in numbers of professionals and dollars spent and earned. This is due to two reasons, firstly the rich men mentioned earlier but also the gross number of followers. More people follow sailing than the board sports. I know some clown is going to argue but the reality is that some companies pay more for a few sailing sponsorships than the entire PWA budgets combined. They certainly dont do this because more people follow kitesurfing.
In summing up my rant/essay kitesurfing has a snowballs chance in hell of making the Olympics.
I agree with Fletch in many ways. Boat sailing is so much bigger than windsurfing or kiting in most countries that we're lucky to have either windsurfing or kiting in the Games. For example, the biggest yacht races (UK Round The Island, Barcolona, etc) attract about 10,000 people each, which dwarfs the few hundred in big windsurfer events. The biggest yacht event in Australia has over 4,000 sailors; the biggest combined windsurfer and kite event in Oz gets 200 sailors. The biggest cat event gets about 150 sailors, the biggest dinghy event up to 350 (and there's lots more dinghy events than cat or board events).
No matter how you look at it, the numbers are simple - there are many more yachties. And the bog-boat side of the sport is actually doing a lot better than most other sides of the sport, in terms of growth.
That means that, far from ISAF being a bunch of old farts who favour yachts, they're actually surprisingly generous in giving almost every spot in the Games to small boats and windsurfing and/or kiting. If they just looked at the number of active sailors or the number of active pros, or the number of spectators, it'd be a big boat event. Look at the Hobart start with its live TV coverage and 200,000+ live spectators - it's miles bigger than any windsurfing event here.
Oh, and even when the Games featured fast cats (Tornadoes) and skiff (49ers) and boards (RSXs) it got very few viewers, so it's not as if it becomes a big spectator event if they introduce "exciting" classes.
PS - in many countries, sailing is a fairly big sport. Here, it attracts many more participants than league or union, for example, or Olympic sports like hockey, athletics, kayaking/canoeing, etc.
It would be fun to watch. The kiters could wear the national colours on their boardies over their wetsuits. I go for kiteboy.
Sailing was something like the 3rd most watched sport in the U.K during the 2008 Olympics. When the 49ers were on the tv and the Australians capsized 100 metres from the finish, the only thing I heard the next day was the sailing. Dont say sailing doesnt get attention at the olympics
I looked up the official stats for viewers from the Beijing Games. They clearly show that "cool" and "spectacular" sports do NOT attract more viewers.
Athletics was broadcast for 206 hours, got 65 mill spectators each minute
Swimming was broadcast for 120 hours, got 58.8 mill spectators each minute.
Artistic gymnastics 106 hrs / 53.3 miull
Diving 31 / 43.5
Trampolining 11 / 41.6
Table tennis 41 / 40.8
Rowing 24 / 40.8
Volleyball 103 / 38.5
Track cycling 37/32.8
Sprint (flat water) kayak/canoe – 24 / 32.4
Rhythmic gymnastics 49/ 30.4
Shooting 12 /28
Sync Swimming 17 / 25.7
Sailing – 11 / 24.5
Road cycling 121 / 23.8
Slalom (whitewater) canoe – 22 / 22.3
Beach volleyball 59 / 23.6
BMX 44 / 23.2
Triathlon 68 /. 19.4
Water polo 24 / 17.4
MTB 45 / 16.4
To me, that list doesn't seem to show the spectacular sports to be more popular. The most popular is athletics, followed by a bunch of people swimming up and down a pool at about 4 knots. Diving - which seems more spectacular than swimming up and down a pool - attracts only 2/3 the viewers. Water polo, which is a pretty fast and vicious sport, is much less popular than people going up and down a pool, or synchronised swimming.
In cycling, fast and furious (but hard to understand) track cycling is popular, followed by road cycling and then the "newer and cooler" mountainbiking, with the even "newer and cooler" BMX trailing a looooong way back.
The fourth event with cycling in it, triathlon, was only as popular as badminton.
"Boring old vanilla" volleyball attracts half as many again spectators as "cool new funky beach volleyball", which doesn't seem to be living up to the hype.
In canoe/kayak, the "boring" flat water stuff is much more popular than the spectacular whitewater stuff.
Rowing - which is a bunch of people going in a straight line over glassy water at about 8 (?) knots, got not too far from double the viewers of the windy sailing regatta which came complete with crashing 49ers, RSX boards, and Tornadoes - all of which can go three times as fast as a rowing shell and over rough water. But not many people cared.
I haven't got any idea about ski-cross and can't comment unless you give us some figures.
So overall, in a world where BMX runs a bad last in the ratings among cycle sports, where whitewater gets less viewers than flat water in kayaking, where rowing is less popular than 49ers and Tornadoes, where beach volleyball is much less popular than volleyball and where people ploughing up and down a pool at 4 knots is one of the big drawcards, it seems hard to find hard evidence that fast crash 'n burn stuff gets more viewers.
Personally windsurfing more of a participation than spectator sport. I prefer to be doing it than watching it. Olympic level windsurfing is quite boring to watch. It seems quite unrelated to the sort of windsurfing most people do. Olympic class windsurfing seems to have more in common with rowing than windsurfing, ie using the sail as an oar rowing through the air.
For olympic windsurfing to have any relevance to most recreational windsurfers and be reasonably interesting to watch they need to hold races in a minimum of around 10 knots of wind. Of course olympic venues are never chosen based on the amount of wind thats present so we are cursed with this light wind version.
If the kiting association wants that, an olympic version of kiting that is unrelated to the kiting 99% of them do, then let them 
Another point - the IKSA submission completely contradicts itself.
It says that the "the Olympic Games must be the pinnacle event for this category of events and classes.
Keelboats have a well established and recognized Match Racing World Tour which is
considered to be the pinnacle of the sport, and the womens keel boat racing seems
to go in the same direction.
What realistically could be then the reason for keelboat events in the Olympic
Games, except saving the Star ?"
So IKSA says that the Match Racing World Tour is the pinnacle event of keelboat sailing, and therefore the keelboats should be out of the Games.(1)
But the IKSA also says (2) that the America's Cup is now the pinnacle event of multihull sailing - yet the IKSA says that "the whole sailing world believes
that it has been a mistake" to dump the multihull.(3)
You can't have it both ways, IKSA. If keelboats should be out because the match racing tour is their pinnacle event, then multihulls should be out because the America's Cup is now their pinnacle event.
If they cannot even create a submission with a logical argument, how can they claim to know how to run the sport?
Funny that they say the Laser isn't attractive to new sailors when it's growing strongly in its youth appeal, and how they favour skiffs which are great boats but have been shrinking in popularity over the long term and (in many areas) in the short term. Fantastic boats, but they have never attracted big fleets for long outside of NSW where they are supported by licensed clubs.
(1) - complete BS in the opinion of 99% of keelboat sailors, I'd say, but IKSA says it's true without giving the slightest bit of evidence.
(2) see the pdf version of IKSA's submission.
(3) dumping the cat was a bad decision IMHO, I'm not defending it - although there was some logic from some angles
