Well, let’s review what happened here and try to make sense of a few things.

This process was an attempt by the kiters to get into the Olympics. Nothing wrong with that, and there are a lot of windsurfers (the vast majority from what I can tell) who would like to see them in. But the way the kiters did it turned into an exercise of “us vs. them”….a dog eat dog mentality.

Since the IOC was not giving another medal for sailing (and I think a lot of people had wished they would have but there are very real budgetary constraints on the process) somebody was going to have to get kicked out for the kiters to be in….this process has been going on for a while, with keelboats getting kicked out, cats getting kicked out, etc. But since the higher ups at US Sailing and perhaps at ISAF see windsurfing and kiting as interchangeable (see Scuttlebutt article from early June mentioning this) it was inevitably going to turn into an us vs. them situation.

But the kiters went about this the wrong way, as I will explain shortly.

Mike Gebhardt, two time Olympic Medalist for the US in windsurf, spearheaded a very technically flawed paper and made some fairly outrageous claims….which was enough to sway our US reps at US Sailing that kite was the way to go over windsurf. Since the US has not had a lot of Medal Success recently in windsurf and J. Heineken (American) is currently the world champion in kiting, US Sailing was thinking, “hey, we can jump the rest of the world, utilize our current superiority in this new sport and hopefully medal before the rest of the extremely well-funded countries such as UK, France, etc catch up and run us over.” And they bought this silly paper hook, line and sinker in spite of the glaring inaccuracies and subsequently helped get the ball rolling at ISAF, who ended up making this same recommendation, in spite of the fact that windsurf is the second most popular sailing class, is very low cost and is easily accessible by all member countries. Sailing is the second most expensive sport of the summer games: accessibility, low cost and and easy youth pathway is what ISAF was looking for and what windsurf was already delivering better than any other sailing class (!) but somehow, windsurf was about to become the loser to a very unproven sport.

But then the backlash started by the windsurfers…..”how come we are getting kicked out? Why not someone else?” Back to that Scuttlebutt article…..when you don’t know much about it, and you are an old time sailor as a lot of higher ups at ISAF and US Sailing are, it all kind of looks the same. There is no doubt US Sailing has never been in the windsurf corner…..and the wild backlash against the decision, both here in the US and worldwide, that generated virtually no response from US Sailing, is only proof of this. Kiters did not have 25 thousand people signing a petition on Facebook supporting the decision…..but the windsurfers had 25K people signed up in two weeks really upset with the decision! US Sailing and ISAF had run this decision through without thinking through the parameters or without consulting the other side: They had decided that they “knew best” what had to happen and were not interested in a democracy or what their members actually thought!

Was someone getting paid off to make some of these decisions? If you look at it objectively, it sure seems like it. When everybody says, “no, this is wrong”, but a silent few keep voting the other way,

usually there is money involved. After the first vote came out, many countries expressed outrage that their reps had voted contrary to their wishes!! Kind of reminds you of a FIFA-style process does it not? I heard the rumor repeatedly that Richard Branson was actually involved in some of this, no idea whether that is true or not but if you look at it objectively, somehow there was some money flowing to these reps to make some very contrarian decisions to the dismay of their countries that they were supposed to be representing.

The simple facts are that windsurf has a very large infrastructure already in place…..much bigger than kite does. US Sailing and ISAF are looking for youth pathways into the sport….and a lot of this happens at yacht clubs around the world. Kiting is a tough sport at most yacht clubs, because they do not have the proper facilities to make it happen….kiting is a beach sport, windsurf can be either (beach or dock/harbor), but you can’t kite out of most clubs. This means that all the development (training, practice, racing, etc) happens outside of the traditional channels……not to say this is impossible, but kite has a poor setup for developing youth currently….unless you are in the DR or somewhere similar. Techno World Championships, which just happened in Holland, had 350 participants…..at the kite worlds, they were flying people in to pad their stats…..the facts are the facts, kite racing is just not a very big sport yet, particularly on the female participation side. I think it will be one day, but currently, it is not there.

Democracy…..it is a concept that people even in the US are baffled with sometimes but somehow in all of this, the concept of democracy has been lost. Personally, I was very saddened by our US Reps attitude in all of this, Charley Cook in particular, who with a wave of the hand, seemed to dismiss the facts of the situation. “We know best”……no consult of US Windsurfing on this decision before the decision was made: Is that how a democracy works? US Windsurfing has been a member of US Sailing for a long time, kiters have not been part of US Sailing AT ALL, but somehow, they get voted in and windsurfing gets voted out? Even our presidential candidates do a better job of paying attention to the constituents than that! This is a very basic concept that seems to have been misplaced at US Sailing. Thankfully, with the help of a lot of US Windsurfers, US Windsurfing put together a very coherent website that had a lot of the facts laid out, which helped to give meat and content to the backlash.

So….when the issue actually got put to a full MNA vote, windsurf was reinstated easily, as everyone knew that it would. All the subterfuge can’t be hidden in a true democracy and fortunately for windsurfing, the democratic process was allowed and the will of the members was passed.

But let’s talk about what should really happen with kiting….this reporter really thinks the kiters were barking up the wrong tree from the get-go. There is a very well developed aspect of kiting, which is called freestyle, which has a long standing world tour, a long history of world champions, well defined judging and that is visually very dynamic. This aspect of kiting is what most people want to see and what they actually think kiting is anyway…..guys going big, floating in the air, doing crazy moves, giant kite loops. Now some of this would obviously be challenging in lighter winds, but I think what the kiters need to do is to try to get a demonstration event, at the Olympics, in kite freestyle. If you see the success of snowboarding in the Olympics in the half-pipe discipline, kiting has a chance of making that happen on the Olympic stage. This would be incredibly exciting…..and much more worthy of a new

medal being granted than into racing, which is really just more of the same thing (not that I don’t think it should be in—it still would be a cool type of racing in the Olympics). Take some of that development that is happening with kite racing, apply it to making kite freestyle work in lighter winds, and that may be something that is a lot more marketable to masses, the IOC and a TV audience at the Olympics. If Kevin Langeree or Youri Zoon ended up as the next Shaun White, I am sure they would not have any complaints. This is really what kiteboarding is about and is what people want to see……the beauty of kiting is it actually can happen in relatively light winds…..and if you DO have a windy day, you may be looking at one of the most visually exciting sports in the entire Summer Olympics!

Kiters: Do the hard work, establish your sport as a demonstration event for proof of concept, and put the money into making that work, instead of trying to “short circuit” the process with end-arounds of the normal process. Build some consensus for your sport and you will be very successful in the end and I suspect, much more successful than some of your predecessors.

by : Jim DeSilva