greenleader said...but windsurfing was a fresh new sport.
there was no mountain bikes, mals hadn't re appeared since the sixties, no skateboard culture, no video games only pinball at the corner shop, no friggin anything to stand the way of windsurfing being super successful and it was.
i used one of those catamasailboards and they went straight very well!
With the greatest of respect (honest!) maybe we under-estimate the level of competition windsurfing had back then. There were many other boom sports in the 1980s that windsurfing competed with successfully in those days, despite the fact that boards were bloody expensive (compared to the average wage) and crude in many ways.
Squash was an enormous sport at the peak of a boom. Aerobics was happening. I think triathlons were novel and big. Dinghy and yacht sailing were stronger than they are today, and the catamaran fleets were massive. Waterskiing seemed to be a lot bigger than wakeboarding is today.
Skating has always been around. Mountain bikes were appearing by the mid '80s. There was, in some places, a bicycling boom. The video games weren't up to today's standards, but they were pretty much brand new and maybe had more impact. Canoeing and kayaking were really suffering under the windsurfing boom, now it's the other way around.
The Australian population was only 75% what it is now; since 1985 about six million people have arrived and stuff-all of them have got into windsurfing.
While there are more sports to compete with now, we how have 25% more population, more money, and many of the sports we used to have to compete with have lost popularity. In contrast, other well-managed sports (where the barriers to entry are down and the structures you need are in place) have done one hell of a lot better than windsurfing in the same crowded market.
While windsurfing was fresh, that was also a handicap in some ways; it's hard to work out how to sell and run a sport, and (imho) we proved that by blowing the boom!
