Mary,
After thinking about the consequences and speaking to a few "good" sailors I must retract my initial knee jerk opinion.
I know that there is know that there is no way that the average or above average sailor can beneit from the cash purse. There are too many "rock stars" out there that will dominate the race. If Worrell needs 50 sailors to make his plan happen, at a minimum of $28,000 to get in......I think the sailor doing it on a shoe string has been snubbed. It was about guts and bragging rights...now it is cash and will attract the ones who are after the cash and can afford to go for it.
I don't think there are 50 sailors out there that think they will actually "place", therefore making the purse smaller.
I hope I am wrong, I hope this can get some media excitement.
I guess this is part of evolution.
Damon's right. The attention and recognition is what this sport needs to revive it. There's not a beer swilling, football loving armchair quarterback in America who doesn't know what the America's cup is. And that race is not even exciting unless you have a real appreciation for sailing. When we can expose what the real thrill of catsailing is to the masses in armchair America, we could well spark a resurgence of the sport. Who knows where it could all lead, we could even have real fleets again, instead of a bunch of limping decrepit old mismatched 30 year old beachcats competing against the one or 2 guys in fleet that can buy the nice boats.
CARY
ARBO has a point. There may not be 50 entries which will diminish the purse.. However, when ya think of it, the Worrell has been made up of our Rock stars of catsailing for a number of years. How many of us can afford new Inter20's with triply redundant sail packages? Not me, I just stand by hoping for their leftovers.
Sure it will change the character of camaraderie between teams on the Worrell, But I don't think it will filter far from that. The Myrtle Beach Cash prize race has never changed the nature of that race or its participants at the smalller levels, as Jake noted. I for one would have started this sport off a lot earlier had I known more about it, maybe a little media will prevent that from happening to the next guy and we'll get more sailors at the local level.
Smart Media coverage would fill the boring times with a history of the sport, Showing how little Billy went from his leaky Hobie 14 to a Nationally ranked Catracer in just a few years. Let's face it, It has greater possibilities than we know, and it is obvious that whatever ALL of us are doing, the sport is barely hanging on, we gotta do something drastic to turn it around, maybe this is just the sort of jumpstart the sport needs.
CARY
Interesting thing: I was just at the website for the ISAF 2003 World Sailing Championships for the Olympic classes (www.cadizworlds2003.com). The site is all in Spanish, but I know enough Spanish that I noticed they have a polling question very similar to this one. It asks, "Do you believe that the professionalization of sailing is good for the sport?" So far there have been 751 votes, with 55 percent voting yes, 40 percent voting no, and 6 percent that don't know or don't care.