At 06:36 28 February 2013, GC wrote:
On 28/02/2013 04:09, Bill D wrote:

Good points but I think they will be overcome.
...
The masses of TV viewers will never adopt gliding but they don't
adopt many other sports either although do enjoy watching them. At
any one time our infrastructure can only accept a few thousand
newcomers. If TV coverage of glider races could provide those few,
we'd be in great shape.

Maybe - but it isn't a shape I want my sport to be in.

I like it as it is and it's as much mine as yours. I'm enjoying my
flying and I enjoy the friends I have in gliding. There is nothing more
I ask from the sport. For me the sport centres on my Club and my flying
field and my local region and they're in good shape. Young men with
wider ambitions can tear the sport off me when I'm dead but right now -
I'll fight them for it. I like it as it is.

I have no interest in watching gliding on TV - I'm a participant. How
would a million TV viewers increase my and my friends' enjoyment of
gliding? Worse, the level at which I participate would be killed by TV
popularity. The sport - like motor sports - would become dominated by
the demands of the professionals and the amateur end would be squashed
by the juggernaut.

Anybody who thinks gliding is comparable to cycling is deluded. The
closest comparison is motor sport and they're not faring any better at
the bottom than gliding. Worse, in fact. The next best comparison is
sailing and I've watched what professionalism has done there with very
little enthusiasm. It didn't improve my sailing pleasure one iota.

An earlier post said "...It's OK if you don't want to participate but
what's the point in discouraging others?" The point is that it's MY
sport as much as it's theirs and what they want would kill it from MY
point of view. So I WILL fight them for it. I will fight to stop it
becoming the plaything of bombast-stoked ******s.

GC


G, I have a heap of sympathy for your take on this. especially your last
line!..................however, demographically I am in the middle here as
a late starter at age 49, now 52, I look around my Club and the wider
sailplane scene and the view is a sea of white hair or bald heads and
wrinkly faces atop bodies that don't bend as well as they used to (and they
are to the last man (or woman) great company) but it makes me wonder just
who is going to be lifting my wingroot or hooking me on in twenty years
time? the sport needs to suck a little bit of youth into it somehow.