Dyer needs with …
Make or break In an infamous interview, the Beatles were once asked if Ringo Starr was the greatest drummer in the world. Lennon jokingly replied that Starr wasn’ t even the best drummer in the Beatles.
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Dyer needs with …
Bryce Dyer
Make or break In an infamous interview, the Beatles were once asked if Ringo Starr was the greatest drummer in the world. Lennon jokingly replied that Starr wasn’ t even the best drummer in the Beatles.
For me, that’ s a decent analogy of my experiences in SUP racing over the last couple of years. I can travel to an event and be reasonably competitive yet still be given an absolute hiding by half a dozen great paddlers less than five minutes from where I live and they don’ t race much. Along with this, my other half recently asked me whether the SUP racing bubble had burst. I didn’ t know but my reply was maybe that we had maybe just got it all wrong to start with. For example, British Cycling’ s membership has increased nearly 10 fold in just under 10 years. That’ s been cited as mainly being due to its‘ Olympic effect’. This effect is where we are influenced to take up a sport due to your countries own success in it( which for us oddly seems to involve anything that requires sitting down – i. e. rowing, sailing, equestrian and cycling).
However, when you read into this and see the explosion in their event participation, this growth is not in their races. It’ s actually in its‘ sportifs’. These are events which are timed and have no prizes at all. Put simply, it’ s providing a‘ big day out’ experience and gives weekend warriors the option to covertly race their hearts out or to just tootle around without fear of reprisal( and over a route that is challenging). This mass participation phenomenon has recently been seen in other sports too such as‘ park runs’ in running and the hugely successful SUPbikerun triathlons.
Those particular triathlons have seen nearly 300 people paddling SUPs in their events, which when you do the head count, is actually more than any other current SUP event in the UK. The only SUP race that approaches anywhere near those kind of numbers in the UK is the Head of the Dart, which ironically does this by seeing two-thirds of its own entrants undertaking the‘ leisure’( non-racing) category.
Taking this at face value, maybe the reason SUP race participation possibly hasn’ t skyrocketed is because events aren’ t catering to what the grass-roots paddlers actually want. For example, you can now race on rivers, seas, downwind, do it technical, do it over huge distances, do it on an inflatable or do it on a board of any length. However, these are objective choices. What the most popular events seem to be doing( such as the Paris Crossing in France that gets 600 + paddlers and sells out in mere hours), is focusing more on the actual emotional experience of the day. A guy like me will spend hours trawling over their data, tweaking training plans and have a mood that will shift from sublime happiness to one of infernal damnation depending on where I finish. But when it comes to sport though, I am elitist, I’ m certainly not normal and I’ m definitely not the core market.
Is water the problem? Is SUP never going to go mass participation because many people have a fear or dislike of being on or in water?( Watching Jaws 2 at aged 10 sure as hell‘ encouraged’ me to be faster with my capsize drill when I raced sailing dinghies back in my youth!). Take a sport like open water swimming; this has also been booming. Back over on the River Dart again and their open water swim event this year had over 1,600 swimmers – and that’ s coming from a competitive sport that was virtually non-existent a decade ago. I don’ t think water is the problem if you package it right.
So what should SUP take from this? Well, it involves a decision. The decision is whether the event focuses on the needs of a handful of chiselled athletes pushing the boundaries of athletic excellence or between hundreds of Joes and Janes exploring the world from a different point of view together. These are mutually exclusive and the answer could ultimately make or break SUP as a sport.
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