WEIGHING UP THE VALUE
If you pay a super champ, and they only do the 6 events… it’s not cheap at all. In other sports there are a lot more events during the year for the athletes. So with only 6 events, all focussed in a period of the year, it’s not really balanced. I also believe we should have more competition over the winter to advertise the gear before the selling season starts, and have the riders more free over the summer to have them do more promo events with our windsurfing community to promote the sport. Racing is important, but it’s only a fourth of what a rider needs to do to be complete. There are results, but also media (and we are not talking about social media only, which anyone can do easily nowadays), communication with the community, and we also calculate the effort. The result of these 4 aspects gives the value of the rider. In Point-7 we tend to multiply these 4 factors, and if one of them is zero, the result is zero. Often the riders don’t consider gear to have a big value when given to them for free, but this is already a lot of money. They are often having between 10 to 25 sails, same for the masts, plus all the carbon booms, clothing, accessories!
The total costs of the team, depends on how many people you have onboard, and from these how many are in the top 5. A super top flight sailor can cost between 40K euro up to whatever incentives they will have. It can easily double if the results are good. The lower the level of the rider it immediately halves in money value, or goes down even to a quarter. A top brand can even spend 150K euro, if not more. A small brand much less. At Point-7 we like to see the riders as a team and not as individuals. A team has a bigger chance to be sold to external sponsors. At the moment riders try to support their activity by living off only windsurfing brands, but the industry cannot support everyone. We have sponsors for our Point-7 Black Team, but we could have much more sponsors if the existing racing structure would be a bit different. This would ease up the expenses for the industry and immediately give more to the pros.