Just looking for the first year the sport of windsurfing was introduced to the Olympic Games. Cheers.

bizflats said...

Just looking for the first year the sport of windsurfing was introduced to the Olympic Games. Cheers.

Google coulda been your friend...

In 1984, windsurfing was introduced to the Olympics in the form of the Windglider board.

www.inc.com/magazine/19820201/9808.html

A terrible choice and mistake, made for politico-commercial reasons at the time - if you'd ridden one of those, you'd agree. Greg Hyde placed well in racing, if memory serves. In this Olympics as in subsequent ones, there was no public interest in the racing event.

The memory of that board - and the racing event itself - is lost now, like a lost sock in the laundromat of oblivion. More importantly, in the end Windsurfer the original was allowed to be used as a demo event. There were fairly crowd-pleasing events of slalom, long distance and freestyle. In those days, those events were successful in bringing laymen's attention to the sport. People that were around remember the demo event, not the offshore racing-on-a-log thing.

In North America at least, I remember the Windsurfer pre-Olympic competition for national representation as as stringent as that for the racing events.

Cheers.