This discussion has been going on for many, many decades in the water skiing world and is still being bought up for consideration today. However, those bringing up the topic today may not be paying enough attention to the history of water skiing’s previous attempts to join the Olympics. These issues are still in play today, indicating almost no chance that it will ever actually happen.
It is highly unlikely that water skiing in any form will ever make it back to the Olympics. A few of the current hurdles are a combination of too many human variables, gas-powered boats, the difficulty for the average person to understand, and current overall popularity/watchability. Cable skiing looks to be the only chance water skiing has of being included at the Olympics in the future.
Water skiing went to the Berlin Olympics in 1972 as a demonstration sport; Greece made the application to add it as a demo sport again in 2004 but was denied citing cost and time constraints. The USAWS was created to invest time and effort into presenting skiing to the Olympic committee. They made several regulation changes to accommodate regulators, but that actually hampered the sport’s progress as a whole. Unfortunately, at the wine and dine demonstration evening, selectors from the committee left shortly after the demonstration began, clearly indicating they don’t see water skiing as a viable Olympic sport.
Top Issues Water Skiing Faces To Be Included At the Olympics
The Boat
Gas Power – Motorized propulsion makes this discussion a non-starter right out the gate; every other Olympic sport is either athlete or gravity-powered, adding engines would be seen as too big of a break from traditions. Also, if you let in one sport with an engine, there would quickly be a push for other motor-powered sports to be allowed as well. I doubt this is a door the Olympic committee wants to open.
Environmental – There would be pushback against the environmental impact of adding gas power to Olympic sports. If skiing was added, then there would be more funding for training future athletes. This means more boats, more skiers, more engine time to train and prepare. There would be a large increase in the number of people skiing in general, which would be a much larger impact than just the one tournament shown on the Olympic stage.
Speed Control – For a long time, speed was judged using bouy magnets in the boat course with boat sensors to get exact times to calculate speeds. At 36mph/58km, the boat takes exactly 16.08 seconds to drive the course; variations of less than 0.01 are enough to force a re-ride due to incorrect speed. GPS speed control has been developed in recent years. However, it is still too much of a potential variable for Olympic selection.
The Human Variables
Boat Drivers – Drivers can hugely impact any skier’s performance, and no driver is perfect. When dealing with the forces of skiing, the ski boat is pulled from side to side within the boat course, drivers have a very small window (6inch) within which he has to stay. Cameras are posted at each end of the course so that the boat line can be judged each run.
The thing is, drivers these days are so good, that window is still enough where a driver could make or break a competitor’s run. Drivers will course-correct when the skier pulls on the rope, but depending on the timing of that correction, they can either help or hinder the skier while staying within the driving lane. Whether done purposefully or not, a driver can give an advantage to their favourite skiers and make life harder for those they don’t like.
Judges – Judging is not easy, your view can often be obstructed by the spray of the water, and bad calls have been known to happen. The judging is also more black and white than other sports. Did your ski go around the bouy, or did it not.
Difficult For A General Audience To Understand
From an audience perspective, water skiing is difficult to see the progression and therefore understand the difficulty of what they are watching. There is also the issue of current tournament layouts and how they make it difficult to get the general populace engaged.
Slalom – This event has a couple of issues, first is the slow build-up of each skier. Each competitor gets on the water and starts at a warmup line length, typically doing 3-4 passes before falling or missing a boy. This means that you have to watch skiers progress to their hard pass, where the excitement really happens. Then wait again for the next skier to progress through passes, which can take 5-10 minutes per skier, not the best for spectators.
Then there are the line lengths. Each time a skier completes a pass, the rope will be shortened to make the next pass harder. An average spectator will not understand the impact of shortening or the exponential levels of skill required each time the rope gets shorter.
This lack of understanding will also mean that slalom becomes repetitive, with general audiences not easily understanding where skiers are ranked. The time taken between passes adds up when skiers wait for wakes to dissipate.
Even in the industry competing for 20+ years, I struggle to sit and watch an entire slalom round.
Tricks – Tricks happen so fast that even judges sometimes have to slow down the video to validate tricks. As a casual observer, it is almost impossible to tell one trick from another as they flow into each other soo quickly. A lot of audiences see it as a less freestyle, more rigid version of wakeboarding.
Jump – It can be a little bit slow to watch, but it is easy to understand. Furthest wins. The problem is that there is too much of a score gap between the top 10 athletes, making it almost a given who will win any particular tournament. This would be helped by getting more people into the sport.
Too much dead air time and repetition – When televising water ski tournaments, there is much time waiting between skiers and their individual runs. This means that it can be great when watching summaries but not great to watch live. It also means that very few skiers actually get air time because the summary would cut a lot to avoid repetitiveness.
Current Popularity
The popularity of skiing needs to increase before having a large enough audience base to justify such a large stage. Water skiing is currently seen as a rich white man’s sport as it is not cheap.
There are many steps that could and should be taken to progress the sport in the public eye before aiming to get it into the Olympics.
As much as it pains me to say as a skier, maybe we should push wakeboarding and cable boarding to get us through the door and add 3 event skiing later.
Where Should Water Skiing Focus Their Attention?
There are a few avenues that skiing should pursue to further the sport that I believe will have much more success than trying to be accepted into the Olympics.
Cable Skiing
Cable skiing is a new method of using an elevated electric cable system to tow the skier instead of using a boat. This form of skiing solves a number of the issues bought up above but still has a few hurdles to get past. For a more in-depth article on cable skiing, check out this article. In late 2019 there were over 1000 cable parks globally, with that number expected to rise above 1500 by the next summer Olympics in 2024/25.
Less Human Variables – Because the cable system is a rigid structure, the speed issue is easily addressed as calibrating the system is pretty straight forwards. There is also no driver, so every skier gets the same pull and line from the cable.
Less Pollution – These electric systems remove the pollution and environmental concerns that come with running boats. There is still the issue that this is not an athlete or gravity-powered sport, which seems to be a major for the selection committee.
Better For Audiences – Cable tournaments have a different layout which is actually faster-paced and easier to follow. This event runs skiers through each difficulty level one at a time, earning your move to the next round. This way, you can tell as a skier drops out and doesn’t make it through to the next round, seeing the field get smaller and smaller as the difficulty increases. More consistent progression without the downtime waiting for the next skier to get to their harder passes.
These aspects make it far more likely that cable skiing could be accepted where boat skiing won’t. There still needs to be more sites developed for cable skiing, however, sites are going in all over Europe and in Asia, but more are needed.
Cable skiing is a direct poke in the eye of boat companies, potentially decreasing the boat side of the sport by making it more expensive than it already is.
Try To Get On The X-Games
Engines are fine – Obviously, the engines and boats would not be a problem for the X-Games. They already have a Wakeboarding presence, so adding events would be a realistic approach.
Smaller stage but televised – Although it is a much smaller stage than the Olympics, I think it is much closer to the target audience for skiing. It is also on TV, so it would be a way to get skiing awareness out and hopefully get people interested in watching skiing.
Lead to Collegiate Backing – If skiing made it to the X-Games, then the potential for college ski teams to send competitors might increase participation. If college kids know that they could go to the X-Games, how many more students would start to sign up for the team while at uni? This could lead to greater numbers of skiers staying into the sport to help it grow.
Change The Tournament Layout
Yes, this would be difficult and controversial. As a competitor, I like the way tournaments are set up, but for audiences, it has to change.
Head to head is an approach where one skier goes through the course and is followed quickly by another skier on the same rope length. This makes it very obvious and easy to follow. If someone falls, then you watch the next skier immediately attempt to beat their score.
Parallel slalom courses have 2 skiers competing right next to each other. Again another easy way to see who wins if one of them misses a pass or falls.
As you can see, there are many reasons why boat skiing will never be allowed to go to the Olympics. However, there are a few things they can do to promote the sport and help it become much more popular in general.
Addressing the popularity of the sport is an important first move. Supporting new layouts for tournaments and pushing cable skiing will get the sport a long way, possibly leading to Olympic inclusion in the future.