A Process Of Elimination
Posted By Paul Kotik on 1 November 2004
It’s all coming true, except the part about riches, fame and glory.
A few years ago, when Martin Stepanek and I brainstormed the future of freediving we concluded that the sport stood on the cusp of an explosion in performance benchmarks. We figured that growth in the sport would attract competitors from a larger pool of athletes, thus increasing the likelihood of those rare, extreme performers coming into the game.
We reckoned this performance explosion would feed back into growing the sport even more, as major media and masses of spectators and fans were drawn in.
Top freedivers like Martin would be global superstars, and double handfuls of succulent crumbs would fall off their tables into the grubby claws of media remoras - types like me.
Life would be grand.
Well, life is grand, to be sure, but not in all the ways we imagined. Meanwhile, the Constant Weight record has rocketed from Brett LeMaster’s 81 meters, then, to Martin’s own 103 meters, for now ( as of this writing, 26 October 2004). I’ll not provoke Martin any more than I have already, so let’s not even mention what's happened in the Static Apnea discipline. But where are the clowns and dancers?
Where’s my f**king limousine ?
Sure, the sport has grown. Little baby steps, increments. There’s more media exposure, but mostly of the cheapo sort like webcasting. It’s just not happening until there are more major network cams on site than there are divers.
So why no traction ? We all know that freediving is awesomely fascinating, right ? We aren’t eccentrics or nutjobs, are we ? Perhaps that’s a different discussion, but let’s stipulate here, for the sake of argument, that we're not cuckoo. Why doesn’t the great wide world of couch-lounging fans love our sport and demand more ?
I've said it before and I’ll say it again: the way we compete makes for bad, bad television. It is b o r i n g ! There. Are you listening ?
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