I wonder with the Hobie Championships at Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, if the HCA-NA may be able to use this to gain more leverage within US Sailing. When we ran the event in Clear Lake, I made mutliple multiple contacts to US Sailing to simply provide some on-line coverage. The number of simple replies was ZERO. Yet, US Sailing does on-line coverage of many other venues and events.
That kind of coverage (and not just from US Sailing) is one of the pre-requisites to attaining big time sponsorship. Other's would be the 2 or 3 major sailing magazines, an official results posting with ESPN or FOX SPORTS on their website and maybe even broadcast results over their radio affiliates.
I guess what I'm saying is money is actually not the barrier. It's the work to line up these promotional venues...which persuade Corporate America to penny up the dough. If anything this is the most perfect time in U.S. History to have a U.S. Worlds...why....we are ALL about GREEN! There's not a sport more green than sailing.
Maybe we could devote some time over some Canadian beer talking about this subject some more!