Within minutes of last Saturday’s news story on the mass departure of the Superboat class from Super Boat International’s upcoming season-opener in Cocoa Beach, Fla., forecasts of offshore powerboat racing’s imminent demise popped up all over Facebook and online high-performance powerboating communities, including this one. It was the same gloom and doom stuff I’ve heard since I started covering the sport in the late 1990s.
Pronouncements of offshore powerboat racing’s demise are as old as the sport itself. Photo courtesy/copyright Pete Boden/Shoot 2 Thrill Pix.
A longtime friend and loyal reader who usually is good for an entertaining comment or two about the sport even shot me a text. “Offshore racing is dead,” he wrote.
For reasons I’ll never fully understand, people—including fans of the sport such as my friend—seem to love pronouncing offshore racing dead whenever the chance arises. Those opportunities come in the form of changes, and whenever one occurs it elicits the same Pavlovian response.
“No, it’s not,” I wrote back. “It’s just in a transition period.”
Let’s get this out of this out the way now, because nostalgia is a dangerous, mind-altering drug that distorts reality.
and then