Hello again,
Stavros,
It really amazes me that you would comment on our bid. I mean of all people, another contender is not the best person to do this. It shows lack of respect for the other members of the forum (as if they don’t know anything about competitions and they need some sort of messiah to open their eyes), lack of sportsmanship (for the other bid) and lack of respect for the top, history writing freedivers that have commented positively about our bid and our past events. Who exactly do you think you are? Anyway, I guess you wouldn’t do that if you didn’t worry too much. So, here is a little information for you, from the “amateurs”:
1) You are forgetting that some of the potential organizers are already judges. So there is no extra cost to get them to Santorini, since they will be there already!
2) About the accommodation etc costs for extra judges that you mention, the answer above covers it.
3) We are budgeting for 10 doping tests because I personally contacted Pim Vermeulen, AIDA’s technical officer via sms and he gave me this number, “10”. But if AIDA International tells us to have more, we have the money to do this.
4) The safety team will be 3 safety divers per competition line and 3 divers for the warm up lines. More than enough for each competition line.
5) It appears that you have not read the schedule very carefully. I every singe day, there won’t be more than 45 freedivers diving. For example, if we get 70 athletes and say 35 are men and 35 are women, then on the first day of diving we only have 35 divers to try to get in the men’s finals. And the next day we have the 35 female athletes and the say 8-10 men finalists. In the event that all 70 athletes are men, AIDA Hellas has enough money reserve to cover for an extra competition line and counter ballast system.
6) There are more than one hotel options just outside the camping area witch have already offered us reduced rates. This makes it possible for the athletes to be together. Meetings will not be announced just a few hours before they start but people will know exactly where to be, and at what time. It just takes some basic planning skills.
7) Yes, we have been to Santorini. I’ve actually stayed in the camping site for a few days and know from first hand experience that the level of service they offer is very, very high. Actually the youth hostel is inside the camping site! And a member of our organizing committee went there a few days before we submitted our bid to do a last check on things. As you can see in our proposal, we have more than one diving sites. This is why (as you can see in our budget), we have allowed for 1000 euros for an anchor set-up (much more that what it usually costs us). This way, if the existing anchors turn out to be unusable, we can anchor a little further to the north. But these 1000 euros will go towards lowering the entrance fee if we manage not to spend them.
8) About the cable car, according to official information (
Santorini Cable Car Santorini Island Teleferik Santorini) the cable car is capable of carrying 1200 persons per hour. So, if today you saw people waiting for an hour, well, there must have been 1200 people waiting just outside the cable car in Fyra! I’m surprised you managed to get through. By the way, whenever I used the cable car (in August when it’s the peek season), I never had to wait.
9) 70 athletes is our worst-case scenario. We are making this an open competition, a freediving festival. We can accommodate more than 200 athletes, and the more athletes come, the lower the fee will be since all money made will go back to the athletes. We are non-profit organization and what drives us is the love for the sport, not money making or personal egos.
As an ending, sad, personal note, you keep talking about how great and how professional your events are and yet, the few “professional” freedivers that wrote in these threads, had the best comments about AIDA Hellas events and at least one of them had negative comments for yours. What is more contradicting with your self proclaimed professionalism is that you don’t read other people’s bid with the attention that a true professional would. You jump to conclusions, use words like “funny”, an obnoxious tone and write lies.
The truth is, you haven’t been bad at learning some organizational skills from AIDA Hellas. But you failed miserably at the lesson of ethics and true freediving spirit.
I deeply apologize to other members for my tone, but I feel it is justified.