Re: the broader vision
Aida is not very proactive - it is re-active.
In my village we have a saying (no really, we do!):
"You avoid mistakes through experience, but can only gain experience through making mistakes." (Danish proverb)
The sucess of the last attempt I would guess is mostly Herberts and his team. They thought out the "system" and asked for rulechange.
Go figure. So it is the Ferrari team that claims the glory when Michael Schumacher wins a world championship, and not the FIA sanctioning it.
Consider this: Every once in a while someone splatters himself to death in a supercar (pardon the image), so multiple heads (some wise, some dumb) get together to avoid it ever happening again. And deep down, they hopefully understand that absolute safety is an illusion, and that all they can do is keep trying.
In this apnea case, the super-crazy-sled diving is in a troublesome phase with people dying, so Herbert's team develops answers to horrible questions, answers that AIDA can accept. Just like the Ferrari team (or whoever) develops a 'survival cell' in the supercars, or better helmets, what do I know.
As RXCNC2 writes NLT and other stunts steal all the media attention.
Ask yourself, why is that? Why do you think that that's where all the attention goes to? Why are people more interested in Formula One than, say, marathon running? (Lousy comparison perhaps, but...)
Aida needs to be associated with competitions and SPORT - with world championships
I totally, utterly agree. But other freediving interestees will always find super-crazy-sled diving more appealing, probably merely because it reaches greater depths, or because it's machinery, or because it is indeed potentially lethal. The above is just yours and mine personal philosophy (and I'm sure a lot of others, too), but other freedivers have different preferences, and they're probably just as right or just as wrong.
And also, here we are only talking about the freedivers' perspective. In this maniacal equation that the AIDA name is locked into, you got at least three other parties: Media, sponsors and quasi-ignorant spectators. I don't think we should be get too presumptious about what control AIDA has in this process. I don't think AIDA controls anything, all she is is the agency. All she can do is attempt to service the at all times accumulated philosophy, which (as we have seen already) can change chaotically with every new board or Assembly. For each individual in the AIDA circuits, each will have different preferences for various personal reasons, and are probably all right and wrong at the same time. Any board or Assembly will have to try to make sense of all these opinions and wind up with a hopefully generally beneficial accumulated philosophy. Welcome to f***ing politics.
And right now, No Limits freediving is still a part of this accumulated philosophy. It's the Formula One of Apnea, where Constant Without Fins freediving is the Marathon. (You know, something like that...)
1) Would NLT lose anything if the best NLT brains joined forces in a NLT Organization?
2) Would the other disciplines suffer if NLT was "further away" from them?
3) Would Aida weaken in the long run?
These questions are missing the mark. Your primary focus is that AIDA should disassociate itself with NLT, which is colored by 1) your personal apnea philosophy and 2) your benign fears of future deaths. You don't want AIDA's name sprayed with dead freedivers. I can accept if it is, the name AIDA is just a name,
provided that we keep giving the best shot we got, accumulatively and all, and accept that sometimes the Sea just claims somebody.
That's my own broader vision. Take it for what it's worth.
Chris Engelbrecht, Copenhagen
