With a large spectator fleet milling about last Sunday, Reichelsdorfer drove Northstar between the aft floatation towers and down the watery corridor defined by the catwalks.
"I'm expecting a much larger spectator turnout than in the past two years," said Glasspiegel, who projected that 12,000 to 15,000 spectators would attend the tournament compared with 8,000 people in 1999 and 5,500 during last year's rain-shortened event.
Two raptor-like catamarans doing all this close to shore with a big crowd watching in the San Francisco sunshine and with a large spectator fleet rounding out the numbers in the choppy waters beyond Alcatraz Island.
In practice they tend towards a blink-and-you-miss-it affair of all-out adrenal attack, a chair-bound blur of feint and jab that is instantly translated by a large spectator scoreboard above the competitors.
Apart from sports purposes, stadia are also increasingly being used for concerts and other events with large spectator attendance.
"We are preparing for a crowd around the 100,000 mark for the week of the Championship, and with a particularly large spectator audience expected for the weekend, we felt it prudent to stop selling tickets for Saturday and Sunday," said Irish Open Championship Director Antonia Beggs.
Several reports of the Games highlight the importance of large spectator attendance and 'passing the hat' around in the fund raising efforts.
One of the basic requirements of any large-scale spectator sport is that the fans should be able to understand it.
The renewal of large-scale spectator sports came about gradually in the 19th century with the growth of European cities and the revival of interest in athletic contests; symbolically, the great impetus for the design of modern stadiums came from the revival of Olympic competition in 1896.
As a company, the Santa Monica-based Mobcrush is a bet that mobile gaming will eventually have as large a spectator audience as desktop gaming.
