HOTM Round Up

by Sarah Kingdom
08 / 12 / 2009

Editors Note: The following article isn’t really in keeping with the ‘Alliance style’ but the wide-a-wake.com Hottie Of The Month contest became such a big deal within the wake scene this summer that we couldn’t ignore it. Plus when you see the excited little face of Sarah Kingdom, the driving force behind WAW, there is no was you can say no to her. The girls over a WAW have really done a great job at promoting the sport and getting more women involved this past year, so hats off to all of you - Sim
 
 
Hottie Of The Month - basically set up to give the girls another incentive to take up wakeboarding. Let’s face it, we’re pretty spoilt with the beautiful boys we get to see on the water, so we thought rather than have a back page model of Doris*, who has never even seen a wakeboard (Yes, Alliance you’re VERY guilty) (*Editors Note – Actually, in the past year we changed the Girl Page to only feature ladies who wakeboard - so there!) we’d give the girls a taste of what to really expect. NO! Not free licence to perv, but a celebration of our lovely boys!
The format was simple; readers of WAW nominated their favourite Hottie with a picture, and the top 4 go through to an online poll for a month.
 
 
April
The first and possibly the funniest HOTM. The submission of ‘Scottish Stu’ Chatham in the bath with a can of Tennents ‘Vitamin T’ set a VERY high benchmark for all subsequent nominees photos! The voting frenzy was very unexpected, with a total of over 10,000 votes cast in the first ever poll! The Scottish wakeboarders’ ‘Stu for HOTM’ campaign was fantastically supported and spearheaded by Gordy Forsyth, with a small army of off shore riggers voting - whether a female vote at all was cast shall remain a mystery! Stu was very prominently presented with his winning certificate at the first stop of the Loch Stock tour at Loch Lomond. Poor Matt Crowhurst on the MC was most put out that he hadn’t been nominated!
 
Nominations - Lee Debuse, Dominic Ghuurs, Ben Cordery and Stu Chatham.
Winner - by MILES Scottish Stu
 
May
Matt C was finally nominated, in a somewhat compromising Wonder woman outfit, but Stu’s April bubble bath pic (thankfully cropped as the full picture would have revealed Gordy in there too!) set the tone for most submissions! Tom Watson was sporting a rather ‘enhanced’ look with his balloon breasts. Clearly the poll was being taken seriously at this point!! Whilst submissions remain anonymous, it’s fair to say that as early on as the second poll, less than 50% of the nominations were submitted by ladies! Were the boys taking this a little too seriously? Surely not! Tom was presented with his award with the help of his Princes dock crew like a beauty Queen!
 
Nominations - Matt Crowhurst, Gareth Stelfox, Tom Watson, Andrew Eddy
Winner – Tom Watson
 
June
Word was getting around and boys were approaching me as to how they get voted for…prestige or egotism, who can tell, but the boys were flocking to Wide-a-wake.com to gauge the competition. Successful nominees were not eligible for the following month’s vote, so little wonder that as soon as he could be voted for, LDB popped up again. Strange coincidence that his WAW chick sessions were in full swing and feedback remarks of, “ God! He soooo fit” manifested themselves into nominations! This little hottie was getting lots of nominations, so too was Max Main who made a number of enquires to me about the competition! There was a good mixed bag in this vote, with the original gangster that is Connor Floyd and the officer and gentleman Kieran Taheny successfully nominated too. Connor was a clear winner for some time and quite rightly so! The mystery remains how only the morning after Max commented to myself and Lee, with very specific stats to hand, the current voting scores (Connor having a clear lead at this stage) that Max’s votes shot up over night to take the title. Now isn’t that strange? One could argue that if cheating, heaven forbid, were to have reared it’s ugly head, that Max STOLE the title form a child, dear oh dear! Max was presented with his certificate at the Girls’ Rail Jam at Wakestock 2009 by, yet again, a very bitter Matt Crowhurst!  I remain gleeful that Connor won’t forget that and in a few years time might ‘remind’ Max!
 
Nomination - Connor Floyd, Lee Debuse, Kieren Taheny, Max Main.
Winner – sudden last minute voting surge – Max Main
 
July
In an attempt to get a more nationwide voting campaign underway, Cable Hottie Warfare was declared. Each cable park choosing to take part, nominated a cable operator to go into the national poll. This in itself caused ructions, cable operators being put forward by their bosses, protesting loudly, but loving the attention! But some cable parks chose a very diplomatic approach to selecting their operator. Sheffield at their 10 Feet high stop announced it over the MC, James Chapell geeing up the crowd to cheer for their favourite, and collapsing with laughter as his brother Simon’s vote was greeted with a wall of silence! The place simply erupted as the toothless Damon Bull was offered up. There, democracy at it’s best! This poll was really exposing the wonderful vanity of the boys and steering the whole HOTM further and further away from the original intention of giving the girls something to drool over! It was a circus! WAW could never have anticipated how much fun we’d have with this! Cirencester’s picture for Tom Taylor, was just pure gold! The Sheffield massive got 100% behind the campaign and blew the other cables out of the running. Damon was presented with his certificate at the season final of 10 feet High.
 
Nominations  -  Sheffield – Damon Bull
                       Milton Keynes – Cameron Holmes
                       Box End – James Sunders
                       Princes Club – Ashley Templeman
                       Thorpe – Matt Stevens
                       Cirencester – Tom Taylor
                       Nottingham – Andy Van Pelt – ‘Fanners’                    
 
Winner –Damon Bull, Sheffield
 
Box End – James Saunders 5001 votes
Sheffield – Damon Bull 30169 votes
Princes – Ashley Templeman 2222 votes
Thorpe – Matt Stephens 4040 votes
Cirencester  – Tom Taylor 7080 votes
Nottingham  – Andy Van Pelt aka Fanners 69 votes
Wake MK  – Cameron Holmes 5859 votes
Total Votes: 54440
 
 
August
To commemorate the end of the summer holidays and the return to school, we launched the ‘Super Groms’. If we were expecting a fair fight we were VERY much mistaken! These groms took this poll to a new level! There was controversy, confessions, crashes and chaos! Less than 36 hours after the poll was opened we had to close it. Nearly 90,000 votes had been cast and threatened to crash our server! There were stories of elder brothers recruiting entire classes of school children in their lunch hours to rest books on the ‘return’ key, massive family operations and tales of parents falling out! So we decided to start voting from scratch but with a single vote per computer. The second poll was launched and voting began at a pace we expected and seemed to have solved the problem of over zealous frenzied voting…but that was short lived. Soon the votes were creeping up for 3, 4, 6 every second or two. Either there was some seriously impressive canvassing going on, or cheating was rearing its ugly head once more! When another nominee’s votes were following a similar pattern, we received calls to ‘stop all voting’ and were amazed to receive confessions of cheating! Once again the poll was cut short but with a massive dilemma as to how to resolve it. Ultimately, we painstakingly calculated the number of different IP addresses for each nominee and declared Joey Battleday the winner, with the most number of genuine, honest votes! Naughty, naughty parents! All the Groms that took part in the poll will receive a certificate.
 
Nominations - Taylor Knight, Liam Peacock, Joey Battleday, Scott Rosewell, Lex Lawson.
Winner – Fair and square – Joey battleday
 
 
Ultimately, the HOTM campaign wouldn’t have got off the ground without the amazing support and exposure through Alliance. So really, It’s all your fault!
 
We’re not sure how we’re going to run it next year, but there’s talk of issuing a screen saver with prominent dates on, showcasing current HOTMs and last years too.