I kind of lean to private lakes helping the decline maybe not the total cause...
The CL tour was competition sure, but more of a show(to entertain). The best locations were for the crowd not the skier. The value to sponsors is to get 10k people out there watching not a world record. For that crowd, and TV they gave us product to promote with....Mastercraft gave us a boat to give away with a radio/TV promotion....This was when the skiers were in that six-figure range....in the late 70's 100 skiers would show up at a slalom tournament on a public lake....now on our private multi-lake sites we sometimes have less than 25 entries.