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Foreword
I
t is a huge honour to have been elected as president of the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) at such an exciting time in the sport. The fantastic success of the 2012 Olympic sailing competition, the exciting, dynamic professional sailing series and events, and the muchanticipated 34th Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cup mean that attention on our sport is really high. It is most important to me to do something for the sailors during the time that I am the president of ISAF. These past nine months since the election I have learned so much from travelling to events, talking to sailors, event organisers, sponsors and with my ISAF colleagues, and we have already made good progress in some areas. My goal is to focus on three or four things and do them well. We cannot address all the areas at once so it is important to me that we do something really important for the sailors. And by that I mean all sailors; ISAF is not just about the Olympic Games. We are working to support people new to the sport all the way up to the athletes at the very top of their discipline, whichever that may be. We cannot ignore the commercial challenges of sailing and ISAF is working hard to generate sponsor income. We are in competition with other sports, all the other demands of busy daily life, but I am optimistic that with a clear strategy we can attract more supporters to sailing. I am excited by the tasks ahead and am always happy to hear your thoughts and ideas. Yours,
Carlo Croce ISAF President August 2013
BLACK BOOK 2013 l 3
Editor’s Note
EDITORIAL David Cushnan Eoin Connolly Michael Long Ian McPherson Rachel Warnes
DESIGN & PRODUCTION Daniel Brown
LISTINGS Michael Barber
PHOTOGRAPHY Action Images Press Association
COMMERCIAL Nick Meacham Peter Jones William Dobson Jon Abraham Bhav Sahota
Y
ou don’t have to be working inside the sport to recognise that professional sailing has plenty of challenges, but this might also just be the most exciting point in the sport’s long history. Even at the very top, despite the well-publicised tragedy and politics which have marked this edition of the America’s Cup, the seeds of a brighter, more sustainable, future seem to have been sown: the television coverage in San Francisco this summer has been remarkable, while the America’s Cup World Series has great potential as a way of creating a running narrative for a staccato event. Indeed, whichever way you turn in the sailing world you find potential: the Volvo Ocean Race is poised to debut a new, one-design boat next year which should raise the level of competition and lower the barrier to entry; the Clipper Round the World Race set sail in September as perhaps the most refined of all the major sailing properties in terms of its business model and the value it provides its investors; the Open 60 class lies on the cusp of commercial revolution, helmed by the experienced, astute and very capable Sir Keith Mills Throw in maturing annual properties like the Extreme Sailing Series, now backed substantially by Land Rover, and the Alpari-sponsored World Match Racing Tour and sailing is arguably offering more concrete, high-value opportunities for sponsors and investors than ever before. Conceived as a guide to the commercial intricacies and, yes, peculiarities of professional sailing’s showpiece events, the first Sailing Black Book includes indepth interviews with the sport’s most influential executives and decision-makers, combined with detailed analysis and information. Sailing may be as complex off the water as it is sometimes on it, but in the following pages we’ll do our best to help you navigate a sport rich with opportunities, as it makes its way into a truly commercial age.
David Cushnan Editor-in-Chief August 2013
4 l BLACK BOOK 2013
OPERATIONS Yéwandé Aruleba Black Book is published by: SportsPro Media Ltd Trans-World House, 100 City Road, London EC1Y 2BP, UK Tel: +44 (0) 207 549 3250 Fax: +44 (0) 207 871 0102 Email: info@sportspromedia.com Web: www.sportspromedia.com (SportsPro Media Ltd is part of the Henley Media Group Ltd www.henleymediagroup.com) NOTICES: Black Book is published annually. This is the first edition. Printed in the EU. SUBSCRIPTIONS: Single copies of the Black Book 2013 are available at a cost of UK£90, US$150 €103 and delivered anywhere in the world at no extra charge. Copies are available by logging on to www.sportspromedia.com EDITORIAL COPYRIGHT: The contents of this book, both words and statistics, are strictly copyright and the intellectual copyright of SportsPro Media Ltd. Copyright or reproduction may only be carried out with written permission of the publishers, which will normally not be withheld on payment of a fee. Article reprints: Most articles published in the Black Book are available as reprints. Normal print run for reprints is 400 copies. Please contact us at: info@sportspromedia.com
Contents
Contents 1/ Power 20 8.
Our ranking of the most influential players in global sailing over the last 12 months
2/ Events 20.
ISAF Meet the president: Carlo Croce
26.
America’s Cup The past, present and future of the Auld Mug
36.
Volvo Ocean Race A new chapter begins in 2014-15
46.
Clipper Sir Robin Knox-Johnston in conversation
54.
Extreme Sailing Mark Turner on building a sports property
64.
World Match Racing Tour The teams and venues under the microscope
72.
IMOCA Sir Keith Mills’ bold plans for offshore racing
78.
The Sports Consultancy Sailing’s commercial challenges outlined
3/ Contacts 86.
Contacts by Company
90.
Contacts by Surname
4/ Luxury 108.
Super yachts in 2013
116.
The business of boat shows
120.
Gallery: sailing’s most prestigious regattas
In association with:
BLACK BOOK 2013 l 5
1 / Power 20 8.
Our ranking of the most inďŹ&#x201A;uential players in global sailing over the last 12 months
Our ranking of the most influential players in global sailing over the last 12 months, ranked by experience, entrepreneurship, profile and achievement
20/ Peter Gilmour Four-time World Match Racing Tour champion In a sport full of versatile athletes there are perhaps none more so than Peter Gilmour. The Australian is an America’s Cup veteran who then began to ply his trade on the World Match Racing Tour, where his knowledge and experience became a vital tool for series organisers and event promoters. He is a four-time
champion in the series and remains on the board; most notably, he was one of the key advisors in the development of the Monsoon Cup in Malaysia where an area of wasteland was turned into a thriving world-class marina. Few sailors have as effective a transition from athlete to trusted authority on all areas of growing the sport as Gilmour. Even fewer have the kind of all-round knowledge of sailing.
19/ Angus Buchanan Co-managing director, The Sports Consultancy While Angus Buchanan’s The Sports Consultancy works, as the name suggests, across a wide variety of sports, sailing has always been its backbone. Buchanan and his co-managing director Robert Datnow have been responsible for many of the sport’s major commercial deals since 2006 – around UK£200 million worth, according to the best estimates.
Indeed, it was a major sailing sponsorship which brought Buchanan and Datnow together. Former sailor Buchanan, who once raced the Trophée Jules Verne before training as a lawyer, was the commercial director of the Volvo Ocean Race when Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movie branded a boat. Datnow, himself a lawyer, helped to provide the legal framework for the deal. The Sports Consultancy now works with sailing events and stopovers
around the world, delivering value and, importantly, clarity for clients in what remains a fragmented sport.
18/ Ernesto Bertarelli Founder, Alinghi Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli’s name will forever be associated with the America’s Cup. His Alinghi team successfully challenged for the Auld Mug in 2003 and then he put together the organisation which staged what was, by some distance, the most successful Cup yet, in Valencia in 2007. The love affair may have soured a
8 l BLACK BOOK 2013
touch following the legal wrangling post-Valencia, a bitter battle which ultimately saw Bertarelli lose out to Larry Ellison’s Oracle team, but the once all-conquering Alinghi team is still competing in the Extreme Sailing Series. It first took part in 2008, as practice for what turned out to be the legally dominated 33rd Cup, but the series currently forms the bulk of Alinghi’s
racing activities. Rumours, however, have suggested a possible tilt at the Volvo Ocean Race in 2014-15. Bertarelli retains his influence by dint of the fact that he has the pedigree and the capital to vault back to the very top tier of the sport almost when he pleases. The clever money would be that he will do just that, at some point. There are, after all, still scores to be settled.
The Power 20 17/ Samantha Davies her first Vendée Globe in 2008/09, is an enthusiastic contributor of video updates whilst out at sea, earning her a significant fanbase. With sailing still dominated by men, she has become the leading woman and an important part of promoting the sport to female sailors of the future. In the new commercial, international era of the sport, she could yet emerge as one of the sport’s genuine star acts, starting with her role as a member of the allfemale SCA crew on the next Volvo Ocean Race.
1 The Power 25
Sailor, Vendée Globe/Volvo Ocean Race In a sport where men and women compete equally, Britain’s Samantha Davies is the current standout female athlete. Although the 38-year-old failed to finish the 2012/13 Vendée Globe after a mast on her Saveol boat collapsed early in the race, her performances in the major races so far have shown enough to suggest she can follow in the footsteps of Dame Ellen McArthur. ‘La petite anglaise’, as she was dubbed when she finished fourth in
16/ David Graham Chief executive, Oman Sail Briton David Graham has stewarded Oman Sail – a ten-year national initiative to make the sultanate a force in world-class sailing, build a sailing industry and switch on Oman’s youth to the sport – since its launch in December 2008. In that time it has become the model for a multi-pronged national sailing effort, but one which has not yet been matched anywhere in the world in either its breadth or achievements.
With 1,300 miles of coastline to play with and a deep maritime history, the Oman Sail project has ambitious targets to introduce schoolchildren to the sport and, ultimately, to create sailing-related employment opportunities. Under Graham’s leadership Oman is not only becoming a more influential competitor in sailing’s big global events, it is laying down foundations at home which will last for generations.
World Race from Whitbread in 1997 and has never looked back. The race is jointly owned by the
Volvo Cars and Volvo Group. “They don’t get nearly as much credit as they should do,” our observer added.
15/ Olof Persson Chief executive, Volvo Group Olof Persson may not be a familiar name to the entire sailing community but his presence on this list is a mark of how significant a contribution Volvo, the Swedish car manufacturer which Persson runs as chief executive, has made to the sport over the past 15 years. “I don’t know a brand which has invested so much – and that’s in Olympic sailing, participation and at the elite end,” was how one observer characterised the brand, which bought what was the Whitbread Round the
BLACK BOOK 2013 l 9
14/ François Gabart Winner, 2012/13 Vendée Globe It is no understatement to describe François Gabart as a new sailing superstar. At the turn of the year the 29-year-old became the youngest winner of the Vendée Globe, in record time, underlining his status as the best of a new breed of French sailor and a worthy challenger to the likes of JeanPierre Dick, Michael Desjoyeaux and Armel le Cléac’h. As one of the dynamic new faces of the sport, Gabart could be the key to
unlocking a whole new generation of sailors, especially in the new IMOCA commercial age envisaged by Sir Keith Mills. Sailing, like any other sport, needs poster stars and Gabart, the first man to win the IMOCA World Championship and the Vendée in the same year, appears an ideal candidate for the role. “I hope that this title will grow with the new era of IMOCA,” he said of his world title earlier this year. He will assuredly have a role to play in that growth.
13/ Patrizio Bertelli Owner, Luna Rossa Challenge The America’s Cup has been praised and criticised in almost equal measure for being a plaything for billionaires over the years, but the investment in it by people like Patrizio Bertelli cannot be dismissed. Bertelli, the founder of Prada, has spent millions upon millions on four challenges for the America’s Cup since 2000, under the Luna Rossa Challenge name. The team came closest to challenging for the Cup itself in its first year, before being beaten by
AmericaOne in the Louis Vuitton Cup final. But Bertelli keeps coming back for more, his millions filtering down through the sport as he has done so, and this year Luna Rossa faced off against Emirates Team New Zealand for the right to compete in the Cup match. An old-school owner, Bertelli has been in the game long enough to offer the kind of comments that makes the sailing world sit up and listen, not least his strong views on the safety of the AC72 boats used for the 34th Cup in San Francisco this summer.
12/ Richard Brisius Co-founder, Atlant Ocean Racing The brands may change but the management has not. Swede Richard Brisius, a sailor himself, founded Atlant Ocean Racing, a ‘sports management company specialised in managing and producing sailing projects worldwide’, in 1998. It has become, as one insider puts it, “the most successful team management franchise bar none”. Atlant was the team behind Ericsson’s highly successful sailing projects, the high watermark coming in 2008/09
10 l BLACK BOOK 2013
when an Ericsson-branded boat won the Volvo Ocean Race. It also ran the Assa Abloy Racing team, which finished second in the 2001/02 Volvo race. For the 2014-15 edition, Brisius has signed up to lead an all-female team, which will be branded Team SCA by global hygiene company SCA. Team SCA was the first entry to be confirmed for the 14/15 event, just the kind of advantage on which one of the sport’s leading team operators can be expected to capitalise.
11/ Luc Talbourdet President, IMOCA In the world of offshore racing, IMOCA remains the kingpin organisation, even if it has recently passed its commercial rights over to Sir Keith Mills. The International Monohull Open Class Association is led by Frenchman Luc Talbourdet, a sometime competitor who has carved himself a niche as a sailing sponsorfinder and is now one of the sport’s key administrators.
Talbourdet runs Absolute Dreamer, a company which helps run campaigns for Jean-Pierre Dick, but as the head of IMOCA his main role in recent times has been to find a way of more properly commercialising Open 60 racing. In Mills, he may have found the man who can help him do just that. Expect Talbourdet to keep a steady course in the coming months as IMOCA prepares for the kind of changes which could make or break its long-term future.
10/ Sir Ben Ainslie Founder, Ben Ainslie Racing Perhaps the best sailor in the world, and certainly one of its most prominent ambassadors, Sir Ben Ainslie has ensured through his remarkable run of Olympic success that he is a critical figure in the promotion of sailing around the world. A fourth gold medal, at home, in 2012 was in all likelihood the end of a fabulous Olympic career, but Ainslie has already embarked on the next chapter of his sailing life. His Ben Ainslie Racing team, with corporate support from JP Morgan,
9/ Bruce Farr Co-founder, Farr Yacht Design In a sport where technology matters more than most, Bruce Farr has proved, over the years, to be one of its pre-eminent designers. His company Farr Yacht Design, co-founded with Russell Bowler in 1981, has been responsible for some of the world’s most famous yachts. It now comprises 18 designers. New Zealander Farr has been designing yachts himself since the 1970s and if his most dominant era
12 l BLACK BOOK 2013
was the 1980s, when virtually all of the major championships were won by Farr-designed vessels, then he has staged a recent resurgence, claiming the hugely lucrative contract to design the new generation Volvo Ocean Race boats. The deal ensures Farr will continue to shape, literally, professional sailing for some time to come. “He has been so influential in the industry for so long, I think he has to be on this list,” said one sailing insider of one of the sport’s true greats.
is a likely challenger for the next America’s Cup. Ainslie’s profile in Britain and beyond has the potential to do wonders not just for his own team but for the competition as a whole – to be frank, the America’s Cup needs him probably more than he needs it. His move from sailor to sailor/chief executive, although gradual, will also be fascinating to watch over the next few years. Ainslie has the potential to establish himself as one of global sailing’s most respected voices and powerful influencers.
8/ Grant Dalton Managing director, Emirates Team New Zealand Grant Dalton is very possibly New Zealand’s greatest-ever sportsman, a national hero who is now the leader of what is effectively the national America’s Cup team. The 56-year-old Aucklander is a veteran of five Whitbread/Volvo races, but has spent the last decade running Emirates Team New Zealand, a perennial America’s Cup challenger. “Grant’s been a shrewd operator,” said one figure from inside the industry. “What he’s done is no mean feat, raising all that money, partly from
the New Zealand government, partly from sponsors, without the backing of a private investor. He’s right up there.” A successful challenge for the America’s Cup – at the time of writing Emirates Team New Zealand had easily qualified for the challenger
selection series final against Luna Rossa Challenge – would propel Dalton to even greater levels of respect and responsibility. Many in the sport see him as the ideal man to get the Cup back on track. First, though, he has to earn the right to do that on the water.
7/ Sir Robin Knox-Johnston Founder, Clipper Round the World Race Nobody in the sailing community can tell a story like Sir Robin KnoxJohnston, which makes him just about the perfect frontman for one of the sport’s most professional and commercialised events. The first man to complete a solo circumnavigation of the world, in 1968, he remains one of sailing’s leading authorities – when he talks, the sport listens. Working closely with his very capable chief executive William Ward – the pair insist they’ve never had a cross word
6/ Mark Turner Executive chairman, OC Sport Mark Turner is one of sailing’s brightest commercial brains. As the executive face of the Extreme Sailing Series, he has pioneered stadium sailing – and made it work, with the series now in its seventh season and established as one of the elite competitions in the sport. Turner runs OC Group, the result of a merger between his OC Sport company and Patrice Clerc & Associés
14 l BLACK BOOK 2013
in 2012, and has been described by one colleague as “very astute”. Another sailing observer noted: “He has a very good understanding of how to drive costs down and increase the value – he’s been very, very shrewd in taking on the Extreme 40 concept.” He is now reaping the rewards: a long-term deal with Land Rover could be the start of a new commercial era for an already successful series.
– Knox-Johnston has developed the Clipper Race into the sport’s leading business-to-business platform, enticing corporate firms, tourist boards and even governments around the world to buy into the idea of amateur sailors taking on a round-the-world race. Knox-Johnston has a keen sense of how to make the race work commercially, but his priority, as he never fails to point out, is always the safety of the crews he trains up and puts into the race. He is the sailor’s sailor.
The Power 20 5/ Knut Frostad Chief executive, Volvo Ocean Race Knut Frostad is preparing for his third Volvo Ocean Race as chief executive of the event, but his history with the race dates back much further. He has competed four times in the gruelling round-the-world challenge, first in the 1993-94 edition. He also competed in two Olympic Games but his primary role now is behind a desk, where he dovetails an understanding of what works best for the sailors with a keen sense of how to drive value for sponsors. “Knut has always been passionate about the event and is not at all concerned about his own image, just the success of the Volvo Ocean Race,” said one keen observer. “That’s absolutely at the centre of his thinking in every decision he makes.” Only someone with as much experience as Frostad could oversee the fundamental changes to the Volvo Ocean Race’s business model – the new, one-design boat, currently in the works, might be his greatest legacy.
The Power 25
1
4/ Sir Keith Mills Founder, Open Sports Management An entrepreneur with a range of interests inside and outside sport, Sir Keith Mills has been an investor in sailing for well over a decade. As the owner of Alex Thomson Racing, the Hugo Boss-sponsored offshore racing team, for ten years, Mills has become well versed in the inner workings of the sport. He is now putting that to even greater effect, taking over the commercial rights to Open 60 racing through a new management company, Open Sports Management. His idea is simple: to add an international flavour to a class currently dominated by the French, with new events and teams to
follow over the next four years. Mills combines a love of sailing – his dream is to win the America’s Cup with a British boat and crew – with the kind of hard-headed commercial
approach the sport so desperately requires. “He firmly believes in the sport,” was how one member of the international sailing community put it. “You can’t underestimate him.”
BLACK BOOK 2013 l 15
3/ Russell Coutts Chief executive, Oracle Team USA As the chief executive of Larry Ellison’s Oracle team, 51-year-old Russell Coutts is one of the most influential figures in the modern-day America’s Cup. It will very likely be his counsel that helps Ellison decide the shape of future Cups, assuming Oracle, as expected, prevail in San Francisco this year. New Zealander Coutts is one of the most accomplished sailors in history: an Olympic gold medal and four America’s Cup wins are at the top of a glittering CV. He has been the Oracle team chief since 2007, Ellison’s navigator through the unique and often baffling politics and technicalities of the America’s Cup. Coutts knows the Cup – how it works and how to win it – perhaps better than anyone else and his will be one of the loudest voices when it comes to determining how to turn the competition into a commercially viable contest for the long term. He will no doubt have his own vision and, as rivals have discovered through the years, he does not like losing.
2/ Carlo Croce President, ISAF Carlo Croce is only the seventh president in the history of the International Sailing Federation, but he is the second Croce to hold the role – his father Beppe led the organisation between 1969 and 1986. The younger Croce has lived and breathed sailing from the age of six. He narrowly missed out on selection for the Italian team at the 1969 Olympic Games, but went on to compete at the 1972 and 1976 Games. A career in offshore racing followed, but in 1987 he became chief executive of Italia, an Italian America’s Cup challenger. He went on to manage two
16 l BLACK BOOK 2013
challenges by Prada-owned Luna Rossa, dovetailing those commitments with the presidency of the Yacht Club Italiano. He got the top job at ISAF in November 2012 and has spent his first year in charge developing his idea for a more commercially friendly annual World Cup Final and strengthening ISAF relationships across the whole sport, from the America’s Cup down. One admirer from within the sailing world puts it this way: “His pedigree is second to none. He’s been involved across all aspects of the sport, so he has a very good perspective, and I think he’s very conscious that ISAF needs to be a good governing body.”
The Power 20
The Power 25
1
1/ Larry Ellison Owner, Oracle Team USA Despite all its well-publicised problems, it is a fact that the America’s Cup remains the pinnacle of professional sailing, both for those inside the sport and for the casual observer with only the merest passing interest. With that in mind, the top of this list has to be reserved for the current custodian of the Auld Mug. That man, as it stands, is Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, a man who has devoted much of his time and many millions over the last decade to sailing and, ultimately, his deep desire to successfully challenge for and then defend the America’s Cup. When Ellison finally got his hands on the Cup, and all that comes with it, it was perhaps not in quite the way
he might have dreamt it. After years of struggle, the battle was won in the water but only after the competition had been decimated in the courts. Still, a win is a win, and Ellison soon set about putting his stamp on a competition that has a storied past but remains in dire need of a commercial overhaul. Once again, however, events haven’t transpired entirely as he would have wished: the giant AC72 catamarans designed to provide action-packed, spectacular racing the like of which the Cup had never seen before have ultimately proved too costly, reducing the number of challengers to his Oracle team to just three; ambitious financial targets for the event, despite the spectacular setting in San Francisco Bay, proved a step too far in a decidedly
shaky economic climate; and, by far most important, the death of British sailor Andrew Simpson in a training accident in May cast a dark shadow over an event designed to showcase sailing to a new audience, and brought to the fore the kind of technical and political arguments that the competition had been trying to avoid. Yet while there have been hitches, Ellison’s vision for the Cup, particularly the development of the America’s Cup World Series regattas, must be admired. The execution has been far from perfect but Ellison has at least put his money where his mouth is and it is for that reason he heads our list. He holds the Cup and in sailing, more than any other sport, holding the Cup really does equal power.
BLACK BOOK 2013 l 17
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2 / Events 20.
ISAF Meet the president: Carlo Croce
26.
America’s Cup The past, present and future of the Auld Mug
36.
Volvo Ocean Race A new chapter begins in 2014-15
46.
Clipper Sir Robin Knox-Johnston in conversation
54.
Extreme Sailing Mark Turner on building a sports property
64.
World Match Racing Tour The teams and venues under the microscope
72.
IMOCA Sir Keith Mills’ bold plans for offshore racing
78.
The Sports Consultancy Sailing’s commercial challenges outlined
20 l BLACK BOOK 2013
Events
ISAF: Beyond 2012
Italy’s Carlo Croce was elected as only the seventh president of the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) in November 2012, just months after his predecessor, Sweden’s Goran Petersson, had overseen a successful London 2012 Olympic regatta in Weymouth. The 67-year-old is the second Croce to become president of world sailing’s governing body – his father Beppe led the organisation between 1969 and 1986. Croce Jr first sailed when he was six and subsequently competed in races such as the Admiral’s Cup and the Fastnet Race as a professional. In 1987 he was hired to lead the Italian challenge for the America’s Cup. He went on to lead three Luna Rossa challenges for the competition, in 2001, 2004 and 2007. He also helped Giovanni Solidini raise sponsorship for a Volvo Ocean Race campaign. He remains the president of the Italian national federation, a role he took on in 2007. In this exclusive and wide-ranging interview for the Sailing Black Book, Croce reviews his first months in charge of ISAF and on the success of London 2012. He also presents his vision for the future of sailing – notably the creation of a new pillar in the global calendar, the Sailing World Cup – and assesses ISAF’s involvement in the elite professional side of the sport. Talk us through your feelings on being elected president last year? It was a great surprise for me and at the same time a great challenge and
honour. I am here only, as I stated in my very short electing period, to do something important for the sailors, to improve the potential of ISAF in the professional environment we now have. This is my challenge. It’s very interesting for me. I’ve been working very hard in these first months. I really have three or four goals and that’s it, I’m not going to say that we’ll do hundreds of things – we’ll do three or four, but these I want to achieve.
2 Events
In the aftermath of a hugely successful London 2012 regatta, sailing’s world governing body, ISAF, elected a new president. As he approaches the end of his first year in the top job, Carlo Croce examines the state of the sport and the challenges ahead.
Let’s run through those major goals – what’s your number one priority? The very first one is to organise the new Sailing World Cup for the Olympic classes. We will prepare a proposal for the November meeting of ISAF, but the vision is to organise what we saw in Weymouth [at the London 2012 Olympics]. I think that was a very important moment for our sport because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) are now pushing us and helping more. They can see what we’ve always been saying is necessary, which is for the sailing world to be easier to understand on television. Now it’s good, so we have to move on from this first step. It’s a long process but we want to do something already next year, if the council is in favour of this. We are thinking of a super, professionally organised final in November and we want to have in that final all the Olympic classes – they will sail, all of them, for one week. The last three days, which will be the super final and have fans, grandstands and television. It will most probably be in China. We had to find a partner that was willing to invest, risk and be a professional team with us and we have now decided we will go forward with Mark Turner of the Extreme 40s. We have met a few times so that we can prepare a proposal for
BLACK BOOK 2013 l 21
a bit like the class world championship: we don’t want to forget them and they will all be used as qualifiers for the final. Politically, we need to keep things like Santander absolutely alive – maybe it’s more a matter of how we name it – but, for us, the world champion is the guy who wins the super final. This is, of course, difficult to work out but with this there will be one every year and the [current] world championship is not every year. Speaking to the classes, we want to also make the class championship part of the qualification system. We don’t want to harm anybody. It’s not easy, but we will try.
Carlo Croce became the seventh president of the International Sailing Federation in November 2012
What are some of your other key goals?
the November meeting. The 2014 programme is only focused on the final but in the future we will also change the system of qualifying for the finals; all the events will have the same format. You can only sail if your federation sends you, because it’s a World Cup, we don’t want it to be for tourists. We will go up slowly in quality of competitors and we will give prize money in the super finals, even in the first year. What benefits will this new event bring? I think it will help the sailors because when they come to the finals, television will help them look for small, private sponsors who can boost them. We are
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helping them. If you look at the reality today of an Olympic sailor, he spends eight years of his life, comes to 30 and he has nothing – no job, not real money – and he’s put in all that effort. This is what we want to achieve, to help people make a living. This is my number one goal and I do hope we manage it. Just to clarify one point about the Sailing World Cup and the proposed super final, will that be a replacement for the existing world championships? The Santander world championships [next year] will go on. We are not competing with that. I think we will slowly make our point that the season will become the world championship. It’s
We have another idea we’re looking at, which is much more complicated, which is to find a way to do an offshore world championship. I was thinking of three groups of boats in a box rule, or at least two boats in a box rule – maybe 20 to 24, a medium size of 40 and then a big boat class. I have a sponsor who is willing to cover such an event and we will think of a venue for 2015, but this is politically much more complicated. In November we will discuss with our committees and councils about how we can get through it – it’s an old dream that many people have had. We’re not killing the designers, because with the box rule they still have a lot of room in which to work, and I think for competitors and media it will be better. I think we have also a very interesting idea, helped by the IOC, to help emerging nations. We want to help sailing to build up. The IOC will maybe help us in building a place where people can gather, people can teach in places where sailing is non-existent, so it’s easier for a young person to start up. It’s something that the IOC loves because of the universality, which is quite a good point in our programme now but has to improve. What’s your take on the governance of sailing and ISAF’s part in that?
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Sailing has always been a fragmented sport – how difficult has it been, as you’ve been putting together the plans for the Sailing World Cup, to bring all the different parts of the sport together? We’re working with an informal president’s forum. It is nothing that
exists on paper but I put around a table important professional people and I listened to their voices. These people are working either in the classes, coaches, sailors, judges. Within that we want to draw up a proposal upon which everybody agrees. An example: Victor Kovalenko, who has worked for everybody, is coming to our forums in a very enthusiastic way. We need to listen to everybody. It’s very fragmented, the classes of sailing, but the goal is the same for everybody: to promote sailing in a more up-todate way. If you watch other sports on TV, like tennis, each player above 90 in the world ranking makes more money than Sir Ben Ainslie – so there is something wrong, it cannot be like this. We are not stupid: sailing in Weymouth was fantastic to watch and we need to keep our goal of being friendly and easy for television, so the sailors become known as athletes and champions. In the end, everything is very fragmented but everyone wants to move forward and I think we’re trying to help this.
ISAF has traditionally been concerned mostly with the Olympic side of the sport and the wider participation side, but how do you see its role when it comes to the elite end of the sport and events such as the America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race? Would you like ISAF to become more involved in those events?
Croce has made it his number one priority to create a Sailing World Cup for the Olympic classes following the success of London 2012
100 per cent. I’ve been involved in these events, in the Volvo Ocean Race with an Italian challenge, so I know what it’s all about. The America’s Cup, the Volvo Ocean Race and all these round-the-world regattas do very, very well for sailing. I think we need to understand that Olympic sailors are necessary for these big events – we have seen that very many Olympic sailors are now aboard these regattas. Sailing needs the spectacular and promotional side of these big events, the group of about five or six events. I think even from their side, they are in favour of seeing ISAF as an active promoter of these events. If you look at what is going on with the America’s Cup, if
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I think we should really make governance easier, more flexible, lighter. The ISAF governance is very, very complicated. I went to a meeting in Lausanne of ASOIF, the summer Olympic Games federations. The day was totally focused on governance and we were really different from everybody else – a different system. We have more committees – there are far too many steps if you compare to a corporation like, say, the Ford Motor Company. Here we have to work hard and work out how we can keep people involved and interested but make the decision-making more flexible and faster. That is what I have on my table.
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you have an international organisation that can help keep the standard of the event as it should be I think it’s good for everyone in the end. It’s interesting for both sides. I think we have to be part of the action and I have such good relations with all of these people, I think it’s a case of sitting down and saying, ‘How can we both help each other?’ I think it’s very, very important. The Olympics, of course, is really our thing – it’s really the soul of ISAF – but these events are so popular, if you look at their numbers in social networks. If the Volvo Ocean Race has 200,000 people following it, we cannot really ignore it. We will make a special effort to be involved in them, not just as we do now with the rules and jury but also on the organisational side. It’s a legend that ISAF is not interested in these events. It’s simply that ISAF is so much involved in the Olympic organisation; it is so time-consuming that, actually, there is very little time to devote to other things, so people concentrate on what is a priority. We will do our best. You’ve been involved in America’s Cup campaigns. What have you made of the organisation and the well-publicised challenges that this edition of the Cup has faced and the America’s Cup World Series? The America’s Cup World Series is very good, I think, for the sport and is spectacular. For the America’s Cup itself, I’m afraid the cost has been so impressive with these boats and I think probably the size of the wing mast was too high. In the end it made it impossible for many countries to have a boat; in the end we are down to very basic numbers and it’s very far from what was promised at the beginning. The cost made that impossible. I think there should be a budget cap and I think things should be made simpler. I think there should be a big effort to make it like it was in Valencia. The racing itself is not, I think, as exciting as it was with the old match race boats so I think we should really look into it
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and see if we can… the America’s Cup is made on research and progress, but I think it went a little bit too far. Events such as Extreme Sailing have pioneered stadium sailing – how important a concept is that for the long-term future of the sport? We spoke with Mark Turner about this and in fact we are thinking about, in the week where we’ll have the super finals, having the Extreme 40s and maybe have the Olympic sailors give them a try and see how it goes. It’s a show. But I think we should not lose the soul of our sport, which is more tactical. I think we should make a compromise somewhere – maybe keep the last 300 metres [of a race] within the stands. But the regatta has to be a regatta. An extremely short course is maybe a bit too much of a show. I think we should keep our soul – we want to keep the good sailor in a position to demonstrate he is the best. Let’s say the races in Weymouth were the highest point where you can go for the show, no more than that. In Weymouth it was about sailing but we have to be careful. When it comes to the Olympics we need to have a course that makes the difference between a good and a less good sailor. In the Extreme 40s it’s perfect but we have to keep an eye on not doing exactly the same for the Olympic classes. So there is a trade-off to be made between the show and sporting authenticity?
Then there are the Youth Olympic Games. The ladder is very much in front of a sailor, he knows how it goes up so we don’t have to do much. They understand where they’re going and that is very important. From then on, you can go up to the Olympics through the Sailing World Cup and the Olympic Games. There’s not much I can do there, I think it’s already good. Where does ISAF generate its revenues at the moment? We get most of our money from the IOC. After the Olympics we were upgraded in terms of the financial contribution it makes, from UK£8 million to UK£14 million for the next four years. Plus we get some minor revenues from events like the America’s Cup – they pay some fees – and we have a lot of programmes where we send people to teach sailing and we get fees from the countries. What is really lacking completely is sponsors. All my telephone calls are concentrated on that fact. If we organise the Sailing World Cup as we are saying, I am 100 per cent sure we will get sponsors – already we have people knocking on our door. If the World Cup becomes an event where a global sponsor can invest a huge amount of money, part of the money will go into the ISAF bank and be invested in our emerging nations programme. It is incredible that today ISAF has no sponsor income. It’s unbelievable. But, as I say, Weymouth on television I think made a difference and it will, I trust, be better in the future.
Absolutely correct. To what extent is it ISAF’s role to link the two sides of the sport – mass participation on one side, the major professional events on the other – for the overall good of the sport? What ISAF has been doing is good. Adding the emerging nations is step number one. After that step, there are youth sailing world championships.
Finally, when you finish the end of your first term as president what achievements will make you think, yes, I’ve been successful? I have these plans. If I achieve three of them I would say I’m happy about the work I’ve been doing. If I achieve two, I will be not completely happy. This is very clear. We want to achieve 75 per cent of what we are thinking.
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The America’s Cup The past The America’s Cup has often been described as Formula One on water and for good reason. It is sailing’s most famous and valuable event, a high-wealth, high-technology
team competition which attracts the world’s top sailors and holds an almost magnetic attraction for the entrepreneur with sea legs. Over the years, however, its commercial development has lagged somewhat, a result of its complexity and the
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Bound by its heritage and attempting to transition into something that will secure its long-term future, the America’s Cup, fought for in San Francisco this summer, has reached a critical moment in its history.
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The Auld Mug is thought to be the oldest sporting trophy in the world but making long-term plans for the America’s Cup has proved difficult
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binding nature of history on its format. At the same time, the America’s Cup has been attempting the transition from an elite amateur contest to a commercially driven, modern sports property. That transition is far from complete and the process to date has been far from seamless. The America’s Cup is the oldest sporting trophy in the world. The Auld Mug, as it has become known, was struck in 1848 and contested for the first time in a 16-yacht race around the Isle of Wight in August 1851. A schooner boat called America won the race and the winning crew subsequently donated the trophy, through a document known as the Deed of Gift, to the New York Yacht Club so it could organise challenge races with the trophy, with the right to stage the next event as the prize. Remarkably, however, the New York Yacht Club retained possession of the trophy and the event until 1983, seeing off every challenge to hold The Auld Mug for 132 years – a sporting record. Over time, the trophy and the event became known as the America’s Cup, after its first winner. In 1983 an Australian challenger, Australia II led by Alan Bond, which applied state of the art new technology to its boat, changed the competition forever by breaking the American run to take the Cup to the southern hemisphere for the first time. It probably saved the event, which was by now gaining commercial appeal, corporate support from Louis Vuitton and more challenging teams. In 1987 the Cup returned to the USA, thanks to Dennis Conner’s Stars and Stripes ’87 team, and there it stayed until New Zealand’s Black Magic boat, led by Sir Michael Fay, successfully challenged in 1995. The Cup was successfully defended by Team New Zealand, now led by the legendary Sir Peter Blake, in Auckland in 2000. However, the home team was then beaten in 2003 when Alinghi, the multi-million dollar baby of Swiss pharmaceutical entrepreneur and
sailor Ernesto Bertarelli, challenged successfully at the first attempt to become the first European team to win the Cup. Bertarelli and Alinghi took the competition to a purpose-built €500 million port in Valencia, Spain and organised the most commercially successful America’s Cup yet in 2007, attracting 11 challengers and generating sizeable revenues which saw a surplus of €66 million distributed amongst the competitors. Team budgets were higher than ever, too, reportedly reaching €100 million for the likes of Alinghi and key challengers from New Zealand, Larry Ellison’s BMW Oracle Racing and Italy’s Pradabacked Luna Rossa. For the first time, there also seemed to be a recognition amongst Cup stakeholders that a longer-term commercial vision was required, in spite of the longstanding rule that the winner earns the right to take control of the event. Alinghi successfully defended the trophy, but any commercial momentum gained was soon lost when the Cup was engulfed by a costly, interminable legal battle between Bertarelli and Ellison, the American billionaire who took
umbrage at what he saw as the Swiss team’s attempt to skew the rules in its own favour by selecting a pliable yacht club from Spain as the Challenger of Record – the term used for the team selected to represent the challengers’ position in rules discussions with the defender. The legal squabbles boiled down to a head-to-head battle on the water between Ellison’s Oracle and Alinghi in 2010 – all other potential challengers effectively excluded by the legalese – which the Americans won. Ellison finally had the Cup in his hands and has been working since then to shape a new era for the competition in San Francisco, with an eye on both a successful defence and creating a more regular diet of America’s Cup on-water action during the long periods between Cup matches. The 34th Cup, in September, was to be the fruit of those labours. In recent years, in particular, the America’s Cup has increasingly found itself hamstrung by its own history, most crucially the binding rule that the winner gets not only to keep the Cup but create the rules, format and commercial structure of its defence. It is a statute which means no Cup stakeholder has been able to plan for anything other than the short term, in the knowledge that everything from location to type of boat could change depending on who wins. On the flip side is the knowledge that victory offers the opportunity to mould the next event, a unique proposition which has made the Cup so intoxicating for billionaire entrepreneurs such as Patrizio Bertelli, Bertarelli and the current custodian, Ellison. Throw into the mix a competitive group of challengers led by a Challenger of Record, a yacht club designated to convey the views of the challenging teams and, in theory at least, try to prevent the defending team shifting the format too far in its own favour, and there is a ready-made recipe for politics, intrigue and controversy. “It is unique in that there’s no organising committee,” said Tom
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The present Larry Ellison’s vision for the America’s Cup, once he’d done the hard bit and got his hands on the competition, was bold. Based in San Francisco, his plan was for a bigger, faster, more actionpacked contest on the water, designed in part at least to attract a new breed of
The America’s Cup: 2003-2013 2003 - 31st America’s Cup Venue: Auckland Defender: Team New Zealand Challengers (9): Alinghi, GBR Challenge, Le Defi Areva, Mascalzone Latino, OneWorld, Oracle BMW Racing, Prada Challenge, Team Dennis Connor, Victory Challenge
Larry Ellison (below) has sought to create a coherent commercial strategy for the America’s Cup since winning it in 2010 but his plans faltered
2007 - 32nd America’s Cup Venue: Valencia
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Defender: Alinghi Challengers (11): Emirates Team New Zealand, BMW Oracle Racing, Luna Rossa Challenge, Desafio Espanol 2007, Victory Challenge, Mascalzone Latino - Capitalia Team, Team Shosholoza, Areva Challenge, +39, United Internet Team Germany, China Team
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Ehman, an America’s Cup veteran, outlining the fundamentals which guide the competition way back in 2007. “There’s no FIA, no International Olympic Committee, there’s no Football Association. Here, the winner gets to make some of the decisions but only to the extent that they can get the other challengers to agree with their decision. I liken it to an adult’s version of the child’s game King of The Mountain. The defender gets to decide where the sand pile is, where you’re going to do the climb and some of the ground rules and after that the defender sits up there at the top of the pile and the challengers are all fighting. “At first they’re helping each other get up the pile and after they reach a certain level you’re starting to grab at each other and get ahead of each other, and the closer you get to the top the defender starts to see who the best teams are and starts to pour hot tar, throwing rocks and pushing sand in your face. It’s more like the real business world because there’s some basic governmental structure that is put in place by this old piece of paper called the Deed of Gift but after that it’s an arm-wrestle. “There’s nothing to stop them from doing whatever they want,” Ehman added. “They can create a central organising committee, they could keep the same one or they could start from scratch. They can do whatever they want. That’s part of the problem for the America’s Cup but it’s also part of the charm and the great attraction. That’s why people work so hard to win it, because they know they will get to put their stamp on the event.”
2010 - 33rd America’s Cup Venue: Valencia Defender: Alinghi Challengers (1): BMW Oracle Racing 2013 - 34th America’s Cup Venue: San Francisco Defender: Oracle Team USA Challengers (3): Emirates Team New Zealand, Luna Rossa Challenge, Artemis Racing
fans. Beyond the challenger selection series, a new property, the America’s Cup World Series, was also unveiled, a Grand Prix-style series of events designed to provide a greater narrative and a more economically viable platform for competing teams in the long periods between America’s Cups. The results, however, have been less than entirely positive: the spiralling costs of the new breed of AC72 boats have limited the number of challengers – the final tally dwindling down to three – as, according to one interested party, has the governance of the American custodians. British entrepreneur Sir Keith Mills founded Team Origin off the back of the 32nd America’s Cup in Valencia in 2007. Positioning it as a proud British challenger for the Cup, Mills decided to invest based on what he saw in Spain. “For the first time I saw a much more viable America’s Cup,” he recalls, “with very close racing,
millions of people going through the America’s Cup village, media supported – all elements that said to me: ‘The America’s Cup has come of age.’ That combined with the fact we had started to breed extraordinary sailing talent like Ben Ainslie, Iain Percy and, very sadly, Andrew Simpson, meant I
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Oracle Team USA has held the America’s Cup since beating Alinghi in the 33rd edition, but the spiralling cost of the giant AC72 boats in which it is defending its title has kept challengers away
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could build the nucleus of a team, a homegrown team, and participate in an event that had come of age. “Very sadly, after I’d put the team together the legal dispute started and that resulted in the America’s Cup ending up in the hands of the Americans, the Oracle team. What was very disappointing to me was the promises that were made by Oracle, by Russell Coutts and Larry Ellison, of what they would do with the America’s Cup if they became the defender of it, then didn’t materialise. “They painted a picture to me, and indeed to many other teams, from France, Germany, Spain, that the America’s Cup now needs to move into an NBA or Premier League-type model. We’d create an independent entity, owned by the teams, with independent management and we’d create commercially viable events that were close and exciting and would attract lots of teams of different nationalities. We set up something called the World Sailing Teams Association (WSTA) and we all subscribed €1 million into this company – this was going to be the company that was going to be the manager of the event, the NBA of the America’s Cup. All of which made a lot of sense to me, which is why I kept Team Origin going for three years even when they were in courts. “What actually happened was that once Oracle got the America’s Cup and was the defender of the America’s Cup, all of those plans went out of the window. The WSTA, they weren’t interested in and it got disbanded. The independent event management company didn’t happen. The ‘let’s go for lots of teams and a commercially viable sport’ didn’t happen.” The initial challenger series events, traditionally sponsored by Louis Vuitton, were a shadow of what Ellison and the organisers of the 34th Cup desired this summer. With Oracle waiting in the wings and the Swedish Artemis entry, run by billionaire Torbjörn Törnqvist, substantially
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Effectively a national team, Emirates Team New Zealand was one of only three challengers to the holders in the 34th Cup
delayed following the death of British sailor Andrew Simpson in a training accident on San Francisco Bay in May, only two challengers had taken to the water in competition as July turned to August. Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa Challenge, both of which became embroiled in a squabble over rules implemented as part of the safety overhaul which followed Simpson’s death, have raced each other; ludicrously each has also raced itself, so short is the competition of challengers. Mills, for one, is unimpressed. “What we’ve ended up with is a pretty grotesque – I don’t think it’s even a sport now – exhibition dominated by a couple of billionaires,” he says, clearly frustrated with the way a competition he would love to have been part of has been tarnished. “Certainly, the most farcical and disappointing part of the America’s Cup was watching Team New Zealand and Prada sailing up and down on their own – that is not sport. The America’s Cup is currently not a sport and until it becomes a sport it won’t be viable or successful.
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“I would love there to be a viable America’s Cup that a British team, a Spanish team, a French team could all compete in. I don’t know what Larry Ellison, if he wins, or Grant Dalton, if Team New Zealand won, would do and I guess we’ll have to wait until the end of September to find out. I just don’t know but I feel very sad for our sport that essentially the pinnacle of our sport is now... I speak to a lot of people in sport and people are laughing at it, ridiculing it. How can you have a sport with one competitor? If Tottenham Hotspur turned out on the pitch with no other team to play it would be a joke, and it is a joke and that’s a shame.”
The future Long-term predictions about the future of the America’s Cup are notoriously difficult given the historic conventions by which it is governed. But what is clear is that there is a move towards creating a series to sustain the America’s Cup community in
between Cup matches. The America’s Cup World Series may currently be an imperfect solution, but it is, according to some experts, a clear move in the right direction. “I think what’s interesting about the America’s Cup World Series is it probably shows how they’ve got their changes to class and format right,” ventures The Sports Consultancy’s Angus Buchanan. While the AC72 giants have generally been considered a step too far, the smaller AC45s used in the World Series have proved popular and produced competitive racing. “All of the innovations – new production with live inline graphics – were excellent,” Buchanan continues. “The changes to make it a sharper, shorter racing format was absolutely correct. The focus on stadium sailing is trying to take it to places where the spectators get closer to the action. And also, probably, if you look at the number of teams – there were, I think, eight competing at the height of the America’s Cup World Series – shows you how successful the format can
Events Expert insight: The Sports Consultancy’s Angus Buchanan and Robert Datnow on the America’s Cup
What have you made of the America’s Cup World Series from a commercial standpoint? Buchanan: In terms of the ACWS itself, I think that absolutely the America’s Cup, if it continues to be a quadrennial or triennial event, needs to fill the period in between America’s Cups with close, competitive action and with the ability for sponsors and teams to compete annually towards an America’s Cup trophy, I think that’s a very good thing. I think a global economic climate coincided with their ambitions to launch a vibrant competition and they didn’t manage to achieve the number of venues they set out to. But the potential is definitely there and it’s a very good concept – it takes it away from that big set piece every three years. Should any future iteration of the America’s Cup World Series be somehow separated from the closely bound by history America’s Cup? And if so, how viable is that? Datnow: You can’t get away from needing a single challenger and you wouldn’t want to, it’s part of the attraction of the event – a single challenger takes on the defender. Any sporting event has to be meaningful, for competitors, for spectators, for host cities and for participating sponsors, but I think
Buchanan: It has to matter. It can matter but that will take time, to build the America’s Cup World Series brand. I think you would fairly say, if you are involved in sport event management and marketing, that that takes time. What would be nice would be if it were slightly separated from the America’s Cup to enable someone to grow that as a franchise and a brand so that, over a period of five or ten years, it increases its sporting significance so it matters in its own right rather than being an adjunct to the America’s Cup brand and that being why it matters. I think it does have the potential and the opportunity to do that and it will probably depend on the succession, if there is one, from Oracle to the next Oracle team managing it or a new defender. It’s very difficult, not impossible, to separate the two. Datnow: I think there are ways of making a World Series matter – a standalone trophy – but where the people and national team matters, where you’re following characters competing against each other, you’ll build a fanbase. There’ll be a way of constructing the format of that event so that not only does the competition matter in itself but that the points are maybe carried forward into a challenger selection series, so it has some relevance to the America’s Cup itself. All those things matter, to spectators and the sailors. Amongst the criticism, how much admiration should people have for Larry Ellison’s global vision, this sense he’s had of where the Cup should go?
Buchanan: I think a lot of people recognise that in terms of what they did it was very innovative, was quite disruptive, it shook up the industry and I think that they haven’t achieved what they wanted to in terms of number of competitive entries and some of that, I think they would say, is down to a cost of competitive entry increase and that coincided with the global economic downturn. It’s fair to say that’s led to a shortfall on their projected number of competitors. The America’s Cup itself has only ever come down to a competition between two boats and it’s actually only in the 80s that it extended to other challengers. I think it will largely come down to the quality of competition in San Francisco and they are incredible boats and then probably how they build on that over the course of the next cycle – and clearly we don’t yet know who will be custodians of the next club, taking it forward for its next cycle. There are clear positives from what they’ve done in San Francisco; it’s to be hoped some of the positives will be capitalised on, no matter who is taking the America’s Cup forward. There are some clear game-changers with this America’s Cup, be it the media coverage, technological values they’ve brought to the sport, speed of the action, the shorter, sharper format, the fact we’re looking at stadium sailing and the possibility of gate receipts for stadium sailing. It’s been pretty spectacular in that respect, and I think we’ve seen consumer brands attracted to the America’s Cup for the first time in a long time – Red Bull, for example, carving out its own niche with the Youth America’s Cup. I think there have been pretty significant gains and I hope they’re capitalised on through the next America’s Cup.
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you can still have a meaningful World Series in the same way you can have a World Championships in Athletics, the Diamond League and the Olympic Games.
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Prada-backed Luna Rossa Challenge made a fourth attempt in San Francisco to win the Louis Vuitton Cup, taking on Emirates Team New Zealand for the right to compete for the America’s Cup itself
and should be in the future, for the America’s Cup and the World Series. “Russell Coutts [Oracle chief executive] and Stephen Barclay [America’s Cup Event Authority chief executive], I think, recognise the change to the class of boats, whilst needed and whilst creating a very exciting boat in terms of the 72, has been, they would say, unsustainably expensive, whereas the AC45s were one design and were much cheaper for the teams to campaign in. If you see there are eight boats competing in that series of events and if you said that was for the America’s Cup itself there would be at least a 50 per cent uplift, in terms of the value of that to the sponsors, you can start to see the value of that to the America’s Cup. If you had removed what was probably unforeseeable at the time, which was a clash of a significantly increased
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budget in terms of design and build of the 72s plus the downturn in the global environment, I think the ACWS shows you the potential of what the America’s Cup could and can achieve.” Sports industry veteran Harvey Schiller, who is the vice chair of the America’s Cup 2013 Advisory Board, predicts that the future of the World Series is franchise-based. He says: “What has happened to the Cup series is that it used to be the global event but over time, because of other things that have occurred and the competition in sports itself, it hasn’t got the same kind of attention. We think, like any other event, you have to have something leading into it. With the World Series the whole idea is to have events that will occur and what we’re looking at is getting a league. The league would have franchises and the
franchises would compete on a global basis. The league would be much like a single-entity league like MLS, in that you could have owners owning more than one franchise. “It’s a matter of making sure the format’s there, keeping the sailors involved, keeping the competition enclosed, fixing costs so it doesn’t get out of hand, which is really important, and to have something that has a continuum,” he continues. “One-off events are OK, but just that. Even in the Olympics, if you think about it, all the sports have everything they do leading into it. There isn’t anything you’d consider to be a real championship that doesn’t have something leading into it. “This, because of the way it was generated to begin with, was a single event and it had its time but it needs to be reformatted.”
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Volvo Ocean Race The Volvo Ocean Race is switching to a onemake format for its 2014-15 edition in a bid to cut costs for sponsors and build its fleet size
The 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race will mark the start of a new chapter for one of sailing’s most famous endurance events, with a new one-design boat poised to debut. More competitive racing and cost savings are the aim. The next Volvo Ocean Race begins towards the end of 2014 and will mark a new era for a round-the-world race first run, as The Whitbread Round the World Race, in 1973. The organisers, based in Alicante, are currently in the midst of receiving the first of a new generation of boats, part of a fundamental shift in the business model of one of sailing’s marquee races. Whereas previously, competing teams have designed and built their own boats to the regulations set by race organisers, the 2014-15 edition will see a one-design boat raced by all. The switch to a single model is based on a desire to broaden the Volvo Ocean Race platform by keeping spiralling costs in check. The ultimate goal is to increase the size of the fleet – six boats took part in 2011-12 – while also maintaining the quality of competition. In short, the new boat will be cheaper, safer and at least as competitive. While budgets for the last edition of the race were reaching up to €30 million, this time round it may be possible to mount a competitive campaign for 50 per cent less. “The real business case behind it is not really about one-design or open class racing or anything like that,” explained Norway’s Knut Frostad, who sailed in the Volvo Ocean Race four times and is preparing for his third edition as chief executive of the organisation. Interviewed in June, he added: “We identified very early that it’s going to be a tough sponsorship market. There was very little cost-control in our event. We needed to put in measures and find
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a way to reduce the cost base without reducing the return on investment, in fact increasing the return on investment, for sponsors. The key for us was going through our whole event and seeing how we could re-scope it so that it had more value for sponsors, for less cost. “Obviously there’s lots of elements you can spend money on that do not necessarily bring any value to the event or the sponsor and that’s what we really focused on. If you build 25 carbon rudders that you are developing and testing, does that really bring more value to the sponsor? The answer was pretty clearly no. At the same time, the sponsors have some value from the fact this is the pinnacle of offshore racing in sailing and that the boats are fast, deemed as high technology and developed. “The question was: how you can achieve that without each individual team spending money on R&D? Different to motor racing and cars, with Formula One as an example, there’s no doubt the technology department in Formula One does benefit, to some extent at least, the car manufacturers: Mercedes is happy to spend quite a lot of money on Formula One because some of the technology can clearly be linked to and associated with their products and brands. If you’re an insurance company or a shoe company, does producing carbon rudders really benefit your business? It’s very difficult to argue for that. As our sport is not driven by the boating industry, we are driven by pure commercial sponsorship. We have to make that strategic decision and shift the focus.”
The Volvo Ocean 65 The first of the new generation of boats, known as the Volvo Ocean 65, was due to be delivered in September, with another to follow every second month after that. The boats have been
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Knut Frostad competed in the Volvo Ocean Race four times and is preparing for his third edition as chief executive of the event
constructed by a consortium of four manufacturers: Green Marine from the UK, Swiss firm Decision, France’s Multiplast, and Persico from Italy. The boats, which have had a greater safety margin built into them ahead of what is always an unpredictable and arduous journey, will be used for this edition and the next in 2017-18, a fact which race organisers are hoping will entice teams to return. “All the boats we’ve used in the past were only constructed for one event and basically they became obsolete after that one event because they were not strong enough and also because they wouldn’t be fast enough,” said Frostad. “The fact you can now spread the cost over two events but continue to race in the same boats, as a sponsor you would have a very, very low cost base when you start the second event. “In the last three events we have seen more teams starting to commit to two events. Telefonica has done three, Abu Dhabi has done two, Puma did two, Ericsson did two. More teams are doing multiple events, which is a good sign. I think the challenge for us is always going to be that we’re such a long event. It takes one year and there’s three years between each start. For a sponsor to think that long-term is not so common. The challenge we have in the sport in general is we are
Teams SCA As early as August 2012, global hygiene product manufacturer SCA, the owner of brands such as TENA, Tork, Tempo, Saba and Libero, confirmed it would fund an entry in the 2014-15 race. The entry will feature an entirely female crew, with the team itself run by Atlant Ocean Racing, which has two previous Volvo Ocean Race victories to its name. SCA’s team is headed up by Richard Brisius, who has twice competed in the race.
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not predictable, so the sponsors didn’t know what the route’s going to be, what’s going to happen, when and with what kind of boats or what the budget’s going to be. Now we can give much, much more sustainability and assurance on this – we have already contracted more than 50 per cent of the ports for the 17-18 race. That assurance is something our sport has not been good at – the America’s Cup is another example, where a sponsor doesn’t even know when or how or who it’s going to be in the next years. We need to overcome that so creating sustainability has been a very important objective for us, not only where we’re going and when but what the cost base is. With the new boat, we can create a lot of assurance.
“The other part for us,” Frostad added, “is working with the teams, and the teams and their funding processes are something we take part directly in, much more than we’ve ever done before. We have discovered over the years that when a team is securing its funding and negotiating contracts with its sponsors, we actually bring a big piece to the table. Although the sponsors buy a team and the team is responsible for the return on investment, we are also delivering a substantial part of the return for a sponsor as the event organiser. We guarantee the TV production, TV distribution, we look after the hospitality at ports, organise a lot of sponsor events. We are much more engaged now with the team-sponsor negotiations than we’ve ever been before.”
“They have a very specific objective and market,” said Knut Frostad. “They are targeting a female audience. It is something we have worked really hard to achieve because we want to see female teams back in the race – it brings another dimension, which is very important for the sport in general. “They have a long-term project and they started early, way earlier than anyone else, to make the team competitive, which is a positive, because it gives them a competitive chance to do well. Although it’s a Swedish company and group it’s very much a global project, with global reach.”
Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing The 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race will be the second for Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing team. Its participation in this edition was confirmed in February. The team, which became the first Arabian entry in the race in 2011-12, will be skippered by double Olympic medallist Ian Walker. The team, however, is only one third of Abu Dhabi’s involvement in the event: it also hosts a stopover and is a sponsor of the race. “It’s driven much more towards tourism and building the Abu Dhabi brand,” Frostad explained. “It’s a team and sponsor we worked very successfully
Events Hygiene product brand SCA is backing an allfemale entry, one which Frostad expects to be “competitive”, in the 2014-15 race
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with in the last event. In this sport you learn and develop by participating more long-term and I’m expecting to see Abu Dhabi stepping up quite a lot from the last race in general performance and the way to activate the event; they’re learning more how to do it, how the race works and what the big assets you can really activate are. I think Abu Dhabi will have a great event this time.”
team or crew remain sketchy for now. “They are very early in their process so there’s not too much to say at the moment,” said Frostad. “We’re not as involved at the moment as we are with the others.” The Pernambuco boat will be the first Brazilian entry in the round-the-world event since Brasil 1 competed in the 2005-06 edition.
And the rest? Pernambuco/Brazil As part of January’s announcement confirming Recife would be one of the stopovers for the next edition of the Volvo Ocean Race, the race organisers confirmed that the Brazilian state of Pernambuco would enter a team. Details on the precise make-up of the
The Volvo Ocean Race expects to be able to announce more teams in the coming months. It is already in active discussions with several interested parties, according to Knut Frostad. “The ones we work with are either teams from the previous event that are active in the sport and have a regular
commercial team set-up, or they could be a sponsor,” he said. “It could also be a new team that has a sponsor they are working with or they may have a history as a team before. Obviously we know that not all of them will make it. But we have a good group – and one of the reasons, I believe, is that costs for teams have dropped significantly for the last event.” One team which will not be returning is Puma Ocean Racing, following its parent company’s decision to jettison its sailing programme in the wake of poor financial results. Frostad was philosophical when asked for his reaction. “When you look at these decisions you have to look at why it is happening,” he said. “Is it because of sailing or is it because of Puma’s
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Alicante (above) has been the home of the Volvo Ocean Race organisers since 2009 and will host the start of the 2014-15 edition, while Itajaí (below) will be one of two Brazilian stops
situation? With Puma, we had two great events – they were in the race for as much as five years, nearly six. That’s a long time to be involved in an event like this. There’s no doubt that the financial status of a company has an impact on its
sponsorship and that’s a general [rule] that everyone has to live with. We had a great experience with Puma; it was a very interesting development for us because it also opened the eyes of all the consumer brands about getting into our event –
we had previously been stronger in the B2B sector than with consumer brands. It was a good experience for us, we would obviously have liked to see Puma continuing but we also understand why they decided not to continue.”
in an attractive destination at the time when we start. It’s about the fact we start late in the autumn in Europe, and Spain in September and October has a fantastic climate. The airport is brand new and well connected so it’s not difficult for us to have a lot of corporate clients – we had more than 3,000 at the start last time. It’s quite affordable there so the model works for us, in particular in difficult times.”
twice during the 2014-15 event. The race is scheduled to arrive in Recife in November 2014 before Itajaí hosts the race for the second time in April 2015. “Brazil in general is important to us,” Frostad explained. “People tend to focus on the cities where they think there is going to be a lot of economy coming but you have to look at the important markets for any sponsor. We think about that and we also have a sailing route to follow as well; we have to create an attractive sport proposition for the sailors. Brazil works really, really well for us – there’s a strong interest
Venues Around the world in ten stops The 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race will cover 39,895 nautical miles (45,910 miles). It will begin in Alicante, where the race organising team is based, on 4th October 2014, and conclude at the end of June the following year in Sweden, the home of Volvo.
Alicante, Spain “Alicante and Spain have been a good experience for us,” said Knut Frostad, when asked about the city and country that the Volvo Ocean Race has called home since the May 2009 announcement that the race headquarters would move from Southampton. The deal also confirmed Alicante as the starting point for three editions of the race: 2011-12, 2014-15 and 2017-18. “From the outside it looks like Spain is in a difficult situation and they clearly are,” added Frostad, “as are many other European countries as well, but we’ve had a very strong partnership with the government in Spain. What we’ve been able to do is demonstrate we have a serious economic impact for them, so it’s really worth the investment from Spain. It’s been interesting for us because we came to a city which didn’t have any major sports events and we are number one in the city and are a very big focus for them. We had a good chance here to be successful and we’ve now expanded, opened a museum and are holding more and more events in the city. “It was also important for us to be
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Recife and Itajaí, Brazil The Volvo Ocean Race will visit Brazil
Monster Project is a 2nd Generation Volvo Open 70 designed by Rob Humphreys, originally as the Team Russia ‘Kosatka’ entry to the 2008 Volvo Ocean Race. Now operated by The Project Racing Team she has undergone a year-long refit and is now available for global race charter and adventure sailing, both inshore and offshore. Whether it’s cruising, corporate days, adventure sailing or competitive racing, we can create a charter package that suits you. The boat is very avant-garde in her design.“The Team Russia VO70 is characterised by her aggressive spray rails, bluff bow and low chines. She has shown evidence of real pace, clocking numerous 500nmplus 24-hour runs on Legs 1 & 2 as well as a 300nm-plus run in 13 hours during qualifying.” – Humphreys Yacht Design The skipper Andy Budgen is a successful 49er, 18ft skiff and international moth sailor who also has extensive yacht racing experience, including the team’s previous yacht ‘V Project’ – a Volvo Open 60. Over the course of 2013/2014 season Monster Project will be heading to the Mediterranean and Caribbean, before returning to the UK in early June in preparation for the Round Britain & Ireland Race.
Andy Budgen - contact@volvo70charter.co.uk - +44 (0) 78 6658 9824 - www.volvo70charter.co.uk
The New Zealand city of Auckland (above) is a traditional Volvo Ocean Race stopover while the Chinese port of Sanya (below) is on the route for the second time
in Brazil for events, the media follows it well and it’s a very important market now for a lot of the companies we work with.”
Sanya, China The Chinese port city of Sanya, situated on the south tip of Hainan island, made its debut on the Volvo Ocean Race route in the 2011-12 race, and will return as the fourth stopover point on the next event. “In many ways Sanya proved to be the best-kept secret in sailing,” said Frostad as its return was confirmed in March. It will be the race’s third visit to China, after Qingdao hosted a stopover in 2008-09. “Obviously it takes time in China to build the sport,” Frostad explained. “Not only are we involved with the race, we are involved in building sailing in China and it’s going really well. They have done well on an Olympic level now and the infrastructure for the sport is being developed really quickly. “There’s a lot of marinas being built in good locations. Sanya has worked very well for us. We had the biggest
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sponsorship and corporate numbers we’ve ever had, more than 7,000 for the start weekend. It’s a very, very popular destination – kind of the San Tropez of China.”
Auckland, New Zealand If the Volvo Ocean Race seeks out commercially attractive venues, it also makes sure that sailing heritage is properly factored into its route. Auckland is a prime example of that
tradition and history. “We hadn’t been in New Zealand for quite a few years and when we came back it was exactly like it used to be,” reported Frostad of the 2011-12 experience. “There was enormous interest. Auckland provides a lot for us. It’s not the world’s biggest market but there’s a huge and genuine following for the event. “The race boating industry is also very strong in New Zealand so it’s a great location for us to service logistics and maintainers of our boats. It also
Events 2014-15 Venues Alicante, Spain: In-Port Race: October 4, 2014 Leg Start: October 11, 2014 Recife, Brazil: In-Port Race: November 8, 2014 Leg Start: November 9, 2014
The Portuguese capital of Lisbon is described by Frostad as a “great” venue for the Volvo Ocean Race and will once again welcome the fleet back to Europe
Abu Dhabi, UAE: In-Port Race: January 2, 2015 Leg Start: January 3, 2015
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helps us activate the Australian market, so we have a lot of guests coming over. When you create the route for this event you have to balance heritage, history, sailing interest as well as commercial interest. It’s very much the same in any sport: they have to keep Monte Carlo in Formula One, even if it’s tempting to go for commercial gains in the Middle East or so-called new markets. It’s the same for us and Auckland is very much the history and heritage.”
Newport, USA While the Volvo Ocean Race may be visiting Newport for the first time, the city is no stranger to sailing. Indeed, it is probably the USA’s most famous sailing venue having hosted every America’s Cup between 1930 and 1983. “It has the most history,” Frostad said. “We are going there for that reason.” However, the commercial opportunities of taking the race to the east coast of the United States were also a factor. “Newport is very well located,” Frostad explained. “New York, Boston and Washington DC are all very close – you reach a very attractive part of the US. It’s a small city which loves sailing and you can dominate in a small city like that, much more than being one of several major events.”
Lisbon, Portugal The Portuguese capital Lisbon is
described by Frostad as a “great” venue for the Volvo Ocean Race, thanks in no small part to its magnificent waterfront. “It’s right in the heart of the city and we can race there,” he said, referring to the in-port racing which forms a spectacular part of any stopover in the race. “The government and partners we work with really appreciate and do the event very well. It’s located on the waterfront and that’s a challenge for us because waterfronts are very quickly being developed around the world, so to find somewhere where you have the space we need to do our event well – about 20,000 square metres on land – is sometimes quite challenging because many of the ports are changing very quickly from commercial ports to property development.” The race visited Lisbon last time round and the city will again mark the fleet’s return to Europe in the 2014-15 edition.
Lorient, France and Gothenburg, Sweden Lorient, which lies on France’s west coast, was confirmed in April as the penultimate stop on the next Volvo Ocean Race route. “It is one of France’s biggest sailing destinations, there’s a big interest in sailing there,” Frostad said. “It was very popular last time and we had a two-race deal so were always set to go there.” The Swedish city of Gothenburg, a strategic location given the heritage
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Sanya, China: In-Port Race: February 7, 2015 Leg Start: February 8, 2015 Auckland, New Zealand: In-Port Race: March 14, 2015 Leg Start: March 15, 2015 Itajaí, Brazil: In-Port Race: April 18, 2015 Leg Start: April 19, 2015 Newport, USA: In-Port Race: May 16, 2015 Leg Start: May 17, 2015 Lisbon, Portugal: In-Port Race: June 6, 2015 Leg Start: June 7, 2015 Lorient, France: In-Port Race: to be decided Leg Start: to be decided Gothenburg, Sweden: In-Port Race: June 27, 2015 Total Race Distance: 39,895 nautical miles
of Volvo, will host the finale. Welsh capital Cardiff, meanwhile, has already been confirmed as a stopover city on the 2017-18 route, with city authorities believed to have committed some UK£3 million to the project. It will mark the first time since Portsmouth in the 200506 edition that the UK will have hosted the race. “Cardiff made a particularly impressive bid to win one of the coveted European slots,” said Frostad, “and with such outstanding facilities and great enthusiasm I’m convinced that we will have a stopover to remember.” The city has already hosted Extreme Sailing Series events.
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Sailing is in our company’s DNA Mark Turner, Executive Chairman, OC Sport OC Sport is a global sports marketing and events company specialising in professional sailing and outdoor events. The type of events we are involved in range from running, cycling and winter sports, to more extreme sports including adventure racing and trail running. The company can be found in every outdoor arena: oceans, lakes, mountains, deserts and city centres. OC Sport creates and owns its own event properties, manages competitive teams and athletes, and provides consultancy to global brands, host venues and other event organisers operating from bases in Switzerland, France, Singapore and the UK. In 2013 OC Sport’s international team will deliver 22 events, across 32 host venues, spanning four continents. Here Mark Turner, Executive Chairman of OC Sport, talks about how the sport of sailing runs in the company’s DNA ….
Benoit Stichelbaut / DPPI / OC Sport
Over the years OC Sport has taken great pride in managing a number of high-profile events and athletes, including Dame Ellen MacArthur, Sébastien Josse, Nick Moloney and Samantha Davies. At the same time, we have created events from scratch and developed them into worldclass and game-changing properties. Our depth of knowledge, implementation and activation knows no bounds as we are prepared to push the boundaries, do what others say is not possible and, importantly, give a solid return on investment to our stakeholders - sponsors, participants, host cities, VIP guests, public and the media.
Ellen/B&Q winning: Ellen MacArthur, B&Q/Castorama solo round the world record
Mark Lloyd, Lloyd Images/OC Sport
Our business began in 1997, primarily to manage Ellen MacArthur’s offshore campaigns, including the Vendée Globe and her solo non-stop round the world record in 2004. From those beginnings
ESS/Alinghi VIP guest sailing photo: Unique VIP guest experience on Alinghi
we moved on to organising sailing’s oldest solo offshore race, The Transat, to creating a new double-handed, non-stop roundthe-world race, Barcelona World Race, and then to pioneering the groundbreaking Extreme Sailing Series, and plenty more. The company has been involved in almost every element of the diverse sailing spectrum over the last 16 years. Our roots are in managing winning offshore sailing teams and athletes – ensuring successful performances on the water, award-winning sponsorship activation and communications coupled with exceptional hospitality, and all delivered by an experienced in-house
team. Our knowledge and genuine appetite for the sports we specialise in has helped us raise the bar of our professionally managed projects, and we have earned a unique credibility within the industry. With Ellen’s success in the 2000 Vendée Globe, then the offshore projects of Nick Moloney, Sam Davies and Sébastien Josse (Transat Jacque Vabre, Route du Rhum and Vendée Globe) alongside a Jules Verne Record attempt and Ellen’s famous B&Q-Castorama sponsored solo record circumnavigation (for which we were awarded three Hollis Sponsorship awards) you wouldn’t be wrong to say that sailing is in our DNA.
Mark Lloyd, Lloyd Images/OC Sport
Matt Dickents, On Edition/OC Sport
Loick Peyron celebrating winning The Transat 2008
ESS stadium racing Cardiff photo: Extreme Sailing Series action
Brand visibility in sponsoring a sailing project can be exceptional for the right kind of partner and can deliver remarkable returns. Take the Volvo Ocean Race as an example. Their 2011/2012 mid-race report recorded more then 1,200 hours of TV coverage*, a cumulative print readership of 2.6 billion* and 12,174 VIP corporate guests entertained**. Sailing has many standout benefits and a key one is in providing a unique hospitality and B2B experience. Imagine sailing on a 100-foot catamaran that has raced round the planet or a boat like the Extreme 40 where the guest races alongside the crew – that’s unique and it’s a money-can’t-buy experience for many non-sailing guests.
because it often happens hundreds if not thousands of miles from land - but technology has changed all that. The public and media can live every minute of a global race via live tracking, multiple data feeds, 3D-visualisation technologies and live video conferencing. And interest in these types of races that offer up an array of human feats is on an upward trend, through stories of high emotion, great bravery and personal achievements. We witnessed with both Ellen MacArthur’s and Sam Davies’ Vendée Globe campaigns how these feats can capture the imaginations of the nation. Davies’ campaign in 2008/09 had coverage in every national newspaper in the UK, including numerous front covers and over 100 TV features, that all contributed towards a media value of nearly £10 million for her sponsors Roxy.***
Artemis Investment Management is one brand that has fully embraced this concept. Since backing British sailing for more than a decade, their association with the sport has evolved to include a strong client-engagement programme that sits alongside a performance programme designed to nurture future British solo offshore talent with the Artemis Offshore Academy. OC Sport manage every aspect of a project that includes the Academy operating over 50 weeks of the year, with 300-plus guest sailing days and thousands of miles of racing by the Academy’s squad sailors. In the past it’s been fair to say sailing has been difficult to access – not least
Another key influencer of change has been the move to make inshore racing a genuine spectator sport. OC Sport has led the way in this arena by delivering the Extreme Sailing Series to hundreds of thousands of spectators at iconic venues around the world, including Asia, the Middle East and South America. The Series is now in its seventh year of competition and over one million spectators have now watched it first-hand thanks to the elite level stadium racing with all the action taking place right in front of the crowds. It is a format that works for spectators, VIPs, media and for
commercial guests, and other major players in the sailing arena followed suit from the America’s Cup World Series to the 2012 Olympic sailing regattas, which were played out in front of thousands of spectators. This year, OC Sport’s sailing events division was responsible for all the sporting and logistical management of the first edition of the Route des Princes – a new event for multihulls that encompasses both the inshore spectacle and the offshore elements. Starting from Valencia (Spain) in early June the Route des Princes then headed for Lisbon (Portugal), Dublin / Dùn Laoghaire (Ireland) and Plymouth (UK) before a final sprint leg to the finish in the Bay of Morlaix in Brittany (France). In the sport of sailing, OC Sport’s key objectives are to continue to grow the Extreme Sailing Series brand and to manage new sailing campaigns in both the next Volvo Ocean Race in 2014 and the 2016 Vendée Globe. The next few years promise to be a very exciting time for sponsors who want a strong but targetable media return, to engage with a growing global audience and offer up a unique B2B platform. *Source: IFM/Sports Marketing Survyers ** Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers *** Source: Post Race report
ocsport.com
Clipper Round the World Race Sir Robin Knox-Johnston founded the Clipper Round The World Race after surmising that circumnavigating the globe was sailing’s equivalent to climbing Mount Everest
The seventh edition of the Clipper Round the World Race began in London at the start of September, featuring 12 all-new, identical 70-foot racing yachts on a 40,000-mile journey which will take in Brazil, South Africa, Australia, the USA and some of the most famous ocean routes in the world over the next nine months. The race was founded in 1995 by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, the first man to complete a solo circumnavigation of the globe in 1968. Now 74, Knox-Johnston sat down for an in-depth conversation ahead of the 2013/14 Clipper race to discuss the event, its uniquely commercial focus and the wider world of sailing. Sir Robin, take us back to the start: when was the idea of the Clipper Race conceived? I was in Greenland climbing with Chris Bonnington and he told me how much it cost to climb Mount Everest, and I thought about it and wondered what the sailing equivalent of that is and realised it must be a circumnavigation. On the back of an envelope, I did a rough calculation of how much it would cost me to lay on the boats, skippers, some training, ports and all the other costs and how much I’d have to charge someone to go around the world, and it came to roughly half of what it costs to climb Mount Everest. I put an advert in the paper and got about 8,000 answers – once you’ve started something you can’t leave it or someone else will do it. Once you’ve created an opportunity, you’ve got to go with it or give it up and let someone else do it – I wasn’t prepared to do that. That’s when William [Ward, Clipper Race chief executive] and I met and we took it from there, built the
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boats, organised everything in about 11 months from starting to build the boats to the race starting, which was quite remarkable really. How has it evolved since then? It started off as just a race round the world for crews but then we thought, how do we compete with football? The only way to do that is to have what football’s got, town against town – it’s very tribal. We tried that with cities in the UK and I think out of the eight boats in the fleet, three of them really used it. That opened our eyes to opportunities. During the course of that race, in 2000, we had people abroad asking if they could get involved in this city promotion thing. That’s how we evolved into almost becoming, in a way, a floating trade fair going around the world. Not every city wanted to use it but for those who did it’s grown and grown. What we’ve got now is a race round the world for amateurs, 40 per cent of whom have never been on a boat before – doesn’t worry me in the slightest, in fact they’re the easiest to train because they haven’t got any bad habits. We give them pretty hard training, actually, with three solid weeks to turn them into someone who’s safe on a boat. They’ll learn how to race as things go along, they really develop it as they race, but what I really want is them safe. We’ve got that side of it: it’s a race for the crews, which is very exciting. It’s then become an opportunity for sponsors who want to do something different with customers and potential customers in any of the countries and ports we visit around the world. From those meetings, that shared experience on a boat, come the friendships which lead to business. That’s very much
how we are expanding our business model now. For this edition of the race, Clipper has gone into partnership with the Britain is GREAT campaign, aimed at attracting tourism and business to the country. How did that come about? We came together because when we got into some of the ports at previous races, the British consul or high commission or, in some cases, ambassador saw what we were doing and threw a reception. It was good for them, too, because they could invite people they wanted to influence locally to come down and introduce us and our people. It grew from there, that appreciation that this is a wonderful platform to show off Britain. It then grew to a point where the Britain is GREAT campaign was coming up – it works extremely well. This is how the government is using it, which is fine with us because from our perspective it means when we get into the ports we’ve got the British embassy or consulate very much on our side and assisting. We don’t need a lot from them – if they want to throw a party, that’s great, and we’ll take some of the crews along, crews from business, and meet people. Having them there in a port helps immeasurably: they can pick up the phone, get VIPs down, etc. This is mutually beneficial – we’re there to support them, they’re there to support us – so it does work. There are several types of boat sponsors in this year’s race, from cities and countries to corporate firms, and they all must have different requirements or reasons for being involved. How does Clipper cope with that? They need to tell us what they want to do. We’ve got quite a lot of
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Knox-Johnston joined UK minister for sport Hugh Robertson for the launch of the GREAT Britain entry at Trafalgar Square in July
experience at this now. We can say, ‘Well, actually, this way it might achieve your objectives better.’ It’s very much a door being left open to discuss things and we say to them, ‘If we say no, we’ll tell you why we’re saying no and settle down and work out how we’ll turn that into a yes.’ Nothing is impossible if we look at it and work round it and can find a way. They’ve got to tell us what they want to do. Is it going to be internal? Is it going to be brand-building? Is it just going to be dealing with customers? Sometimes it’s all three. To a certain extent with [Dutch financial company] De Lage Landen it was all three. As long as we know that, then we can and will support it. From our perspective it’s terribly important if we get sponsors like that that we have, in-house, someone who’s just focused on them, so we don’t slip up. We did have one person looking after about four or five, but you can’t do that now. We’ve had to expand to do that. In the beginning it was more amateurish, we’ve got more
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professional and we’ve realised you need an account manager. In terms of the route, what kind of balance do you have to strike between classic sailing routes and visiting commercially attractive ports? You’ve got to look at the event: it’s got to be done within 12 months. That brings in the seasons and everyone knows the world has seasons, it has monsoons – for instance, you have to be clear of the Caribbean by June because it’s hurricane season. You’d say, ‘Could we visit the Persian Gulf?’ No, can’t do it. Could we visit India? Not really, as much as I’d love to – lived there, worked there, love India. But if we wanted to go to India we’d have to cut out Australia. That, frankly, is not an option. Australia is slightly out of the way but we get such support from there, they’re very competitive and great fun and we just wouldn’t want to lose them. There are certain places that as much as we’d like to we can’t actually visit. That doesn’t mean they can’t have
a boat and promote themselves but we can’t actually get the fleet to them, it just doesn’t fit in the timescale. What can we expect from the new fleet of boats? They’re faster. They’ve already shown that. They’re more state of the art. The old fleet could have done it but styles have changed and we have to move with the times. What about the old fleet? I’ve got two on the way to Australia to be training boats, I’ve got eight which we’re using for corporate work. We’ll probably sell two, possibly four, and keep the rest for corporate work and for training. To what extent are you already planning ahead for the 2015/16 race? The first thing to say is we’re already taking bookings for the next race and the one after. We can see four years
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Does that kind of late decision test the nerves? It doesn’t test the nerves but it’s annoying, but we can adjust and we’re used to doing it. We tend not to panic. We’ve been doing this for 17 years; William and I are used to working together, used to these things happening and we just don’t get excited about it until there’s a signature on the contract – when I see that, then I’ll get excited. What’s your view on the overall health of sailing at the moment? Sailing is probably the third-biggest sport in the UK, boating certainly. There are 2.8 million boat owners in Britain – that’s a vast number. Our problem is, quite simply, the culture within the media of saying this is not a spectator sport and that it doesn’t work on television. Certain countries make it work on television: France can, America can, Australia and New Zealand can. You watch their coverage, how slick and professional it is, and you’re glued to it, because it’s so good. We don’t have a television programme like that in Britain, you have to go to CNN. Until such time that we start getting the coverage that, say, the French get… the French have that romance for it and I’ve been
trying to work that one out. I think it’s because we had to be seafaring to go anywhere, whereas the French don’t – they’ve got land boundaries. For them it’s more romantic, for us it’s a job. 40 years ago, the Telegraph, Times, Observer all had sailing correspondents on the staff and not one of them does now. The result is you just don’t get the coverage and if you don’t get the coverage you won’t get the sponsorship. If you don’t get the sponsorship you cannot produce the boats you need to hit international level. We can do it in the Olympics because we have the lottery and that can support our Olympic sailors – and we’ve been very successful, so we’ve shown we can do it if the facilities are available. In, say, single-handed sailing, my interest, getting sponsorship is almost impossible. What do you make of Sir Keith Mills’ recently announced plans to commercialise IMOCA? I’m hoping he can. We’ve got some young sailors coming along, we’re getting experienced, they’re competing with these really good French sailors so they’re learning. Keith Mills is particularly interested in IMOCA but I think we need to spread it further than that. We need to build a stairway to IMOCA, which are 60-footers and expensive. There has to be a stairway that leads to that, where people can make a reputation and get attention. To do that you’ve got to get in the media and you talk to the BBC and they say ‘it’s elite’ but 2.8 million? I don’t think so. Is there a role for the world governing body in linking the mass participation side and the professional racing side of sailing more effectively? ISAF hasn’t managed it so far. One hopes, one just hopes. It hasn’t so far. We’re all talking about the fact that our sport needs promoting.
William Ward is the chief executive of the Clipper Race and has been Knox-Johnston’s right-hand man since the two worked on the initial launch of the event
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ahead. Some ports have already signed up, some do sign up for two races so you end up starting to fill in places, it’s like joining up the dots at school – ‘we know we’re going there and there, and in between we can either go here or there.’ We look at who is showing interest and go and talk to them to get it set up now so we can tell people exactly what we’re doing sooner rather than later. This time it’s been difficult, what with the economic downturn, because a lot of places have wanted to do it but found it very difficult to get it together – some of them were rather late making a decision.
How do you promote it? Where are the young people coming in? Well, actually there are young people coming in – there has been an effect from the Olympics in the UK, you look at the sailing clubs. People want to see what it’s about. For the cost of a packet of cigarettes your child can go and spend the day with top trainers, learning what the sport’s like, and you meet the kids who’ve picked it up and they’re so enthusiastic. It’s there. The media just doesn’t cover it and we have to get round that problem. What about the America’s Cup and all its well-publicised challenges? We’ve probably got the most exciting boats ever, for size, involved in this. What’s missing is the competition of two boats close together, which we used to have with the monohulls and the activity like putting up spinnakers, the tactics behind it, the tacking on each other. Valencia was fantastic. We haven’t had that since. That was a fantastic series. What someone has got to decide is where we go from here. We need to get back to that close tussle that we had in Valencia. Do we stick with these big catamarans? It’s not going to be much fun if one leads the other all the way round. You need that close tussle.
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The boats are very exciting, but… The America’s Cup is seen as the pinnacle… Yes, but it’s not doing itself any good at the moment. Is that a danger for the rest of sailing, if what is seen as the pinnacle event isn’t getting it right? Boating in all its forms is rather like athletics. It covers everything from the 100 metres to the long jump. All these different ways we do it, ways we compete – single-handed, doublehanded, Olympics, America’s Cup, our race – mean, I think, the sport is sufficiently well spread that if one of the legs isn’t very strong the sport itself is strong enough. But I don’t believe it does us any good when it is seen to be ‘this is a bit of a mess’. That’s not good for the sport and it would be best if that could be sorted out. I’m one of those who actually thinks the best thing would be for the New Zealanders to win it, take it back to New Zealand and sort it out, and I would trust Grant Dalton to come up with something sensible. Final question, back to Clipper: when this edition is over, how will you measure whether it’s been a success? There’s a number of things to look at. First, the crews: I want them to be saying, at the end, ‘That’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life,’ and then I want to hear them say, ‘So far,’ because I’ll know we’ve widened their horizons. Second is I want the boat sponsors and race sponsors to be turning round and saying, ‘Wow, that was one heck of a way to activate and promote ourselves.’ And thirdly I want the cities we visit to say, ‘We want you back; that was fantastic.’ Those three things. If we get those three things right… boom.
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Clipper 2013/14: selected boat sponsors Although each boat in the 2013/14 Clipper race is being crewed by trained-up members of the general public, each of the fleet is branded in the colours of sponsors, be they destinations, corporate firms or existing race partners who have taken up an expanded role.
Derry-Londonderry left it late to commit to the 2013/14 race, despite its hugely successful debut as a sponsor and stopover in the 2011/12 event, but signed up in August. It has also committed to the 2015/16 race, part of a deal which has been put together by the Northern Irish Tourist Board, Loughs Agency, Ilex, Invest NI and Tourism Island. The boat carries the colours of the city’s tourist board as part of an international brand-building plan.
De Lage Landen
Old Pulteney
The Dutch leasing and financial solutions company, a subsidiary of Rabobank, was among the first to sign up for the 2013/14 event after a successful debut in the 2011/12 race. Its boat is known as ‘De Lage Landen Embraces the World’ and is part-brand building exercise, part-staff engagement tool. “We used the last edition to strengthen the connection between more than 5,000 members of our worldwide organisation,” said Jan Kusters, the managing director of Europe and Asia-Pacific for De Lage Landen. “We also brought customers aboard to witness this. This combination was a tremendous success. Therefore we are going to build further on this initiative, bringing our networking organisation to the next level.”
The scotch whisky brand signed up in August and is taking part in its first Clipper Race. The company intends to utilise the ‘intense global media coverage’ around the event through a series of awareness and activation exercises to be announced as the race is in progress. Old Pulteney’s senior brand manager, Margaret Mary Clarke, said: “Old Pulteney has a long and rich association with the sea, from our coastal location and maritime heritage to our involvement with sailing communities around the world today.” It is the company’s largest sponsorship to date.
Swiss Sailing In June Swiss Sailing, an umbrella organisation of 156 sailing clubs from the landlocked country, signed up for its first Clipper Race. Its boat is called Switzerland and carries the logos of Mercy Ships, a hospital ship charity. “It is a unique opportunity to participate in one of the last true adventures,” said Swiss Sailing president Vincent Hagin, describing the Clipper Race.
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Derry-Londonderry
Jamaica There is a Jamaican-branded yacht in the Clipper Race for the third time after the country’s tourist board agreed a deal for the 2013/14 event in late July. Jamaica previously competed in the 2007/08 and 2009/10 races. John Lynch, director of tourism for the Jamaica Tourist Board, said: “This exciting project is a unique opportunity to target Jamaica’s key tourism markets across the globe, bringing Destination Jamaica back under the international spotlight. “Jamaica’s vibrant branding will be seen all over the world. We are planning a creative programme of
events and activity to mark the arrival of the Jamaica yacht into the race’s various ports of call.” The race is also visiting Jamaica’s Errol Flynn Marina in Port Antonio as part of the deal.
Qingdao The Chinese city of Qingdao, which has focused on developing its status in sailing after its port hosted the medal events for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, has made a substantial commitment to the Clipper Race in recent years and has already signed up for the 2015/16 event, in addition to the 2013/14 race. The race will also stop in Qingdao.
GREAT Britain UK sports minister Hugh Robertson joined Clipper Race founder Sir Robin Knox-Johnston in London’s Trafalgar Square at the end of July to launch the GREAT Britain boat that is now competing in the race for the first time. London is hosting the start and finish of this edition and GREAT Britain, the UK’s government-backed international and marketing promotional campaign aimed at attracting tourism and business to the country, has joined up with British brands such as Land Rover to enter a team. Robertson said: “In a sense, it’s quite an obvious project for this country to get involved in. We’re an island race, we’re a great seafaring nation. We have a long and proud tradition of sailing success, stretching back many, many centuries. “Sailing is very, very strong in this country at the moment. The great thing about a project like this is it brings all that together, you get some iconic British brands sponsoring it and it effectively gives us a platform that will sail around the world over the next few months on which we can run a whole series of advertising and messaging campaigns that are good for British business.”
Events The Northern Irish city of Derry-Londonderry will again stage a stopover in 2013/14, while its tourist board is supporting a race entry
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Henri Lloyd and PSP Henri Lloyd, already the official technical clothing partner of the race, and PSP, which is providing logistical support to the event, both expanded their relationships with the Clipper
Race in August, each taking on full sponsorship of their own boats for the first time. “We are vehemently passionate about the marine industry and the sport of sailing,” said PSP managing director Frank Dixie. “We’ve admired the
Clipper Race for years and relished every minute of being official logistics partner. Now we’re even more involved in the race as a team sponsor, which is an amazing opportunity to build our profile on a global platform, while supporting something very important to us.”
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Land Rover became a top-level sponsor of the Extreme Sailing Series in April 2013, giving further evidence of the competition’s shrewdly managed commercial growth
Extreme Sailing Series Boasting its innovative stadium sailing concept and fresh ideas regarding sport as entertainment, the Extreme Sailing Series brought an entirely new dimension to the world of professional sailing when it launched in 2007. Seven years on and while much has been achieved in that time, as series founder Mark Turner reveals many challenges lie ahead. The 2013 Extreme Sailing Series got underway in Muscat, Oman in early March. Organised by international sports marketing company OC Sport, the series has grown in the seven years since it launched in 2007 from a four-event European circuit to a global
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competition featuring eight four-day ‘acts’ and running from March through to November. The series itself occupies a place of its own within sailing having pioneered the ‘stadium sailing’ concept, which sees racing take place on short and often compact courses in identical Extreme 40 multihulls near to the shore, therefore bringing the on-water action closer than ever to the spectator. That format has led OC Sport, a group formed in the June 2012 merger of OC Thirdpole and Patrice Clerc & Associés which now has full ownership of the series, to bill Extreme Sailing as an entertainment package as well as an elite professional sporting competition. High-speed catamarans, capable of traveling at over 25 knots, ensure
that spectacular crashes, capsizes and near-misses are commonplace in the Extreme Sailing Series, while around the on-water competition a full on-shore entertainment programme featuring music, bars, sponsor stands and VIP areas aims to create a spectacle for the live audience unlike anything else in the sport. Meanwhile, so-called ‘hot seats’ available on board the boats enable VIP guests to get a firsthand experience of the on-water action by riding with the five-man crews during races. A common suggestion is that the series has benefited from the fact that this year’s America’s Cup, the 34th edition of sailing’s oldest event, is being raced in ultra-fast AC72 catamarans. With teams such as Artemis Racing and Emirates Team New Zealand
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Sponsorship April 2013 saw Land Rover sign up as a top-level partner of the Extreme Sailing Series. The car manufacturer began its deal at the third event of the 2013 edition in Qingdao, China, and Turner is pleased to report that the partnership, though in its infancy, is progressing nicely. “It’s a great brand, a really great set of people,” he says, speaking during Act 5 of the 2013 series in Porto, Portugal. “They’re a smaller player; they’ve got a bigger brand than their size with respect to the Audis and the BMWs, so it’s not like we could just kick off on a massive scale or anything. It’ll take some time. It’s the first thing they’re doing in sailing as
Mark Turner is the executive chairman of Extreme Sailing Series operator OC Sport, a group formed in the June 2012 merger of OC Thirdpole and Patrice Clerc & Associés
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seeking all the practice they could get in multihull boats ahead of September’s event in San Francisco, Extreme Sailing has undoubtedly been able to call on the involvement of some of the world’s best sailors in its early years. On the back of its initial success, the series has now ventured into new markets, with events in Asia and the Americas having been added in 2011 to the series’ customary European legs. “We want to be on three continents,” says Mark Turner, the executive chairman of OC Sport. “We need to be in China because we want to have a strong Asian footprint. We need to have a minimum number of events in Europe and ideally you’d be in South and North America. And then there’s the Middle East. It’s not that simple to tick all those boxes but, strategically, this needs to be seen clearly as a global event.” Over one million spectators have watched the series on location since its launch and Turner is now eyeing further growth. As he writes in the series’ official programme, Extreme Sailing is now entering the third phase of its life, ‘a phase that should be marked by solid progress in all areas, rather than any fundamental change to the concept’.
part of a global strategy that includes equestrian and rugby. “The first year was always going to be about sailing into the markets, educating, helping the global team explain to the local teams how that works; letting people see the event for the first time, get comfortable with it and decide how they’re going to invite guests and everything else. They’ve been very open that more activation on the consumer side and media side would start in year two when they’ve got themselves up and running.” As part of its deal Land Rover will have trophy naming rights at half of the events each year until 2015, as well as its own boat branded in the company’s colours for the use of VIP guests, clients and, potentially, a team in 2014. Part of the value of the deal, which is considered the largest in Extreme Sailing’s seven-year history, is wrapped up in co-marketing budgets designed to promote the series and its events.
“We’re looking forward to doing some cool stuff with them next year,” Turner adds, “and they’re very, very clear that they’ll ramp up [their activation]. It’s a long-term mission. We’ve got a three plus two-year agreement with them but their vision, in the way we’ve discussed, is a tenyear vision.” With Land Rover having taken the first of two top-level sponsorship packages, at the end of August OC Sport was in the market for a second top-tier partner. “If Land Rover had wanted to take all of it we may well have done it,” Turner reveals, “but to be honest it works for us to bring in a second partner – different sector, different activation – so we’ve got to sign that. We’ve got some good discussions going on right now and that should be in place for 2014 to sit alongside Land Rover.” In addition to Land Rover, the series currently has a portfolio of partners that includes timekeeper
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The Extreme Sailing Series is held inshore at venues with familiar and dramatic backdrops, like Porto in Portugal
Edox, clothing supplier Marinepool, technical partner SAP, logistics partner GAC Pindar and sail maker North Sails. Windsurfing brand Neil Pryde has title rights to the NeilPryde Windsurf Racing Series, a support act which runs alongside the main sailing event and features top windsurfers from the host country.
Venues Though it first launched in just four European destinations back in 2007, the Extreme Sailing Series has grown into a global tour spread across three continents. The eight-act 2013 series began in Muscat, Oman in early March before events in Singapore and Qingdao, China rounded off this year’s Asian swing. Following that it moved west with four European events, including a June meeting in Istanbul that was postponed amid public unrest in the city, scheduled between June and October. Finally, the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro was slated to host the series finale in mid-November. Part of the founding vision for the series was for it to become a truly global event set in iconic locations, but having such an international spread of events, as Turner explains, poses
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a distinct set of challenges. “All the different cultures we’ve got, languages and everything else, makes it quite a challenging thing to do,” he says. “I guess that’s why there are not really that many global circuits of any sport. There are not really many sports that have true, global set-ups so we’re pretty happy with what we’ve been able to achieve.” And then, as Turner adds, there are the logistical challenges associated with having a global calendar: “You’ve got to overlay a shipping schedule that sometimes can be 40 days to get from A to B, so it’s a complex game. It kind of comes together very quickly at the end.” The stadium sailing concept lies at the heart of the Extreme Sailing Series and forms a key part of the host venue selection process, with the idea being that on-water action takes place barely a boat’s length away from the shoreline to guarantee spectators a grandstand view of the action. “That limits quite a lot of places,” Turner says. “A stadium needs wind of some description – although that’s not as difficult a selection criteria as perhaps normal, traditional sailing has where they would like the wind to be pure and everything else. We need to have
a mix of conditions so that we’ve got some strong wind, which quite often most iconic venues don’t.” Aside from ensuring the location has the necessary weather conditions for competitive sailing, Turner reveals that a “very complex” set of commercial considerations are taken into account before selecting a host venue. The “prime consideration”, he says, is that the host market needs to be commercially valuable, one that is attractive to sponsors at a team level but, more importantly, ticks all the right boxes for Land Rover, whose series main partner package includes the right to have a say in venue selection. Meanwhile, the host cities themselves must express a clear determination to actively support and promote the event. “Having the right deal with the venue, so having the right support in financial, value-in-kind and promotional terms [is vital],” says Turner, “and actually having a relationship you can trust and believe in, which is not always that easy either.” At the end of August five events – in Muscat, Singapore, Qingdao, Cardiff and Rio – were confirmed for 2014 under the terms of existing multi-year hosting agreements. The plan, though, is to replicate this
Set Sail To Malta For Adventure, Speed and Luxury Surrounded by the crystal-clear Mediterranean Sea and boasting majestic harbours, yearround sunshine and a rich history full of marine adventure, Malta is the ultimate sailing destination, both for leisure and for sport. Hosting the famous annual Rolex Middle Sea Race, as well as introducing the Malta Knights Trophy sailing regatta and launching a new sailing school, Malta is one of Europe’s key centres for sailing professionals, sportsmen and beginners alike. For those looking for a more relaxed and lavish boating holiday, Malta is quickly becoming a glamorous hub
for super yachts and luxury boats, offering pristine beaches, beautiful architecture, awardwinning fine dining and chic cocktail bars. This October, Malta will once more prepare to host the annual Rolex Middle Sea Race, taking place on the 19th October 2013. This race is organized by the Royal Malta Yacht Club. A world famous race in the same league as the Rolex Fastnet and Newport Bermuda races, The Rolex Middle Sea Race was founded in 1968 and is one of the most exciting highlights of the sailing calendar. Covering one of the most beautiful courses
in the world, the race follows a 606-nautical mile route that includes the deep azure waters of Sicily and the Strait of Messina, the islands of Pantelleria and Lampedusa, and even features Stromboli’s active volcano as a course mark. The Maltese shores have been receiving plaudits the world over for their beauty, thus making them the perfect setting for the “must do” race. However, the scenery and sunshine often belie the real challenge of the race. The Rolex Middle Sea Race is famous for its ever-changing sea and weather conditions
posing a true test to skippers and crews who have to use their very best skills to cope with the demands of the course. The event has been able to attract top competitors in yacht racing such as Éric Tabarly, winner of 17 different sailing competitions, and Sir Chay Blyth, who was the first man to sail westward non-stop around the world. The Rolex Middle Sea Race leaves from Grand Harbour in the waters between the Saluting Battery in Valletta and Fort St. Angelo in Birgu, and thousands of people gather on either side to enjoy this spectacle of sail. The race is the ultimate opportunity for sailing fans to see first-hand some of the world’s finest vessels in dramatic action – over 80 boats gliding with graceful precision through this imposing harbour accompanied by cannon fire, before speedily cutting through the waves to race the open water of the Mediterranean. Following the success of the Rolex Middle Sea Race, Edysails Ltd has teamed up with Malta’s sailing clubs to launch a brand new sailing regatta, the Malta Knights Trophy (MKT). The inaugural event will take place from the 5th to the 15th of September 2013 and feature some of Malta’s finest sailing talent battling it out to win the trophy. Organised to highlight Malta’s position as a strategic maritime metropolis in the centre of
the Mediterranean, this annual event will be a celebration of both the island’s rich history and its bright future as experts in sailing. The Malta Knight Trophy sailing regatta will be open for sailing races in various Maltese bays and also for offshore racing sailing boats. On the prestigious waterfront quayside of Ta ‘Xbiex, opposite the Royal Malta Club, the “Mediterranean Village” will exhibit the latest marine industry products and services, as well as offering a taste of Maltese culture and traditions. For those who are itching to have their hand on the tiller, but still don’t quite know their bow from their stern, the Malta Sailing Academy is the perfect option for wannabe skippers. Providing a whole range of RYAcertified practical courses in yacht sailing and powerboat handling together with certified theory courses, the Sailing Academy is suitable for both sail and motor users. The Royal Malta Yacht Club also recognises that sailing education is an important part of its mission. Over the last winter it hosted Sailcoach, an international sailing school that specialises in training sailors to a highly competitive level. A huge success, Sailcoach saw a huge number of students from many diverse countries come to train at the RMYC
for the one to two-week programme. This year the Royal Malta Yacht Club is set to launch its own sailing school intended to provide sailing tuition at various levels, initially focusing on teaching young people with little knowledge of sailing who wish to learn to sail. The sophisticated world of sailing should be accompanied by class and a touch of style, something the Maltese capital has in abundance. The city’s beautiful architecture entrenches a wealth of culture. A wander through Valletta’s cobbled streets provides fine dining choices and opportunities to sample the local food, full of rich flavours from the Mediterranean. The Grand Harbour is known as one of the safest natural havens in the Mediterranean, and Valletta has something for everyone, whether seasoned history buff, passionate foodie or keen-eyed shopper. The ultimate luxurious experience is aboard a yacht, and Malta offers the high life on an affordable budget. Sailing holidays that focus on full relaxation throughout the day can often call for a more fast-paced experience in the evening, and Malta has the nightlife to match those needs. St Julian’s is a bustling mecca of restaurants, super yachts and waterside bars, where you can party amongst Malta’s beautiful people - enjoying stylish hangouts and the hottest members’ clubs.
www.visitmalta.com www.rolexmiddlesearace.com www.maltasailingacademy.com www.maritimedirectory.com.mt
Singapore hosted the second act in 2013, and is one of the stages which has given a more international feel to an initially Europeanbased competition
2013 schedule Act 1: Muscat, Oman
5th-8th March
Act 2: Singapore
11th-14th April
Act 3: Qingdao, China
2nd-5th May
Act 4: Istanbul, Turkey – Postponed
Dates TBC
Act 5: Porto, Portugal
25th-28th July
Act 6: Cardiff, UK
23rd-26th August
Act 7: Nice, France
3rd-6th October
Act 8: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
14th-17th November
year’s total. “We will increase to nine and then potentially ten at some point,” Turner says, “but one way or another it’s eight events in 2014.”
Teams There are six permanent teams competing in the 2013 Extreme Sailing Series: defending champions The Wave, Muscat; Alinghi; Red Bull Sailing Team; GAC Pindar; Realteam; and SAP Extreme Sailing Team. Each act also features up to two invitational entries from the host nation, with the likes of Team Duqm Oman competing in Muscat and China Team in Qingdao. According to Turner, eight is the “magic number” when it comes to contracting teams to compete in the series. “There is no format that can support more boats than that, nor is it necessarily a good thing,” he says. “You want to identify the teams, the skippers, the sailors, the people and you don’t want to split the media pie up too much for the teams, either. The quality of those teams, the nationality of those teams, the brands that are supporting them, is something you can always improve and always develop and that’s definitely our focus more than quantity.” Boasting Olympic sailors, America’s Cup veterans and world champions from 13 countries, the series has already put together a stellar list of international competitors but Turner
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is optimistic of strengthening and freshening up the line-up in 2014 and beyond. “Like most things, if the product is right you hope you’re going to keep three quarters of the teams you’ve got,” he says. “Obviously everybody’s got multi-year deals. Some teams will disappear but new ones come in; that’s a good thing for us as well. Ideally a couple of new, fresh teams would be great and potentially [having teams from] China and the US would be an ideal world. We always have to work hard on the teams but we’ve never had not enough or too many.” In addition to being able to call on some of sailing’s best-known stars, Turner explains that having an invitational team at each event is crucial for generating public and media interest in the series, even if the formation of that team varies from venue to venue. “Sometimes it’s a fully funded team in its own right that we give that invitational slot to,” he says, “and in other places we’re constructing that team to ensure we’ve got a home team. “Perhaps we’ll side with a partner to the event. It’s a slightly different make-up behind the scenes but, in reality, having the home team is absolutely fundamental.” As for the companies supporting the entries, Turner admits that while significant progress has been made in that respect, with a handful of major international brands now
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Spectators gather in Cardiff; over a million people have attended Extreme Sailing Series venues in its history
involved, there remains clear room for improvement. “I’m not sure we need loads more big brands but a couple more well-known brands, whether it’s the B2B or consumer side, would be good,” he says. “That said, we’re not in a bad place right now. We’ve got Land Rover, SAP, Red Bull – got some great companies in there. Aberdeen Asset Management is, for the moment, in the Singapore event [as the wild-card entry sponsor], but potentially wider in the future.”
Broadcasting According to Havas Sponsorship Insights, the final media value of the Extreme Sailing Series totalled €27.8 million in 2012. Of that amount, just under 50 per cent was accounted for by television coverage, which, as Turner explains, can be split into four elements. “There’s TV news coverage, which is an important part of what we do and we work with Sunset+Vine on,” he says. “You’ve then got TV programming, which has developed quality and quantity-wise year by year over the last six years. “We’ve now got, this year, I think 42 or 43 broadcasters, with some good quality ones in there: Eurosport,
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Channel 4, Starhub, ESPN. That’s a seven times 26-minute programming series, which has increased every year, more and more value, better-quality times and everything else.” The third part of the TV mix – and undoubtedly the key problem area for sailing over the years – is live broadcasting. “Live has been traditionally difficult for sailing,” Turner adds. “We’ve got quite a good set-up to be honest but we don’t necessarily have the money to produce it at the level we would need to produce it. “What we’ve managed to do this year so far, and hopefully it will be every event, is to have a live TV deal in the country of the event, which I think we’ll achieve. And for the first time we have had at each event a broadcaster in a different country taking that live. Now that might not sound like a big objective compared with other sports that have all that tied up, but ultimately that’s been a good solid step upwards and forwards for us.” The fourth and final part of Extreme Sailing’s television coverage extends into the digital realm, with live coverage streamed online via the series’ official website. “What we’ve actually decided to do this year is align the online distribution with the TV
product and done this ‘power hour’,” Turner explains. “We’ve not tried to cover all of it but instead be a bit more ‘appointment to view’: one hour or one and a half hours, according to the TV deal, online, globally, so it’s actually a product at a particular time. “We’ve managed to also then distribute that product on a TV front as a delayed/live package. The hour we did in Singapore was on Starhub live TV, and then I think we had four or five other channels take it as a delayed/ live package. So we’ve made some good progress on that, but you know it’s step by step within our own means and our own scale.” Although experiments have previously been conducted with the help of technology provided by the series’ technical partner SAP, Turner has identified the production of onboard footage as another key area for improvement with respect to broadcasting. “On-board has a very limited production budget so we’ve been really helped by the partnership we have with SAP,” he says. “They’ve put a lot of funding and development into graphics and tracking and predictive leaderboards and things, which really enhances the TV package for us.”
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World Match Racing Tour The Alpari World Match Racing Tour began its 14th year on the water in 2013. Executive director James Pleasance, coming to the end of his first 12 months at the helm, offers a guide through what is now the world’s leading monohull sailing series. The 2013 Alpari World Match Racing Tour, the 14th edition of the ISAFsanctioned series, got underway on 15th May in Langenargen, Germany. The six-stage competition has been the premier monohull sailing series in the world since the organisers of the America’s Cup – for which the tour had often been considered a training ground – decided to switch to wing sail catamarans in 2010. Each stage is contested by a fleet of eight permanent teams, known
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as ‘tour card holders’, plus four additional teams, two of which earn a place via the qualifying events and two of which are ‘wildcards’ – often made up of local sailors that attract media interest. Teams use identical supplied racing yachts at each location – though the class of boat varies between each event – which, in theory, creates a competition based on individual skill and sailing ability, rather than technological or financial advantage. This format is a defining characteristic of the tour according James Pleasance, who took the top job as executive director of the series in August 2012 after a decade as one of its directors. “One of the USPs of the tour is that it comes down to a battle of skill rather than design, technology or money,” says Pleasance during an interview at the
Alpari World Match Racing Tour’s headquarters in London in late June. “Every crew has to compete on the same boat and throughout racing the crews rotate between the boats, so you can’t pick a favourite for the day. It’s purely down to the skill of the sailor, not the design or technology of the boat. “There’s always going to be slight differences because these aren’t just boats that are pulled out once a year for a week – these are used for corporate sailing,” he adds. “Most events will take about a week to properly measure [the yachts], weigh them. They completely strip them down, there’s no instrumentation at all.”
Alpari: in at the deep end Having been title sponsored by tobacco and disposable lighter
Events and sports travel specialists Travel Places are official tour suppliers. Furthermore, each event organiser has the ability to sign local sponsors, which pushes the total number of partners associated with the series close to 350 each year. As such, the tour and its individual events generate combined revenue of over US$15 million annually. The tour also sealed a long-term partnership with media giant IMG in May 2013 for the distribution of highlights and a daily news release (VNR), while independent production company Red Handed TV has been involved for a number of years. “Last year there was good demand; there were over 13 or 14 broadcasters that were taking the live coverage from the events,” recalls Pleasance. “Sailing has always unfortunately suffered at the hands of the weather, because if there’s not wind it can limit the live action, particularly when you’re live for two hours. “It’d be fair to say we’re stronger on the distribution of our highlights and that’s something we put a lot of time and investment into,” he adds. “Last year we invested significantly in broadcasting every event on the tour
live, which was something that we were not able to do this year from a financial point of view.”
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Pindar, which came out of Andrew Pindar, the print company,” explains Pleasance. “GAC Pindar is now a marine leisure division of GAC Logistics. Ian has those as title sponsor but he also has some peripheral sponsors, clothing and such, but GAC Pindar essentially fund him to compete on the tour. In addition to that, they win the prize money.”
to be crowned tour champion in 2009. The tour’s title sponsor Alpari first partnered the Kiwi team in a short-term deal in December 2012, renaming it the Alpari Racing Team for December’s Monsoon Cup. Four months later, in a joint announcement that saw the forex trader become the principal partner of Premier League side West Ham United, Alpari expanded its sponsorship of Minoprio’s team to become the title sponsor for the duration of the 2013 season. “[Adam Minoprio] now has funding,” says Pleasance. “If he competes at other events I believe he still may be under BlackMatch, but as far as we’re concerned on the tour he and his team are Team Alpari FX.”
GAC Pindar Sitting atop the tour standings midway through 2013, GAC Pindar, skippered by defending champion Ian Williams, were looking for a record fifth title. The team – who also enter a boat in the Extreme Sailing Series – are a leading force commercially too, with a family of partners that includes Musto clothing, Bollé sunglasses and Swiss watch manufacturer Armin Strom. “[Ian Williams] has a title sponsor in GAC Pindar, which is the partnership between GAC, the logistics firm, and
Team Alpari FX Skippered by New Zealand’s Adam Minoprio, Team Alpari FX debuted under their current name in 2013, having previously competed as BlackMatch Racing. The team were founded in 2005 by Minoprio, who went on to become the youngest sailor
Commercial structure The tour’s current prize purse stands at over US$1.5 million, with an additional US$500,000 bonus pool allocated to the eight tour card holders at the end of each year. In turn, each of the permanent entries pays a US$55,000 fee to compete. The distribution of the bonus pool sees the fifth-placed team receive US$55,000, essentially covering their tour fee, while the higher-placed teams receive a larger share of the spoils. Trying to put a figure on the cost of entry to the tour depends, Pleasance says, on whether a team is “flying economy or business class”. “There’s various levels which one could afford,” he explains, “but as a ballpark you’d be looking around the US$100,000 mark per year for a team, almost as a minimum, to cover all reasonable costs. That doesn’t assume that every sailor is being paid – if you have paid sailors on your crew those costs increase. So sponsorships should look at covering that amount and some.”
Now in its 14th season, the ISAF-sanctioned Alpari World Match Racing Tour became the leading monohull sailing series when the America’s Cup switched to wing sail catamarans
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manufacturer Swedish Match, the tour, which received ‘special event’ status from the ISAF in 2006, signed a multi-million dollar title sponsorship deal with Alpari in February 2012. The online forex trading services firm’s five-year agreement saw the series rebranded as the Alpari World Match Racing Tour and provided a welcome cash injection ahead of last year’s eight-event competition. “I think the synergy between what we do on the tour and what Alpari does as a business is very closely aligned – it’s not about design and technology, it’s all about the skill of the sailor or the skill of the trader, competing on a equal platform,” explains Pleasance. “They’re hugely important to us. They’ve allowed us to step up our game; they’ve provided very valuable funding to allow us to do a number of things on the tour, from TV to marketing initiatives as well.” In addition to Alpari, the series has a stable of tour-wide sponsors that includes British carmaker Lotus, London-based luxury jewellery manufacturers Garrard and technical sailing and fashion brand Pelle P. Online event platform Livestream
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Eight permanent ‘tour card holder’ teams are joined at each event by two wildcard entries and two teams who have progressed through qualifiers
US One Sailing At the other end of the commercial spectrum sit the likes of new tour card entry Taylor Canfield and his US One Sailing team. The US Virgin Islands-born, Chicago-dwelling 24-year-old shot to prominence in 2012, claiming first place in the tour’s penultimate event, the Argo Group Gold Cup, and the Monsoon Cup season finale. Canfield is currently the sailing director at Chicago Match Race Center and was ranked ninth in the ISAF open rankings in mid-July. His team count Musto clothing, Line Honors yacht racing outfitters and
Venues 2013: a streamlined calendar The 2013 Alpari World Match Racing Tour was scheduled to touch down in Germany, Korea, Sweden, the US and Bermuda before its season-ending showpiece, the Monsoon Cup, from 2nd to 7th December in Malaysia. The
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The remaining five tour cards belong to the Stena Sailing Team, skippered by Sweden’s Johnie Berntsson, Keith Swinton’s Black Swan Racing Team, the Phil Robertson-led Waka Racing
Team, the eWork Sailing Team skippered by Bjorn Hansen, and Pierre-Antoine Morvan’s French entry, the Vannes Agglo Sailing Team. Meanwhile, a host of other teams fight it out for spots on the series proper via the qualifying events. For example, David Gilmour, skipper of Australia’s Team Gilmour, qualified for the 2013 Korea Match Cup after taking victory against Jeremy Koo’s MAS Koo Racing Team in late April, while Staffan Lindberg and his Alandia Sailing Team won a place at the 2013 Stena Match Cup Sweden after winning the GKSS Spring Cup in Gothenburg in May.
2013 calendar was two events lighter than in 2012 – the Dutch Match Cup in Lelystad and the St Moritz Match Race in Switzerland were cancelled after they failed to achieve adequate commercial funding. “It was very simple: they had secured some government funding that wasn’t ready for this year,” Pleasance explains. “As I understand, it’s been agreed but it’s likely to be in place for next year, not this year.
“Each event has its own responsibility to put the event on and to raise the appropriate funding,” he adds. “What does it cost to run an event? If I was to put a number on it, the cost of running a reasonable match racing event that would be part of the tour, including the necessary fees and the prize money, would be from three quarters of a million US dollars upwards. Some of the events on the tour have budgets significantly
sports technology firm Drift among their ‘gold’ sponsors. Says Pleasance: “You’ve got Taylor Canfield, a young up-and-coming sailor out of the US Virgin Islands, who has some sponsorship but not at the level of some of the other teams. So the level of sponsorship is at varied levels across the eight teams.”
And the rest
Events James Pleasance had been a director of the Alpari World Match Racing Tour for a decade when he took over as executive director in August 2012
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greater than that, particularly the Stena Match Cup Sweden and the Monsoon Cup. “In the past we’ve talked about getting 15-plus events but I think we’ve got to be realistic. I’d like to see more than ten events. We’re working on trying to secure new events for 2014, we’re looking actively in Australasia, we’re also looking at increasing our footprint in Asia. We’ve been doing a lot of research in Latin America, particularly in the run-up to the 2016 Olympics.”
Match Race Germany: Langenargen, Germany “We start in Germany purely because of the dates of the event,” says Pleasance. “We run on a calendar year and Germany therefore, by default, becomes the first event of the season in May. “If we were to secure an event – and we are talking to some events in the southern hemisphere – and the dates lend themselves a lot more to the beginning of our year, so January, February, it might be that we have a new curtain-raiser event; that’d be a fantastic opportunity.
“There’s no agreement per se for Germany to be the starters, it’s purely done on the calendar.” The German event, contested on Lake Constance at the northern foot of the Alps, joined the tour in 2000 and currently supplies teams with Bavaria 40S racing yachts. It attracts in excess of 30,000 spectators each year and added Adidas as its clothing partner for 2013. Meanwhile, MHP-A Porsche Company partnered the event for the third consecutive year in 2013. “Match Race Germany has a combination of funding; largely corporate sponsorship, they do a lot of hospitality,” says Pleasance. “A lot of it’s through corporate sponsors and much less so through tourism and government funding.”
Korea Match Cup: Gyeonggi, South Korea “[The Korea Match Cup] is a unique event and it’s very heavily funded by the local government, the Gyeonggi province, as part of a significant redevelopment of the region,” says Pleasance of a stop which was added to the tour in 2008 and uses KM36 boats. Hosted by the Jeongok Marina
in the Gyeonggi-do province and run in conjunction with an onshore sailing festival, the event attracted over 160,000 visitors in 2013. “There’s a lot of reclaimed land and the new yacht club that they’ve built this year is part of an ongoing initiative to increase the marine tourism waterfront development within Korea,” adds Pleasance. “It’s largely government-funded, although they have corporate funding through the likes of Hyundai. Operationally for us it has its challenges, but at the same time, as the tour, we move around to all the events, so we will take in the TV team, we’ll fly in photographers, writers, so we have our own on-site presence.”
Stena Match Cup Sweden: Marstrand, Sweden A cornerstone of the tour, the Swedish leg of the series – which supplies sailors with DS37 Match Racer boats – has been on the calendar since 2000 and attracts over 150,000 people each year. Stena agreed a five-year extension to its title sponsorship in December 2012, while Turkish Airlines and logistics company DB Schenker signed up to
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Caption
Forex brokerage Alpari signed a five-year deal to title sponsor the tour in February 2012, its first major partnership in sailing
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sponsor the Royal Gothenburg Yacht Club-hosted event in February and May 2013 respectively. “Commercially they have well over 30 corporate partners, including Stena as the title sponsors,” explains Pleasance. “For a corporate sponsorship model, Sweden I would say has the largest number of corporate sponsors. That’s a fantastic example of how successful that can be. “They do a lot of hospitality. You see similar examples in the likes of Formula One – they really set the benchmark for hospitality and what can be done at not only tour events but at sailing events generally. They entertain thousands of guests during the week. That’s obviously a good revenue source.”
Chicago Match Cup: Chicago, USA Raced on Tom28 Max racing yachts at the end of Navy Pier in the heart of the city, Chicago’s tour event was first held in 2012. “They’ve run a very successful match race academy there for a number of years, together with local match racing events, so this was a natural extension for them to join the tour,”
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insists Pleasance. “They weren’t securing the boats for the very first time.” Asked about the benefits of having a US leg, Pleasance says: “It’s a huge boost for us. Many years ago we had a one-off event in San Francisco, the Allianz Cup in 2006, but Chicago is really the first time the tour’s had a US leg. It’s something that I would like to build on with additional events in the US.” The event carries a prize purse of US$100,000 and was expected to attract well over 250,000 spectators in 2013 as a result of being held in conjunction with the Tall Ships Chicago 2013 Festival. Organisers
have tied up media partnerships with CSN Chicago and Michigan Avenue magazine, while Choose Chicago is the event’s tourism partner and W Hotels also backs the event. “I’d love to see another event in the US,” concludes Pleasance, “perhaps on the west coast, perhaps using the momentum from this year’s America’s Cup in the likes of San Francisco.”
Argo Group Gold Cup: Hamilton, Bermuda The series’ penultimate leg, contested on International One Design (IOD)
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2013 Venues 15th-20th May: Match Race Germany – Langenargen, Germany 28th May-2nd June: Korea Match Cup – Gyeonggi-do, South Korea 1st-6th July: Stena Match Cup Sweden – Marstrand, Sweden 6th-11th August: Chicago Match Cup – Chicago, USA 7th-13th October: Argo Group Gold Cup – Hamilton, Bermuda 2nd-7th December: Monsoon Cup – Kuala Terengganu, Malaysiaw
boats, is an original founding member of the tour and one of the oldest match racing events in the sport. In addition to the Argo Group, the insurance underwriter that agreed a two-year extension to its title sponsorship in March 2012, the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club-organised Gold Cup also counts
reinsurance firms Aon Benfield, Guy Carpenter and RenaissanceRe among its sponsors. “Sailed in the very old 50-year-old designs, International One Design boats, [the Argo Group Gold Cup] really gives the sailors a test of their skill,” says Pleasance. “I think they look forward to it,” “Obviously it’s a beautiful place to go. The skills required to sail the IODs is very different to the other boats that they compete in on the tour, but to me that’s one of the charms and the challenges of what we do on the tour, rather than taking your boat to each event. Obviously, cost-wise, operationally, it has its benefits as well.”
Monsoon Cup: Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia “Why is it called the Monsoon Cup and why does it take place during the monsoon season?” asks Pleasance. “It was largely to promote tourism to that part of Malaysia in the off-seasons as well. And it has worked; the growth of Terengganu from 2005 to present day, with the airport over five times the size that it was and the number of tourists and international planes that are in
and out, is significant. A lot of that has definitely been down to the exposure of the Monsoon Cup.” Run by the Ri-Yaz Heritage Marina Resort & Spa and contested on F36 yachts, the Monsoon Cup is the season’s finale and, with a prize purse of approximately US$475,000, the championship’s most lucrative stage. It was won by wildcard entry Taylor Canfield in 2012 and is sponsored by Malaysia Airlines, Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM), KFC and Sime Darby Motors along with support from the Ministry of Youth & Sports Malaysia and 1 Malaysia, a government-run social welfare initiative. “[The Monsoon Cup] is largely funded by the state of Terengganu, as part of a huge property, waterfront and marine tourism development in that part of Malaysia,” says Pleasance, “which involved building a purpose-built fourstorey regatta centre, which has provided the platform for the Monsoon Cup. “It’s an event that the sailors look forward to, it takes place in some very challenging conditions, which is the monsoon itself, and there’s a lot of prize money at stake. It’s the event that every team on the tour really aspires to win at the end of the season.”
Teams compete in identical boats at each leg of the tour, but each local organiser is left to decide on the make of the fleet
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IMOCA: a new dawn IMOCA has been a successful operator of Open 60 class events like the Vendée Globe but hopes to internationalise their appeal in a new partnership with Open Sports Management
Some of sailing’s most challenging events fall under the control of IMOCA and now an organisation traditionally dominated by the French is on the cusp of a radical overhaul, with a British entrepreneur pulling the commercial strings. For all Sir Keith Mills’ many business interests – he was the founder of Air Miles and was vice chairman of Locog, the local organising committee of London 2012, amongst many others – it is clear, from a quick glance round his well-appointed central London office, that sailing is one of the great passions of his life. A scale model of a Team Originbranded boat is a reminder of the British team he created with the aim, unfulfilled in the end, of challenging for the America’s Cup, while Sir Thomas Lipton’s book chronicling his famous efforts to win the Auld Mug is neatly, but noticeably, tucked away on a shelf. It is in another form of sailing, however, where Mills is now focusing his attention. Late last year, the multi-millionaire Briton acquired the multi-year commercial rights, through a start-up called Open Sports Management (OSM), to the International Monohull Open Class Association (IMOCA). IMOCA sanctions the Open 60 class of yachts, single and double-handed ocean races including the prestigious Vendée Globe and the likes of the Barcelona World Race and Transat Jacques Vabre. Mills is now plotting the commercial future for a part of the sport that he – and, it must be said, most of those within it – feels is ripe for modernisation. Mills is no Johnny-come-lately to this world. He has a decade’s worth of experience in ocean racing as the owner of Alex Thomson Racing, a team sponsored for many years by Hugo
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Boss. It is an outfit that, geographically and commercially, bucked the trend in Open 60 class racing and it was that which sparked the initial conversations about developing the sport on a more global basis. “For some time we had been talking to IMOCA about the potential for IMOCA to take a more commercial view of their sport,” Mills says, speaking in early July, “to promote the sport in a much more overt way, broaden the audience for the sport because that’s important to all the teams, because all the teams have got sponsors and they want a bigger audience. That was the genesis of the discussions, two or three years ago.” Mills and his team suggested IMOCA hire a consulting firm who could take a strategic look at all elements of Open 60 racing and prepare some recommendations. It was off the back of that, around 18 months ago, that Mills was asked by IMOCA president Luc Talbourdet whether he would be prepared to invest in the project. “Frankly, I said, ‘I’m in the middle of organising an Olympic Games, really haven’t got the time for this right now,’” Mills recalls, “but I said I’d produce a two-page term sheet. I said, ‘If you take the term sheet to the IMOCA members, of which there are around 90 people and organisations, and if you get unanimous support, once the Games are over and I’ve a bit more time then we can turn that term sheet into a contract and off the back of that I’ll set a business up, put some money into it, etc.’ That’s how it started.” Mills’ term sheet was unanimously approved by IMOCA and, when his London 2012 duties were completed late last summer, he set about turning it into a contract. By early November, the ink was dry. “It’s a little like the Bernie Ecclestone-type arrangement with the FIA,” he summarises. “Bernie puts the commercial rights of Formula One
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Alex Thomson sails his Hugo Boss yacht past Portsmouth’s Spinnaker Tower on his way to the 2012 Vendée Globe race; Sir Keith Mills has been the owner of the Alex Thomson Racing team for over a decade
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into a separate company, he invests in building the sport and pays back to the FIA a percentage of the revenues he raises – that’s the model.” Open Sports Management, based in the Swiss city of Lausanne and already operating with a dozen staff, is being run for Mills by Peter Bayer, formerly chief executive of the Innsbruck 2012 winter Youth Olympic Games. “We’re now in the planning stages of what really is 2014, because this year is planning year and 2014 is the beginning of the new world of IMOCA,” Mills explains. “The strategy is to introduce new events, to complement the existing events. IMOCA has a pretty good circuit of events already, but the sport is dominated by the French and while that’s been terrific it makes it difficult commercially for international companies. The strategy is to make Open 60 racing much more international, starting with international events – events that don’t just start in France. It’s taking IMOCA racing to Asia, taking it to ports and destinations that haven’t seen IMOCA racing before, making it easier for international teams and skippers to enter the sport. There are a lot of boats out there: there are 30 or 40 Open 60 race boats out there, there were 20 starters on the Vendée Globe last year. Compared to the America’s Cup, Volvo, Extreme 40 or any of the other classes, it without question has the biggest number of teams and if organised in the right way it could be very substantial.” The other challenge Mills is keen to conquer is the age-old issue of how to bring to life a sport like ocean racing, with races that last several weeks or months, to as wide an audience as possible. Investment in technology is a given. “The concept of taking ocean racing and putting into ocean racing new technology that can capture what’s going on – reactions, stories, the thrills and spills, 24 hours a day, seven days a week from 20 teams over three months and building an audience of fans – is, I think, a really exciting one,” he says.
Events IMOCA’s established events Tour de France and the Le Mans 24 Hours as a curiously French sporting institution. Hundreds of thousands of spectators attend the start and the finish of the race at the port of Les Sables-d’Olonne, in the north-west of France. The most recent edition, which began in November 2012 and finished on 27th January, was the fastest race and the closest finish in the seven editions of the event to date. The 20-boat fleet was headed by 29-year-old François Gabart, although the nature of the event means that all finishers – 11 in the 2012/13 event – are hailed. Since 2006, another staple IMOCA event has been the Barcelona World Race, a double-handed round-the-world challenge which starts and finishes in the Spanish city. The 2014/15 race will be the third, following the debut event in 2006/07 and a second in 2010/11. The 2014/15 edition will begin on 31st December 2014 and is expected
“The engagement of those fans is much greater than the engagement you get for a short sports event where you get them for an hour or two and then they’re gone. The opportunity for you to integrate that content with things like gaming where, as a spectator, you can put your boat in the race and you can race alongside the pros in real time, and make decisions on sail changes, new headings – suddenly the level of engagement goes up rapidly.” Mills anticipates that it will take IMOCA and OSM four years, or until the next edition of the showpiece Vendée Globe, to fully implement the strategy. “By the time we get to the next Vendée Globe there will be more international teams, there will be technology and content coming out of a race like that Vendée Globe that will be rich and diverse,” he promises, “and on the way to the Vendée Globe we’ll create some unique commercial properties,
starting with the world championship.” In parallel with the creation of new races in new markets, Mills says OSM will be working closely with existing races, events in some cases with long traditions that are a crucial part of the ocean racing fabric. But Mills insists there is a mood for change, even for organisers of existing, successful events, and that any changes will not alter the status of the major races. “The Vendée Globe is to sailing what the Tour de France is to cycling,” he says. “The fact the Tour de France is now a very international event, with lots of international riders, hasn’t made the Tour de France any less French or diluted it. That’s really what we’re trying to do in terms of working with the Vendée Globe. It’s the pinnacle event in this form of sailing. If you are ocean racing there is no tougher event than sailing a 60-foot boat on your own for three months around the
to end the following March. The race traces a traditional sailing route, comprising 20,000 nautical miles. The Transat Jacques Vabre returns this year for the first time since 2007. First sailed in 1993, the event will start this year in Le Havre, France and finish in the Brazilian port of Itajaí. A fleet of over 40 boats, in four categories including the Open 60s, will compete over the 5,400-mile course from 3rd November. The Rolex Fastnet Race, known as such since 2001 but sailed as the Fastnet since 1979, is organised by Britain’s Royal Ocean Racing Club. The biennial event, again for a variety of classes, took place in August 2013 and follows a route from Cowes to Plymouth. The Route du Rhum, meanwhile, is a quadrennial event first run in 2006. The transatlantic race runs from Saint Malo in France to Pointe-a-Pitre in Guadeloupe. The tenth edition will be staged in November 2014.
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IMOCA, the International Monohull Open Class Association, was founded in 1991 and received official recognition from ISAF in 1998. It oversees the rule development of the 60-foot Open monohulls, boats which must adhere only to the so-called ‘box rule’. A set of measurements, most importantly that boats be 60 feet in length, is in place, with designers given freedom beyond that to produce a competitive boat as they see fit. IMOCA is essentially responsible for ocean racing, with events, both single and double-handed, including the Transat Jacques Vabre, Rolex Fastnet Race, Barcelona World Race, Route du Rhum and, every four years, the mighty Vendée Globe. The latter is IMOCA’s most prestigious event, a single-handed, non-stop race around the world. Run for the first time in 1989, it has become sailing’s ultimate challenge, a test of bravery, skill and endurance, and has quickly joined the likes of the
world, in the toughest conditions – nothing touches it. There is not going to be a race anything like the Vendée Globe, so it’s very special. “The challenge for the Vendée organisers,” Mills continues, warming to his theme, “is that they want the sport that underpins their event to be sustainable and to grow. They’d certainly like to have more international competitors. They want to put the Vendée region on the world map – they want the region to be as well known in China or America or Latin America as it is in France. It’s not just promoting to French people, it’s promoting it to the world. We’ve got a great relationship with the Vendée organisers and we will work in collaboration with them to make their event bigger and more economically sustainable. They’ve been incredibly supportive of what we’re doing – they’re very excited.”
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Air Miles founder Sir Keith Mills had a hugely successful stint as vice chairman of Locog before founding Open Sports Management and acquiring IMOCA’s commercial rights
IMOCA race calendar 2013/14 August:
Fastnet Race
November:
Transat Jacques Vabre
Spring:
Double-handed Transat – Route TBC
Summer:
A 1,000 mile long race – Route TBC
November:
Route du Rhum
December:
Barcelona World Race
12 of the 20 boats in last year’s Vendée were French and French sailors have won all seven editions since the first event in 1989, most recently François Gabart aboard Macif in record time in January. Mills, however, believes there are benefits in his plans for the French even if the country’s dominance of the class may come under threat. “Many of the French teams are sponsored by relatively small and very local French companies,” he points out, “and the concern was, what does this do for them? It doesn’t take anything away from what they’re doing right now. All it’s doing is adding to the mix and one of the things many of the teams have a problem with is that they are wedded to one partner, one sponsor, and if that sponsor goes away, the team goes away. This is an opportunity for the teams to bring on board other international commercial partners so they’re less reliant on just one French sponsor, and if they do lose their one French sponsor the potential market for them to go and talk to is much larger than just the north-west corner of France.” To help nudge the internationalisation process along, Mills says there will be incentives for teams fielding sailors from different nationalities in double-handed events in the build-up to the Barcelona World Race, which is scheduled for December 2014. He also hopes there are opportunities for new teams tied to new race venues.
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“There’s some new events we’re talking about now where the country involved has said, ‘We absolutely need to have a team from our country and we, the country, will fund that,’ a bit like Team New Zealand has,” he reveals. “By opening up different markets you’re bringing in international teams. “It’s really thinking about how you make it more attractive and accessible, and the great thing about the IMOCA class and the sport is that the cost of running a top team, like Hugo Boss or Banque Populaire, compared to a Volvo race or an America’s Cup team is relatively small. You’re talking about two to three million a year, not ten to 20 million a year or, in the case of the America’s Cup, name your price. It’s incredibly accessible so if you can expand the market and build an international fanbase over a period of time – it’s not going to happen overnight – then it becomes very accessible.” Mills anticipates the bulk of OSM’s initial revenues to come from sponsorship. “There will be sponsorship opportunities at the world championship level, sponsorship opportunities through the new events, more sponsorship opportunities for existing events,” he explains, “so we’ll be working with the Vendée Globe organisers, Barcelona World Race, Transat Jacques Vabre, Route du Rhum and other race organisers to help them turbo-charge their events. “To the extent that we collaborate with those entities there’ll be revenuesharing opportunities. To the extent that we take an event to a new venue and we are the event organiser we’ll expect the event to provide some facilities and perhaps even one day even pay for the event to come, though that’s not the expectation in the first three or four years, but certainly to cover all or most of the cost of hosting the event. What the event gets is the benefit of hosting a big event, the publicity, the tourist traffic and the ability to do their own local marketing. If we have a naming rights partner for a particular new race – say, the HSBC
Asia Series – that’s revenue into OSM, which we share with IMOCA. As new events become established, Mills suggests there may be revenue opportunities through hosting fees, while he is also hopeful about the possibility of revenues derived from online content. He is also open to helping teams themselves become established in the class in the future. “To make it interesting for everyone,” he says, when asked about overall revenue targets, “it needs to be tens of millions. “I love the sport of sailing,” he adds, “but basically I’m an entrepreneur. I’m doing this, a, because I love the sport, and b, because I think it’s going to be profitable. This is not a philanthropic gesture. I’m doing this because I think it’s commercially viable and I’m prepared to invest money over the next three or four years to build it into something that is a profitable business. Like most of the businesses I invest in, I expect it to make money. And most of the businesses I invest in, thankfully, do make money. Some don’t but that’s the risk you take when you’re an entrepreneur.” The spirit, adventure, risk and challenge of sailing have Mills hooked and there is a passion in his voice when he discusses how to convey those elements of ocean racing to a wider audience. “I’ve been supporting an Open 60 team for ten years. I know it is an incredible property, unlike pretty much any sporting property I’ve been involved in. There isn’t a sport that tells
Events IMOCA boats - 2013 Designer
Skipper
Cheminées Poujoulat
Juan Kouyoumdijan
Bernard Stamm
Mirabaud
Owen Clarke Design
Dominique Wavre
Energia
Finot-Conq
Zbigniew Gutkowski
Hugo Boss
Farr Yacht Design
Alex Thomson
Gamesa
Owen Clarke Design
Mike Golding
PRB
VPLP-Verdier
Vincent Riou/Jean Le Cam
Initiatives-Coeur
Marc Lombard
Tanguy De Lamotte
Votre Nom Autour du Monde avec EDM Projets
Finot-Conq
Bertraind De Broc
Synerciel
Farr Yacht Design
Jean Le Cam
Team Plastique
Finot-Conq
Alessandro Di Benedetto
Groupe BEL
VPLP-Verdier
Kito de Pavant
Bureau Vallée
Farr Yacht Design
Louis Burton
Macif
VPLP-Verdier
Francois Gabart/Michel Desjoyeaux
Savéol
Marc Lombart
Samantha Davies
Safran
VPLP-Verdier
Marc Guillemot
Banque Populaire
VPLP-Verdier
Armel Le Cleac’h
Akena Verandas
Farr Yacht Design
Arnaud Boissieres
Virbac-Paprec 3
VPLP-Verdier
Jean-Pierre Dick
Maitre CoQ
Farr Yacht Design
Jeremie Beyou
Acciona 100% Ecopowered
Owen Clarke Design
Javier Sanso
a story more emotively than a single guy or girl racing around the world on their own, only sleeping 20 minutes at a time for four months, dealing with everything themselves – whether they lose a finger, chop their tongue off or whatever – and having to fix those things themselves is quite unique. Even the most extreme sports like the Tour de France, which is an extreme form of cycling, have a massive team behind them. Nobody helps you, in fact the rules say ‘no help’ other than talking to someone on the telephone. “It’s all about the heroes – personal endeavour and extraordinary courage. You get over half a million at the start of the Vendée Globe and they know there’s a reasonable chance that one of these guys, perhaps more than one,
won’t come back. They’re taking huge risks. The stories you can tell about these individuals, not just when they’re on the boat but all the trials and tribulations they go to to literally get to the start line, are being told to a tiny audience right now. I think they’re very exciting if they’re brought to life – and technology helps us to bring them to life – to a much wider audience. I absolutely do believe this is much more about individuals than big corporations and big teams. Paralleling it with the Volvo race, where the teams are very heavily branded and actually you have 12 or 16 guys on the boat, I don’t think that tells the same kind of story at all than you get from somebody who’s sailing single-handed or doublehanded around the world.”
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Team/Boat
There is an assuredness about Mills that is likely to translate well as OSM helps push IMOCA into its brave new world. Should he succeed, ocean racing will see four years of substantial change. “We will have, we hope, transformed the sport from a very Frenchdominated, non-commercial sport with a limited audience, except in France where it’s huge, to an international sport with more international teams sailing at more international destinations, with the commercial support that goes with that,” he says. “That makes, I think, a remarkable property that we can expose to the world. “If we can tell those stories effectively to the world it will captivate a large audience, I think – I might be wrong, but I think I’m right.”
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The Clipper Round the World Yacht Race is one of the events The Sports Consultancy’s Angus Buchanan sees as the most successful in sailing
A commercial break: meet the experts The Sports Consultancy works across a wide range of sports but the London-based company’s co-managing directors, Angus Buchanan and Robert Datnow, describe sailing as a “foundation sport” of their business.
million in sailing alone, combined with their experience in other sports around the world, Buchanan and Datnow are the ideal people to discuss the commercial health of sailing and some of the major challenges the sport’s biggest events are facing. How have you seen the sport change?
“When we started in 2006 it was the lion’s share of what we were doing and it’s still a significant part of what we’re doing,” says Buchanan, a former sailor himself, “but we’re now involved in many other sports and events – legal, commercial, strategic, host city. Our business has broadened significantly but it’s still something we find ourselves doing a lot of, ranging from Sir Ben Ainslie and David Becker, who is one of our recent signings as a director – he works with Sir Ben – right through to the work we are doing with the Volvo Ocean Race, Open 60 racing over the years, ISAF over the years, America’s Cup over the years and hopefully in the future.” Having worked on deals with a cumulative value of around UK£200
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Angus Buchanan: In terms of the commercialisation, a lot of the change has been driven by the changing way in which media is consumed. The Volvo Ocean Race was one of the first events to really embrace the opportunities presented by the internet. In terms of enabling what can be sometimes a little bit of a fragmented audience experience of the sport, internet and digital platforms really provided sailing with an opportunity which it’s embraced – you see that in the way in which they capture content ranging from the Vendée Globe, with interviews with the skippers which have been webcast for a long time now, through to the miniature broadcast units.
You’ve also seen a revolution, in offshore yachting, in satellite communications which has helped take content from the boats, sometimes 7,000 or 8,000 miles from shore and bring that back to the audience, again using increased speeds of satellite communication and the platform that the web provides. I think sponsor involvement has probably increased as has the sophistication in the way they leverage the sport. We’ve seen, in recent years, more consumer brands coming into the sport, which was traditionally seen as principally a B2B platform – it relies very heavily on VIP hospitality and entertainment. Would it be fair to say it was once seen as a ‘chairman’s whim’ type of sport? Buchanan: That’s absolutely fair. I suppose the criticism of any form of sports sponsorship is that it’s driven by the chairman’s whim but with sailing perhaps that was the case back in the 80s and 90s. But I think the sport, like all sports, has matured and has had to
Events be much more focused on delivering against brand and business objectives for its brand sponsors, even if there is still an interest as with many other sports at board level in the sport itself. It’s certainly had to become more savvy about the way in which it delivers return on investment for the sponsor, irrespective of where the decision comes from.
The rules also must present something of a challenge? Datnow: To be able to interact with a spectator in any sport, the rules have to be simple: you need to be able to
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Datnow: Sometimes as we’re travelling around the world, either securing sponsors or securing venues or helping negotiate broadcast deals, I think there is a perception, and we see it in particular markets – in the States for example, they talk about a particular type of person who goes to see it – they talk about this being an elitist sport. Certainly in the 12 years or so that I’ve been involved in the professionalisation and commercialisation of sailing, I’ve seen a number of things. There are two or three additional difficulties with engaging with the public that are relevant for sponsors and venues. Sailing happens offshore and that’s just an inherent difficulty, whether it’s round-the-world yachting or inshore racing, the difficulty for the race organiser is to bring the action as close to the viewing public as possible. That’s very difficult to do. What I’ve seen over the last decade or so is technologies being created, in a sport that has to probably work harder than any sport, to bring the action on the shore, whether that’s to the spectator at home on TV, or to somebody sitting at their desk playing a game, whether it’s through the use of HD footage, or whether it’s simply creating stadium seating as happened at the Olympic Games and with the America’s Cup. I’ve seen that aspect particularly.
Co-managing directors Robert Datnow and Angus Buchanan founded The Sports Consultancy, based in London, in 2006
see that the person who kicks the most goals wins, or the person who crosses the line first is the winner. Sailing has an inherent complexity to it – a regatta format or a fleet-racing format or a match-racing format – and there is a culture of appeals and rules. What I’ve noticed is the formats of sailing events have changed in order to make the event, from a sporting perspective, more accessible for the general public – we’ve seen 24-hour run records, speed records and they are digestible and easily understood. You mentioned TV – does sailing face a particular difficulty in that the sport has tended to measured, like other sports, by TV rights revenues when it isn’t naturally suited to TV?
Buchanan: Sailing’s revenues on the commercial side have all come from sponsorship. The America’s Cup may be the first event to really see some gate receipt, which would be a first. There’s other events that have sort of had bleachers but no one has really been trying to drive ticket sales the way the America’s Cup has with this stadium sailing concept – the term was coined by Extreme 40s. Rightly, they’ve seized upon it and built upon it. That’s probably the first time in our experience we’ve seen anything from gate receipt, which is an innovation from the America’s Cup which is slightly overlooked. But the lion’s share of the commercial revenues are driven from sponsorship and if it’s driven from sponsorship it has to
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Datnow and Buchanan met while putting together a sponsorship deal between Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean film series and the Volvo Ocean Race
be about two things: one, delivering on the VIP and hospitality elements, and, two, delivering on the audience. It’s a very valuable, quite hard-to-reach demographic, so sailing is I think rightly now focusing on how it delivers the maximum possible share of that very valuable audience for its sponsors and looking at multiple platforms for doing that. It’s had to become much more innovative in the ways it’s delivering content to that audience, be that through understanding what will work as a broadcast offering and what won’t, whether there’s a strong return on investment from that broadcast offering. Is it worth investing in live? Is that going to drive significant audiences? Does the format of the sport work against live programming? Because perhaps more than any outdoor sport it’s weather-dependent. That’s another innovation from the America’s Cup in that they have a class of boat which is capable of sailing in a wider range of wind conditions, particularly at the lower end, which means it’s slightly more reliable as a broadcast product. But how else do you take content, package it and distribute it in a way that’s going to add value to the spectators’ experience and grow that audience and deliver that to the sponsor so you can maximise your
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sponsorship revenues? It cannot depend, in the way other sports can depend, on broadcast revenue as a significant slice of its revenue. Datnow: But it can do other things. We say necessity is the mother of invention in this sport because there are certain things that sailing has, almost uniquely, had to invent in terms of the broadcast proposition. With high definition on-board cameras and a camera operator, or the ability to be able to get a soundbite from the skipper or navigator while they are competing – in Formula One you occasionally get a snippet of radio, but for the viewer of a sailing event to be able to tweet on board and ask the skipper what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, to get some kind of in-competition feedback and then for the fans to be able to talk about that on social media, I can’t think of other sports that can do that. Buchanan: If the general theme is bringing the viewer closer to the action, I think that’s where sailing is leading – in the dinghy format it’s harder because obviously that’s not going to work. But it’s greater engagement and bringing the consumer much closer to the action. With the Volvo Ocean Race, I can’t think of any other sport which has
an embedded media crew member focusing on nothing but the production of content. That’s pretty unique but also the Volvo Ocean Race – and it was planned for the America’s Cup but for obvious reasons, which are linked to the tragedy, it has been shelved – has the VIP crew member; to be able to engage your sponsors and their guests on the piece of equipment you’re racing. Famously, on the Volvo Ocean Race teams used to throw the sponsor guest – usually the CEO – off the back of the boat after they’ve started and they got picked up by a rib. That level of engagement – it’s very hard to think of any other sport which is able to do that. That’s maybe a benefit of one of the issues sailing has to deal with, in that it’s an equipment-based sport – you can do a lot with that equipment, but it is an equipment-based sport and that has a number of issues in terms of trying to communicate that back to the audience and the cost of competition. There’s also confusion around seven or eight different types of equipment competing at the Olympic Games, in different formats – single, double, triple-handed sailing. Those things present problems but I think there are opportunities there, which I think the sport has been quite good at capitalising on. The new one-design Volvo Ocean Race boat has media equipment built into the design. Is part of the challenge that this general perception, amongst broadcasters, that sailing doesn’t work on television still exists? Buchanan: I think there’s a recognition that sailing doesn’t work on TV in the same way as an 80 or 90-minute match works on TV and therefore it’s different. It’s not just sailing that has that as an issue. Cricket has gone from a five-day Test match through to Twenty20, looking for a way to adapt its format so it better suits the modern patterns of media consumption around sport. What sailing, I think, is doing is
Events
Events
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constantly adjusting to a shifting landscape. You have on the one hand inshore racing, the pinnacle of which is the America’s Cup, which has really tried to adjust the format to better suit the 80 or 90-minute shorter format of modern sport. They’re still in the process of adjusting and there have been other events that have pioneered that shorter format, such as Extreme 40. On the one hand it’s recognising that sailing can adapt, albeit I think in the last five years with pretty significant investment in media production in order to make that possible. That in itself is also changing because the technology is becoming cheaper so while high definition five or ten years ago was a massive investment, now you have GoPro. Even dinghy sailors can be wearing a GoPro helmet and have one strapped to the spreader and actually be producing really high quality television footage. At the other end of the spectrum
we have the offshore races, which are realising they have great content but perhaps that it needs to be about something other than just the sport, whilst not forgetting the sporting component – life on board, the dynamics of the relationship between the crew members. But that’s not enough in itself and I think we’ve seen an adjustment which is to say, where offshore racing has traditionally focused on the Corinthian nature of the event, the adventure and life at sea, that’s not enough. The Volvo Ocean Race has been quick to understand that it’s all very well to have that as a key part of your DNA as an event, but it still has to be a compelling sporting event. They’ve shot a number of foxes with the one design because it not only reduces the cost, it also increases the close, competitive racing and means it’s more about the people on board and less about the equipment and
I think they’re now rightly taking a direction more towards elevating the sporting element of the Volvo Ocean Race, whilst focusing on the broader, lifestyle interest. That will lead to a different form of TV broadcast and production, which I think [Volvo Ocean Race chief executive] Knut Frostad and his team are very hot on, understanding how you get that balance of the sporting and the lifestyle.
Datnow believes the involvement of host cities as stopovers and race entrants has allowed promotion around events like the Volvo Ocean Race to become more of a “consumer experience”
We’ve seen several new formats and tweaks to existing formats: what’s your sense of how the sailing community feels about the trade-off between history and tradition and the modernity required to thrive? Buchanan: Sport elicits strong emotions and sport is very famous for defining quite segmented audiences. Core audiences become very accustomed to the sport being delivered to them
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Emirates Team New Zealand was one of only three teams in the America’s Cup challenger series this year and Buchanan believes the organisers need to address the cost of entry
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in a certain way and with any change, be that Twenty20 in cricket, which I’m sure had its naysayers, or changes to Formula One, there’s a general understanding that things are always in a state of change and flux. And actually while there have been members of the core audience who resist that, I think retrospectively they would have understood why it was necessary – that a sport has to continue to, in a very competitive sporting landscape, develop and evolve and grow new audiences in new markets, maybe different demographics or age groups. Yes, there’s always a degree of resistance when it comes to change and, yes, you have to be very cautious in the way you balance the need to grow your audience with the needs and requirements of your traditional audience. I think, for the most part, the sport has been pretty good at doing that – even when there have been some
really quite brave and fundamental changes to the events, such as the ones we saw with the Volvo Ocean Race in 2008/09 with the new route and the new format, with inshore racing. What was normally a four-year event, with a very traditional trade winds route, became an event held every three years with a non-traditional route with a strong inshore component. I think clearly there would have been questions raised at the time about that but I think for the most part it’s rewarded the event organiser with a growth in audience and probably a degree of acceptance from its core audience that change was necessary. It’s recently happened again with the one design where I suppose there were members of the core audience who would have been slightly disappointed by the move away from an open-design rule, but it’s justified in terms of the benefits of reduced cost and greater return on investment
for sponsors. But also what perhaps the wider audience won’t appreciate until they see them racing is the much closer, competitive racing – the spectacle as a sporting event. There’s also been radical change in the America’s Cup. The format changes have been driven by them, as they’ve said, wanting to have more of a Nascar production of the America’s Cup. How tried and tested is the sailing host city/stopover business model? How has it evolved? Datnow: In terms of Volvo, I can see a number of evolutions in how a stopover itself is organised. It’s become, in terms of the broadcast proposition during the stopover, more predictable and more, I think, formulaic because it has to be – with predictable start and finish times of in-port racing and departures.
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In terms of where the power lies in sailing, what impact does it have that ISAF has little control over the main pro competitions from a commercial standpoint? Buchanan: The governing body is clearly important. It sets and administers the racing rule of sailing, at the heart of the sport sometimes arcane and hard to understand, and it manages the quite disparate interests of the elite commercial events with more grassroots participation of the sport. Probably not unlike governing bodies in other sports it has a degree of influence and control over the major events in terms of sanctioning, the special event status, but probably its real influence lies much
The America’s Cup has embraced the inshore ‘stadium’ sailing concept pioneered by the Extreme Sailing Series, prompting Buchanan to suggest it could be the first event to earn gate revenues
more at participation level, Olympic sailing and the grassroots participation side of the sport. How do you see the commercial future of sailing? Buchanan: There’s been a little bit of an overhang in terms of cost – from the heyday of the early 2000s, through to 2007-8, history probably shows that the Volvo Ocean Race and the America’s Cup did some of the biggest deals they’ve ever done in terms of host cities, sponsors. Valencia was the absolute high watermark of the America’s Cup; the Volvo Ocean Race is still going strong but was very successful in 2007. If there’s one thing event organisers need to be mindful of, it’s making sure that they preserve return on investment not just by everything we’ve talked about – innovative means of delivery, value to the sponsors, focusing on core audience – but cost. It’s not the only equipment-based sport which has had a real issue with managing cost and the America’s Cup – they’ve said it themselves – need to look at the way in which that’s managed, to keep the cost of competitive entry down to a reasonable, realistic level. The Volvo Ocean Race has already taken those steps and it’ll be interesting to see how it works through. In terms of great innovation, I think actually it’s the small but
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One of the sacrosanct principles has been keeping the public access free, but with hospitality components, on water and in-village premium entertainment. The quality of those premium experiences has increased for the paying public in the village. I’ve seen the organisation, the layout change: what at the start was a business-to-business environment, with brands using the event almost exclusively as a B2B event, but what you see now is much more of a consumer event, with not just food and beverage but with brands – Puma, Camper in the last race – and the destinations brands – Abu Dhabi, Sanya – using the stopover experience as a method for promoting the product or destination and providing for a consumer experience. The other thing is the host city using the stopover as an entertainment event as a well as a sporting event, with concerts and other content, pro am, youth sailing. The cities have used the stopover as an event in itself, a 16-day period in which to promote themselves, but have also taken their own destination, particularly with the Volvo Ocean Race brand and marketed themselves in other destinations – Abu Dhabi or Sanya or Ireland. All of that developed.
important changes and the harnessing of technology and the advantages that gives you as a sport. More than likely, we’ve been through a period of quite rapid consolidation. There’s a flight to quality in a recession and I think we’ve seen that through the last few years and we’ve identified those events which will continue to succeed, which are Extreme 40, Clipper, America’s Cup, Volvo and IMOCA. Now there’s an opportunity perhaps for ISAF to work with the organisers of those sports to protect, support and nourish those events over the long term. That consolidation is a good thing. I’m not sure we’re going to see a plethora of new events coming to the fore. Datnow: I think you’ll see the format of events changing on-water and I think you’ll see the format of stopovers changing as well. I think there’s one major opportunity that other sports capitalise on but sailing, particularly as an equipment-based sport, doesn’t and that’s the boat show, consumer retail fair. When you have a captive audience of up to a million, free access, spectators coming to a village, they are the people interested in a particular sport. More often than not there isn’t a consumer trade fair, boat show built around the stopover and I think that’s a missed opportunity for cities, for the public and for the event organiser.
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SCAN THIS CODE TO WATCH THE VIDEO GUIDE TO MATCH RACING
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4 / Luxury 108.
Super yachts in 2013
116.
The business of boat shows
120.
Gallery: sailingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most prestigious regattas
Luxury Sailing has always held as much of an emotional appeal in the leisure industry as it does in sport, from the high-end super yacht sector to the more casual boating enthusiast.
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193 super yachts sold in 2013 (up to and including 12th August)
â&#x201A;Ź1,389m
â&#x201A;Ź70m
total combined asking prices so far in 2013
most expensive yacht sold
77.7m largest yacht sold
10m
20m
30m
40m
50m
60m
70m
80m
90m
(Source: Boat International)
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World’s ten largest superyachts (2013)
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Name
Built
Designer
Length
Owner
1) Azzam
2013
Lurssen Yachts
180m
Unknown
2) Eclipse
2010
Blohm + Voss Shipyards
162.5m
Roman Abramovich
3) Dubai
2006
Platinum Yachts
162m
HH Sheikh Mohammed Rashid al-Maktoum
4) Al Said
2008
Lurssen Yachts
155m
Unknown
5=) Prince Abdulaziz
1984
Helsingor Vaerft
147m
Saudi Royal Family
5=) Topaz
2012
Lurssen Yachts
147m
Unknown
7) El Horriya
1865
Samuda Bros.
145.72m
Egyptian president
8) Yas
2011
ADMShipyards
141m
Unknown
9) Al Salamah
1999
Lurssen Yachts
139m
Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz
10) Rising Sun
2004
Lurssen Yachts
138.4m
David Geffen
Luxury The major boat shows: big business Despite being at the mercy of the global economy, boat shows remain big business around the world, a fact perhaps best underlined by the US$267 million worth of business completed during the 2012 edition of the São Paulo Boat Show, Latin America’s largest yacht show. New events are springing up in major cities and ports on every
continent but amongst the most prestigious is the Monaco Yacht Show, which takes place every September. The 2013 edition, in Monte Carlo’s Port Hercule, was set to feature over 100 of the world’s most luxurious and largest yachts – in 2012 the average length was 46.7 metres, with some 40 new builds on display. 33,000 people attended. The Salon Nautique de Paris,
held each December, caters for the luxury market as well as the boating industry at large. Some 810 exhibitors are expected, as are over 240,000 spectators. There will be 800-plus boats on display. The Genoa show, meanwhile, is expecting 900 exhibitors and visitor numbers in excess of the 178,000 that attended last year.
Major Boat Shows – 4th quarter 2013 Southampton Boat Show, UK
September 21st-29th
Istanbul Boat Show, Turkey
September 22nd-27th
São Paulo Boat Show, Brazil
September 25th-28th
Monaco Yacht Show, Monaco
October 5th-13th
Genoa Boat Show, Italy
December 6th-15th
Salon Nautique International de Paris, France
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September 13th-22nd
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ACI Regattas: A Priceless Opportunity
for Competitors and Advertisers For 6 years now, the ACI Match Race Cup regattas have been bringing the greatest names of world sailing to the Croatian Adriatic coast. Dickson, Coutts, Cayard, Cudmore, Gilmour and Conner are only some of the yachting stars who have carried the message of the beauty of the Adriatic and ACI marinas all over the world. Today, ACI offers professional yachtsmen, sporting amateurs, companies and institutions many opportunities for competitions, fun, presentations and sales. Find out why many companies and sports associations put their trust in ACI.
A LONG-TERM EXPERIENCE Since 1987, ACI has hosted numerous regional, European and world yachting competitions. This sporting and yachting story has already lasted for two and a half decades. ACI began to write it at the end of the 1980s when it organised the first ACI Match Race Cup, the spectacle that brought the world's best yachtsmen to Rovinj. As the first ACI Match Race Cup was organized immediately after the 27th America’s Cup, it was considered to be the turning point in the popularization of yachting sports and due to the great media attention, the greatest sportsmen accepted the invitation
to compete in Croatian waters: Harold Cudmore from Great Britain, Hubert Raundashl from Austria, Pele Petterson from Sweden and Pierre Fehlmann from Switzerland. The next year at the ACI Match Race, some of the greatest names of this sport, such as Chris Dickson, Peter Gilmour, Tommas Chieffi, and the legendary Paul Cayard did not miss this opportunity either. Thanks to the support and the recommendations of the greatest yachting stars, as well as the relevant yachting institutions like WMRA and ISAF, ACI was entrusted with the organization of the world championship in match racing (1996 in Dubrovnik and 2000 in Split), as well as many other competitions. The awards for the effort and the confirmation of the quality came soon from the very top of world yachting when the competitions organized by ACI took the high second place of the best-organized Worl Match Racing Tour regattas, an accolade they still hold today. Thanks to the unique combination of wonderful nature, ideal weather conditions, strategically placed marinas and excellent logistics, as well as long-term experience in organizing the most complex yachting matches - ACI offers maximum appeal to yachtsmen.
ACI - A UNIQUE CHAIN OF 21 YACHT MARINAS Today the developed coastline, hundreds of islands, numerous bays and gulfs, marinas, and harbours, as well as the exquisite gastronomical treats on offer, grant Croatia the rightful status of yachtsman's heaven, and ACI marinas enable yachtsmen to investigate this coast. ACI marinas are strategically located from Umag in the far north to Dubrovnik in the south of the Croatian coast. Each of the 21 marinas is located in the middle or near some of the most beautiful natural wonders of Croatia, so that sailing and competition in this spectacular environment is really a special experience. Whether great competitions for top sportsmen, smaller recreational competitions for amateurs or recreational sailing, ACI enables yachtsmen to experience these spectacles under sails at the most attractive parts of the Adriatic coast, ensuring full organizational, technical and logistical support. With a little under 30 years of experience in organizing sailing competitions, ACI knows more than anybody else how to improve the experience of sailing the Adriatic, how to fully use all the advantages of this desirable aquatorium known globally and to
numerous yachtsmen. ACI knows how to ensure an unforgettable experience for yachtsmen that they will remember for a long time. Regardless of the type of competition, you may turn to ACI, because the offers created by this nautical company will be optimized and adjusted to the requirements of your yachtsmen.
THE UNFORGETTABLE ARCHIPELAGO The eastern coast of the Adriatic sea, where ACI marinas are located, is one of the most developed coastlines in the world. Hidden bays and harbors, beautiful secluded beaches and a series of 1244 islands from Istria to Dubrovnik in the south east, are globally recognized Croatian symbols which delight all the sailing fans. Adding to this ancient coastal towns, the stone guardians of a thousand years of history towns that are alive and well today, it is clear why foreign yachtsmen keep returning to the Adriatic coast. In the last year, ACI hosted more than 400,000 yachtsmen, and the company is especially proud of the fact that every second foreign yachtsmen has sailed six or more times on the Adriatic, which is a proof of their loyalty to the Croatian marinas, as well as to the quality of yachting available.
too small. The company has organized tens of successful events from the mega-events, including the marinas along the entire coast, to the smaller, specific events in one of the marinas. The creative freedom that ACI offers to organizers and participants is the quiet and invisible support in all segments and all levels of the organization, as well as many partner companies and institutions that are ACI’s collaborators - all this positions ACI at the top of the list of Croatian companies with the knowledge and opportunity to assist you in realizing your various marketing goals.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR PRESENTATIONS AND ADVERTISING The infrastructure, experience and organizational possibilities of ACI open the possibility of total activation of brands in the beautiful environment to companies and advertisers. General branding, presentations of individual products and services, the sponsors’ support to individual events, raising the awareness of the company’s existence or its products, press conferences, partner conferences or linking products and services with individual events or competitions - trust ACI with your needs. Many companies, institutions and people, associations, societies and sport clubs that used ACI to present or advertise their products will bear witness of the results achieved in collaboration with this leading Croatian yachting company. Also, for ACI no event is too large or
ACI Opatija M. Tita 151, 51410 Opatija, Croatia Tel.: +385 (0) 51 271 288 Fax: +385 (0) 51 271 824 www.aci.hr E-mail: aci@aci-club.hr
Inside the industry January’s London Boat Show is one of the world’s largest and most important marine leisure events, showcasing all aspects of the industry, from super yachts to technical equipment. The 2013 show attracted over 100,000 people to the ExCel Centre and hopes are high for an increase in numbers this time round. Murray Ellis, the chief executive of National Boat Shows, which organises the London Boat Show and its sister event in Southampton, sat down with the Sailing Black Book to preview the event and examine the wider challenges facing the global boating and marine industry.
How are preparations going for the 2014 London Boat Show? It’s continuous really, once we finish a show we start it again. We also own and run the PSP Southampton Boat Show, which is London’s sister show and very important to the marine leisure industry as well. At the present time the industry is concentrating on Southampton, which starts on 13th September. The initial preparation for London is already underway – we’ve probably sold just over 50 per cent of the space from last year and we’ve got some key exhibitors already signed up ready to go; some of them, like Princess International, are committed to doing London for the next two years, which is very, very good. We’re hoping to secure that same sort of commitment from Sunseeker and Fairline, the major powerboat manufacturers in this country. How have these shows grown over the years and how has that matched the growth of the industry?
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2014 will be London’s 60th show, so London is one of the most established shows in the global market. Both London and Southampton sit, and I say this very proudly, within the top ten boats shows in the world – probably 90 boat shows. The shows often reflect the state of the marine leisure industry. Boat shows are part of a company’s marketing strategy; to do a boat show, where a visitor or potential customer can go along, touch, feel the boats, try the boats – a boat show is the only place you can do that. They are extremely important, whether you’re a manufacturer, a dealer or even an equipment company, because you can talk to your customer. When times are good, and we certainly saw that in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s, a lot of boats are sold, there’s a lot of money around and companies are very keen to have more marketing budget to go out and buy space, which is the currency we deal in, in terms of the size of the show. Since 2008, when the world fell off the table, buying boats and equipment is a discretionary spend for the boating enthusiast, whether you’re involved in it for sport, as a hobby or just as a part-time leisure activity. It’s not surprising that the leisure marine industry has not been isolated from the global economic downturn. We’ve seen our shows reduce in size probably by 20 per cent but both our shows have stood up very well when we compare them to shows around the world. There’s a lot of shows in Europe that I can see not surviving at all and some of them are not surviving. We’re obviously going to react to what the market is doing, what our customers, the manufacturers and equipment companies, can afford to spend – because they still need to do the shows as it’s a very important sales platform – in relation to the economic downturn over the last four or five years.
Did it change the extent to which you position the show, as an event for the luxury market? We’ve had to. If you take our very successful British powerboat and super yacht builders, their market was global but then they looked at the market in Europe, which has reduced drastically. The UK market and European market have reduced significantly, so the companies have had to look at where they are going to sell their boats and at the emerging markets. There’s still a market in the Middle East but the emerging market is China, which pretty much replicates what’s happening in other luxury markets in terms of the appetite and spending power of the Chinese in wanting, particularly, British-manufactured goods. There’s also Russia and South America, particularly Brazil. Those companies had to look for those markets and where there was an appetite and the spending power. They changed where their markets were so what we’ve had to do in terms of the shows is – and obviously in a recession everything’s a lot harder – react to what our exhibitors, our companies want. That’s why our shows cover a broad church. We’ve had to cover the luxury end but at the same time concentrate on the enthusiasts who still want to come and see products, they still want to come and see boats – if you’re an enthusiast you want to come to the boat show, but the problem is those visitors can’t afford to buy boats, but they haven’t lost the appetite for the sport they enjoy. They’re just holding on to the boat they have and where they might have changed boats every three years or so, they’re holding on to it. That’s the same with the housing and car market. You have a high-end luxury demand the show needs to meet for our super yacht companies – and sail as well, because there are still some pretty significant sail yachts out there
Luxury
Luxury
4
as well – but also making sure that we retain the majority of the marine leisure industry. We’ve got two sets of customers: one is exhibitors, the other is visitors. We’ve had to react to make it fit more, to make the show meet all those agendas. Doing shows is challenging and it’s not the case as it was when times were good, when demand for space exceeded supply, you sold the space, everyone came in and you had the maximum amounts of brands there and people could afford to buy a new boat. Do you feel there’s a disconnect of sorts between the top-end, elite,
professional end of the sport and the mass participation, leisure end? I think it reflects the diversity and the range of boating people enjoy. Yes, there are different markets and there are people who enjoy vast wealth that can go and buy multimillion pound powerboats or multimillion pound sail boats and can afford to enter the America’s Cup. That’s a million miles from the majority of people, who enjoy boating. There is something to fit anyone’s budget and it doesn’t matter if you do it on your own, as a sport in dinghy sailing, or as a family, or when you’re retired, it’s a huge spectrum.
There’s a misconception that you have to be a millionaire to go boating. There is something for whatever your budget is. I wouldn’t say there’s a disconnect, it’s just the two ends of the market. What we try and do at our shows is try and bring those two ends together. At London and Southampton, you can come along to shows and get on boats that have competed in the America’s Cup or the Volvo Ocean Race. You can get on stuff you wouldn’t normally get a chance to get on and talk to Olympic gold medallists. We’re trying to bridge that gap and the gap is created by wealth, but it’s basically people enjoying getting out boating.
The London Boat Show will return for its 60th at the ExCel Centre in the east of the city in January 2014
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National Boat Shows chief executive Murray Ellis believes the events in London and Southampton reach consumers across the “huge spectrum” of the industry
You can relate it to any sport in as much as with Formula One, you have people who go karting – the gaps in expenditure for both disciplines are huge. The shows do try and bring those things together, so the enthusiast does get a chance to touch or feel some of the elite stuff going on at the other end of the boating spectrum. What is it about sailing that makes it so attractive for business leaders and chief executives, both as a leisure pursuit and a tool for business? The magic comes down to the pure element of getting out on the water – the natural elements of water, wind and weather. It’s you and the elements. Why do people go down and sit on the beach and look on the water? It’s a fascination. From a corporate point of view, it’s very much a commercial sponsorship vehicle and a lot of the time it is determined by a chief executive or chairman who loves the sport.
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What are the major challenges for the industry over the next 12 to 18 months? The trends are to meet the demands of the emerging markets, which culturally certainly in China are different because they see sailing, and its mainly powerboating there, completely differently. It’s meeting those demands and adapting the products to the way they are buying and using boats, which is different although it remains a display of wealth and power to a certain extent. I think for the majority of the market, it’s adapting and surviving. There’s glimmers of hope post-recession but it’s about adapting businesses and products, and making them still affordable so that there’s still pent-up demand. It’s adapting to a market that’s a reduced market. There’s not fewer people going sailing, it’s just that at the moment they can’t afford to buy new boats. For those that can compete in the emerging markets, it’s about
adapting products and ensuring they’re meeting the demands there. What would constitute success at the Southampton and London shows? I always measure the success from the feedback from our two customers. Success would be an increased attendance from our visitors and feedback that what they came and saw they enjoyed, and from our exhibitors that they sold products and services, which, particularly for our British manufacturers, means they are staying ahead in the global market and maintaining the amount of industry and number of people they employ. And for us to grow what for the British marine industry is a UK£2.8 billion industry, employing 33,000 people. Our shows are helping to maintain and grow that industry. The 2014 London Boat Show takes place between 4th and 12th January.
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Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cup
The western US city of San Francisco hosted a festival of sailing throughout the summer of 2013 ahead of the 34th Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cup, with Oracle Team USA waiting for the chance to defend the most prestigious prize in the sport
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Gallery
Luxury
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Extreme Sailing
The Extreme Sailing Series has added a new dimension to the sport in recent years, and has been delighting fans across the globe again in 2013 with high-speed inshore racing
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America’s Cup competition in Newport, Rhode Island brought many innovative sailing professionals together in a community already well known internationally for boat-building expertise. New England Boatworks Inc. began building and repairing aluminum, wood and fiberglass yachts in 1988. After 25 years in the industry NEB has grown to be recognized as a world class boat builder specializing in hi-tech carbon composite construction. The company’s success is built around a core group of talented craftsmen from all corners of the yachting industry. With a strong background in the America’s Cup, NEB has more recently been involved with new construction projects ranging from the VOR-70 Puma and numerous Maxi racing yachts to hi-speed composite power yachts. Service and refit projects at NEB include a full range of top to bottom services from paintwork, mechanical, electrical, hydraulics, custom joinery and interior restorations as well as teak deck repair and replacement and a full list of race prep and repair services to support yacht racing events in Newport and surrounding areas. NEB’s 30-acre waterfront facility on Narragansett Bay in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, USA includes state of the art boat building and service/refit facilities, together with a marina which started life as a torpedo research and testing center during WWII. The well-protected deep-water facility provides easy access to New England’s best inshore and offshore sailing conditions for sea trials and systems testing. NEB builds and services both power and sailing yachts up to 100 ft. The Hi-tech composites division at NEB also builds composite components utilizing an autoclave and 5-axis CNC router for marine, industrial and architectural applications.
Contact: Bob Sharkey New England Boatworks Inc. +1 401 683 4000 bsharkey@NEBoatworks.com www.NEBoatworks.com
Volvo Ocean Race The Volvo Ocean Race will set off once again in late 2014. Top sailors will be fighting through the toughest offshore conditions imaginable, while stopping off at some of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most glamorous coastal locations for in-port races and events along the way.
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Are YOU special enough to be a part of something different?
Atlantic Campaigns proudly organise The No 1 Ocean Rowing Race, The Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge. The race starts in the Canary island of La Gomera and finishes 3,000 miles away in Antigua in the Caribbean. The biennial race begins in early December with teams participating from around the world. Rowers have to cope with blisters, salt rashes, sleep deprivation and rowing in two-hour shifts around the clock for weeks on end, facing all the raw elements of the Atlantic Ocean. Boats are seven metres long and just under two meters wide, with only a small cabin for protection against storms. All boats are fully equipped at the race start, and cannot take any repair, help, food or water during the crossing, yet all boats are professionally and reliably built to sustain the full race. The world record to cross the Atlantic is 30 days; the average is 60, and the longest 120, truly making it the world’s toughest rowing race. The teams participating in the TALISKER Whisky Atlantic Challenge raise money for fantastic important causes, ranging from charities for health, disease and injury to environment, human rights, and disasters. In the last race the teams raised more than £2 million. It is in this spirit that the TALISKER Whisky Atlantic Challenge is raising public awareness in various media channels about the race and the teams’ causes (the 2011/12 race had over one billion opportunities, seen in various media channels), the rowers’ compelling stories and motivations to take part of the challenge, so as to collect as much money to support each of the causes. Be part of this great event as a Team Sponsor or as an Event Partner. The 2011/12 race had fantastic Global PR coverage: f Over 726 individual pieces of international coverage across 27 different countries mentioning the race and the teams rolled up to over one billion opportunities to see, generated across TV, radio, print and online. f Coverage highlights included a Sunday Telegraph front cover, a nine-page feature in GQ online and mentions in newspapers from the Moscow Times and Marca, to the Telegraph, The Mail and Evening Standard. f The Race was mentioned in broadcasts by 18 TV and Radio stations including BBC News, ITV News and Sky Sports. f A 30-minute branded race documentary was aired during prime time slots on Eurosport throughout and beyond March. f Endorsement from the establishment, receiving messages from the UK Houses of Parliament, Her Majesty the Queen and Prince Harry. f Over 37 million website hits, with 350,000 visits that reached out to over 100 countries. f The official race website received 42,000 unique visitors during the prime months of December and January, with a revisit rate of 2.9. f High website engagement with ten page views per visitor and eight minutes spent on the site (on average), surpassing the Google Analytics benchmark of 4.8 minutes. f High production value with up to date video content was a key factor in the race coverage that received over 150,000 views with 55% of completed plays. f 4,000+ people liked the website on their Facebook pages, reached 12 million people.
Head office: Atlantic Campaigns SL C/ Ruiz De Padrón 1 1A 38800 San Sebastian de La Gomera, Spain Phone: +34609140963 Email: info@atlanticcampaigns.com
www.atlanticcampaigns.com www.taliskerwhiskyatlanticchallenge.com
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Thom T Th hom mas Cov o il ille lle e, sk kip ppe perr of of tthe h he ma m axi axi xi-t -tri rima mara mara an Sode So od de ebo bo
Helly Hansen continues to protect and enable professionals making their living on oceans and mountains around the world. Our apparel, developed through a blend of Scandinavian design and insights drawn from living in some of the harshest environments on earth, helps provide the confidence professionals need to step out into the elements and complete their jobs. Helly Hansen has partnered with at least one team in every single Volvo Ocean Race, and we work with single handed sailors like Thomas Coville, skipper of maxi trimaran Sodebo. Helly Hansen is also the uniform partner of more than 60 ski resorts and mountain guiding operations around the world and is worn by more than 33,000 mountain professionals. The brand’s outerwear, base layers, sportswear and footwear for sailing and outdoor sports are sold in more than 40 countries. We are ready to discuss alternative clothing programs for your team or corporation and we offer a Pro Purchase program for sailing professionals, teams and clubs. To learn more about Helly Hansen’s latest collections or to apply for our Pro Purchase program, visit www.hellyhansen.com/team/prostore
CONFIDENT WHEN IT MATTERS
Photo Christophe Launey ©
HELLY HANSEN CATWALK
Imagine a yacht where the lack of fuel is not critical for the voyage and life onboard. A yacht minimizing bad emissions to the air and oceans. Comfort and quality onboard expected to be found mostly in the superyacht class.
OQS-Ocean Quality Systems AB PB 109, 68601 Jakobstad Finland
Peter Granholm +358 44 7817 611 peter.granholm@oqs.ďŹ
WWW.OQS.FI