Black Book Sailing 2015

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FOREWORD

FOREWORD Towards the end of my first term as President of the International Sailing Federation (ISAF), the positive changes that have occurred within sailing during the last 12 months leave the sport in a strong position moving forward.

Through the leadership of ISAF’s new chief executive officer, Peter Sowrey, the strengths and opportunities of the world governing body are growing and developing in a crucial period for the sport.

With the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games less than one year away, sailing will be the premier sporting event with 380 of the world’s finest Olympic and 80 of the best Paralympic sailors competing.

The journey to Rio 2016 is at full speed. At the respective Olympic and

Paralympic World Championships in 2014, 50 per cent of the national places were awarded and we are now in the continental qualification phase where the remaining spots will be distributed regionally.

The Olympic test event in August 2015 offered us a glimpse of what is to come at Rio 2016. Sailors showed their mettle on the Rio race tracks with 19 nations claiming a medal, highlighting the reduction in the performance gap between elite and emerging nations. In fact, many of those medallists will be on the podium at the Olympic Games itself.

Of course, challenges are ahead of us but the sailing competitions of the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games will provide breathtaking visuals for a worldwide audience as well as challenging racing for the sailors.

During the time I have been ISAF President I have put the sailors first and foremost, finding out what is important to them. We are working to bring new

people into the sport, supporting those who are finding their feet within as well as giving those at the top of their discipline a platform to succeed.

At the end of 2014 ISAF brought the dream of an ISAF Sailing World Cup Final to light with star studded fleets that featured Olympic and world champions as well as ISAF Rolex World Sailors of the Year. Creating this pinnacle event for elite sailors campaigning for the Olympic Games has been key, enabling us to increase the commercial element of the sport.

Work remains to be done across the board as sailing continues to stake its claim in a busy marketplace but I remain excited about the future of our sport.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH:

Yours,

Carlo Croce ISAF President September 2015

BLACK BOOK 2014 l 5

THE CAPTAIN’S TABLE

EVENTS

9

20 24

The Captain’s Table Our ranking of the most influential players in global sailing, from the America’s Cup to the Volvo Ocean Race, Rio 2016 to Ocean Masters, over the past 12 months, and those who will influence the next 12.

IN ASSOCIATION WITH:

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46 50 54 60 64 68 76

ISAF: From the office of the CEO America’s Cup 24 America’s Cup Event Authority 28 Oracle Team USA 30 Land Rover BAR 36 SoftBank Team Japan 40 Artemis Racing 42 Groupama Team France 44 Emirates Team New Zealand Volvo Ocean Race World Match Racing Tour & M32 Series Extreme Sailing Series ESS Sponsor Focus Clipper Round The World Yacht Race Ocean Masters World Championship Tour de France a la Voile

CONTENTS

CONTACTS

PORTS OF CALL

82 86

103

Contacts by Company Contacts by Surname

EDITORIAL James Emmett Eoin Connolly Michael Long Adam Nelson Mike Kennedy Nima Farajpour DESIGN & PRODUCTION Daniel H Brown COMMERCIAL Nick Meacham Peter Jones Jon Abraham Bhav Sahota

OPERATIONS Yéwandé Aruleba PHOTOGRAPHY Action Images Press Association Black Book is published by: SportsPro Media Ltd 3rd Floor, America House, 2 America Square, London EC3N 2LU | UK Tel: +44 (0) 207 549 3250 Fax: +44 (0) 207 871 0102 info@sportspromedia.com www.sportspromedia.com

Gallery

(SportsPro Media Ltd is part of the Henley Media Group Ltd www.henleymediagroup.com) NOTICES: Black Book is published annually. This is the second edition. Printed in the EU. SUBSCRIPTIONS: Single copies of the Black Book 2015 are available at a cost of UK£199, and delivered anywhere in the world at no extra charge. Copies are available by logging on to www.sportspromedia.com or www.sailingblackbook.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

BLACK BOOK 2015 l 7

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CAPTAIN’S TABLE 10 The Captain’s table Our ranking of the most influential players in global sailing right now.

THE CAPTAIN’S TABLE THE BRIEFING In the next pages you’ll meet the 14 most influential people in professional sailing this year, as ranked by the Sailing Black Book.

Taking into account events of the last 12 months, and what’s around the corner in the world of top-level sailing, this list is intended as a snapshot of the moment. As ever, lists like these are subjective and the following is intended as a starting point for discussion. These are our 14 for ’15:

14/ James Pleasance World Match Racing Tour (WMRT) executive director James Pleasance is no stranger to the sport with 20 years’ experience in roles varying from yacht salesman to consultant and event promoter. A keen sailor, Pleasance was involved in growing the Swedish Match Tour from 2002-2008 working for sports agency Force 10 Marketing. During his tenure at F10, he also consulted Swiss bank UBS in activating their 20042007 sponsorship of Team Alinghi in

the America’s Cup. Pleasance joined global Exhibitions company Informa plc in 2008 and helped form the Informa Yacht Group including launching the first ever conference for the business of yachting - the World Yacht Racing Forum in Monaco. In September 2012, Pleasance was asked to re-join the World Match Racing Tour as executive director and will now oversee the transition of the world championship, under new Swedish ownership, to multihulls for the first time.

13/ William Ward William Ward has been the driving force behind the growth of the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race since its creation in 1995. As chief executive of Clipper Ventures, the business-minded Ward and his fellow co-founder Sir Robin KnoxJohnston have combined superbly to create a concept and a race that, in many respects, sets the commercial standard for global sailing. This year’s event, the tenth in Clipper’s history, once again

comprises an enviable mix of blue-chip brands, governments and iconic host cities, offering business-to-business networking opportunities whilst creating life-changing experiences for the amateur sailors who take part. Last year Ward was named a GREAT Britain ambassador by British prime minister David Cameron in recognition of his contribution to the UK’s wide-reaching international promotional campaign.

12/ Sarah Treseder Sarah Treseder was appointed from a pool of 145 candidates to the role of chief executive of the Royal Yachting Association (RYA), the governing body of British sailing, in 2010. She took over from the highly respected Rodd Carr and has acquitted herself admirably in the

10 l BLACK BOOK 2015

years since. A former global director of drinks giant Diageo, Treseder’s commercial chops are not insignificant. She is responsible for maintaining the building blocks that lead from participation to the podium and her mission is to keep intact Great Britain’s reputation – at Olympic

level at least – as the world’s best sailing nation. The first eight members of Team GB’s Olympic sailing team were named in September, and with Rio 2016 the first Olympic Games since 1992 not to feature Sir Ben Ainslie, Treseder has her work cut out to bring through the next generation.

THE CAPTAIN’S TABLE

11/ Peter Sowrey responsibilities including piling the pressure on the Rio 2016 organisers to ensure the water is fit for sailing come Games time, while there’s also the ISAF Sailing World Championships in Denmark in 2018 on the horizon.

Passionate about sailing – he started off at the helm of Enterprises as an eightyear-old – he is intent on being a visible CEO and committed to bringing about swift and marked results.

CAPTAIN’S TABLE / 1

Recently appointed as the new chief executive of ISAF, Belfast-born Peter Sowrey, the former managing director of business process outsourcing and sales for Accenture, brings business knowledge together with a fact-based, outcome-driven brand of leadership to the table. Having replaced Jerome Pels, who announced his resignation in October 2014 after 17 years with the organisation, Sowrey takes on

Bebeto Matthews/AP/Press Association Images

10/ Michael Dunkley The America’s Cup Events Authority’s (ACEA) decision to host the 2017 America’s Cup in the North Atlantic island territory of Bermuda was not met with universal praise. For Bermuda premier Michael Dunkley, however, the event “aligns perfectly with the heritage, profile, spirit and future of our island.” The decision to host the Cup in Bermuda does have a fan in The Sports Consultancy managing director Robert Datnow. “I can see the marine leisure aspects of Bermuda being promoted in a very strategic and cohesive way,” says Datnow. “I can also see the leisure tourism aspect being promoted in an effective way both for the race and for Bermuda. I think we’ll see something quite exciting there.” It will be up to Dunkley and his team to deliver.

9/ Russell Coutts As chief executive of the ACEA and one of Larry Ellison’s most trusted employees, legendary sailor Russell Coutts is one of the most influential men in America’s Cup circles. In tandem with commercial commissioner Harvey Schiller, his decision to take the Cup to Bermuda, and to build up to the event through the newly-created America’s Cup World Series (ACWS) events, is a stroke of sports management genius. Kicking off this year in Portsmouth, Gothenburg and

Bermuda, the series gives title sponsor Louis Vuitton the extra bang for their buck they were looking for from the Cup, and is essentially a devolution of power to the competing teams. “The teams are the entities that are most vested and best placed in terms of their local knowledge to create commercially successful events in their local markets,” says The Sports Consultancy’s Robert Datnow. “Portsmouth was a good case in point. It was hugely successful.”

BLACK BOOK 2015 l 11

8/ Mark Turner In over two decades with OC Sport, the current name of the company he founded in 1993, Mark Turner has demonstrated an understanding of the business of sailing matched by few in the industry. Leading a Chinese team on to the podium of the Volvo Ocean Race, as OC Sport managed with the Dongfeng Race Team’s third-place finish in the 2014/15 edition of the race, may just be one of Turner’s

greatest achievements to date. Next year his full attention will return to OC Sport’s main event, the Extreme Sailing Series, which has set the standard for stadium sailing over the first nine years of its existence. The 2016 edition is poised to raise the bar even higher with a switch to a new fleet of GC32 foiling catamarans, with Turner and OC Sport again leading the way in innovative modern sailing.

7/ Håkan Svensson A passionate sailor commited to growing the sport, Swedish entrepeneur Håkan Svensson has helped back a number of high profile sponsorships including the Puma Ocean Racing Team in the 2008-2009 Volvo Ocean Race and more recently supporting long term friend Freddy Lööf in his successful bid to clinch the Gold medal in the Star class at the London 2012 Olympics. In 2013, his company Aston Harald created the

M32 Series, a regatta series for the M32 high performance multihull which the company also owns and builds. In July 2015, Svensson acquired the rights to the ISAF sanctioned World Match Racing Tour with the plan to introduce the M32 to the world championship.

And in case no one thought he was serious, he announced a US$1million cash prize for the world champion starting in 2016.

6/ Antonio Bertone Maverick marketer Antonio Bertone built a reputation for himself at sportswear company Puma, where he was credited with spearheading the creation of the sports lifestyle category, pioneering the type of partnerships between sportswear manufacturers and fashion designers that are ubiquitous today. Leaving his position as CMO and board member of Puma after 20 years with the company, Bertone was picked up for the role of CMO at the ACEA, having impressed specifically with Puma’s work around its Volvo Ocean Race entry. With Bertone driving every aspect of the America’s Cup’s marketing efforts – including a steer in its lauded media production operation – one of the oldest competitions in professional sport can rely on a consistently progressive and fresh vibe.

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The Breeze-Studio is a bright new video production, PR and digital media agency specialising in the sailing and yacht racing industry. We provide a complete solution, whether for a one-off event or ongoing marketing campaign.

Former CNN “Mainsail” Television Presenter and founder of Breeze-Studio, Liz George takes a look at how new media is boosting the popularity of sailing.

2013: The Game Changer Absolutely, 2013 was a game changer. It had it all: A nail biting final, intrigue and arguments and the dramatic setting of San Francisco Bay.

New Media, New Possibilities New media is opening up a world of possibilities for the

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man’s race” become a crowd pleaser.

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accessible and more achievable to provide top quality

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and they are backing this up with added information

form that people want.

and the ability to bring a world-wide audience together to share views, comments and enthusiasm on social

Good Times Ahead

media sites.

In the UK in the next few years we’re going to see a dramatic change in how sailing is seen: The Government

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is throwing its weight behind the #bringthecuphome

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engaging tool. The ability to give viewers a close-up

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the 35th Americas Cup?

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sport environment sport

environment

We are passionate about sport and the environment we play in.

We believe audiences engage best by experiencing real situations Sport Environment was founded Sport Environment was founded by Conrad Humphreys in 2001 by Conrad Humphreys in 2001 after after he skippered the winning he skippered the winning team, team, sponsored by LG in the BT sponsored by LG in the BT Global Global Challenge. Since that time, Challenge. Since that time, Sport Sport Environment has developed Environment has developed into one into one of the UK’ssailing leading of the UK’s leading agencies sailing agencies specialising in specialising in sponsorship, sponsorship, event and management event management project and project management. management.

As sportsmarketing marketingagency, agency, As aa creative creative sports we complete360 360service servicefrom we provide provide a complete from concept to delivery.

We collaborating enjoy concept to delivery.

We enjoy with organisations attract the that best collaborating with that organisations peoplethe andbest believe audiences engage attract people and believe best by experiencing realby situations.

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Sailing has been our core business since the beginning and there are not many sailing Sailing has been our core business events that we haven’t been involved in since the beginning and there are not either as a team, as a sponsor or an event many sailing events we haven’t partner.

Our roots arethat in offshore sailing, been involved in either as a adopter team, asofa but we were also the earliest sponsor an event Our roots the VolvoorExtreme 40partner. back in 2005 whenare in offshore sailing, but we were also stadium sailing was in its infancy, andthe this earliest of themanaged Volvo Extreme year weadopter have project the first40 back in 2005foiling whencatamaran stadium sailing in commercial circuit was with the its infancy, this year weEuropean have project creation of and the Bullitt GC32 Tour.

managed the first commercial foiling We enjoy working brandsoftothe catamaran circuit with with global the creation createGC32 something unique and compelling, Bullitt European Tour.

often investing our time at the beginning to breathe life into awith newglobal idea. At Sport to We enjoy working brands Environment we don’t believe create something unique andone compelling, product fits all and look the often investing our often time at thebeyond beginning traditional sailing properties to work with to breathe life into a new idea. At Sport event organisers that can create amazing Environment we don’t believe one moments for our guests and partners.

product fits all and often look beyond the traditional sailing properties to work with event organisers that can create amazing moments for our guests and partners.

When Ecover Ecover decided decided that When that itit was wastime timetoto move on from sailing, they came to Sport move on from sailing, they came to Sport Environment to help them create a new Environment to help them create a new grassroots event that would open up new grassroots event that would open up new consumer audiences to their ecological consumer audiences to their ecological cleaning products, whilst maintaining their cleaning products, whilst maintaining their position as the number one thought leader position as the number one leader in sustainability.

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Together we co-invested created a new mass-participation and created event, a new the mass-participation watersports Ecover Blue Mile watersports thethe Ecover designed to event, connect nationBlue with Mile our blue designed to connect the years nationwe with environment.

Over three ranour six flagship events and supported over sixty blue environment.

Over three years we grassroots events, immersing thousands ran six flagship events and supported of people in the waterevents, and raising over over sixty grassroots immersing €100,000 for nominated charityand partners. thousands of our people in the water Ecover also funded a series of “Teach on the raising over €100,000 for our nominated Beach”partners. curriculum eventsalso to equip teachers charity Ecover funded a with the and to run lessons series of skills “Teach onresources the Beach” curriculum on the beach. Rockfish, the sustainable events to equip teachers with the skills seafood restaurant chain owned by chef and resources to run lessons on the Mitch Tonks took over the sponsorship in beach.

2015. Rockfish, the sustainable seafood restaurant chain owned by chef Mitch Tonks took over the sponsorship in 2015.

During the the last last recession, During recession,Motorola Motorola approached Henley Management College approached Henley Management College to help them re-build and inspire their to help them re-build and inspire their senior leadership team. Having just sailed senior leadership team. Having just sailed into the history books as the youngest ever into the of history the youngest winner the BTbooks GlobalasChallenge, Conrad ever winner of the BT Global Challenge, co-designed the Motorola Ocean Racing Conrad co-designed Motorolaplatform Ocean Challenge, a simulatedthe leadership Racing Challenge, a simulated leadership that would lead onto a hugely successful five platform thatpartnership. would leadOffshore onto a hugely year sailing races such successful yearRace sailing partnership. as the Volvofive Ocean and the Vendeé Offshore races as the Volvo Ocean Globe prove to such be commercially valuable across a number of sponsorship areas.

Race and the Vendeé Globe prove to be There have been several successful internal commercially valuable across a number programmes developed for both staff and of sponsorship areas. There have been customers includinginternal the recent SCA all several successful programmes women’s Volvo team.staff Motorola employed developed for both and customers Sport Environment to SCA run aall series of internal including the recent women’s staff motivational programmes asSport part of a Volvo team. Motorola employed global sailing partnership, that culminated Environment to run a series of internal in Motorola’s sponsorship of the 2004-5 staff motivational programmes as part of a Vendeé Globe. global sailing partnership, that culminated in Motorola’s sponsorship of the 2004-5 Vendeé Globe.

Bullitt Group manufacture, market and Bullitt Grouprugged manufacture, and distribute mobile market devices, audio distribute rugged mobile devices, audio products and accessories under license products and accessories under license to a number of global brands, including to a number of global brands, including Caterpillar, JCB, Ted Baker, Kodak and Caterpillar, JCB, Ted Baker, Kodak and Ministry of Sound. The smartphone Ministry of Sound. The smartphone industry industry is massive with more than 1.3 is massive with more than 1.3 billion units billion last often harm’s sold lastunits year,sold often in year, harm’s way.inJust 1% way. Just a 1% represents a sizeable market represents sizeable market for a rugged for a rugged is capable of product that is product capablethat of surviving a drop surviving a drop from 1.8m and immersion from 1.8m and immersion in water for up to water for up to 30 minutes.

30inminutes.

Sport Environment approached Bullitt initially with an idea to create a new programme for Catphones, their flagship rugged mobile device. Bullitt is renowned for its Environment innovative products which are sold Sport approached Bullitt initially in over countries wanted to be with an 80 idea to createand a new programme for Catphones, their flagship rugged involved in something new and cutting mobile device.

Bullitt is renowned its edge which would appeal acrossfor their innovative products which are sold in over brand portfolio as well as their global 80 countriesnetwork. and wanted to Environment be involved distribution Sport in something and cutting edge which sourced and new brokered the commercial would appeal across their brand portfolio rights to the GC32 Racing Tour, a start as as their network. up well sailing eventglobal usingdistribution the new ultra-high Sport sourced and brokered speedEnvironment foiling catamaran.Retained to the rights to the GC32 Racing lookcommercial after Bullitt’s commercial interests Tour, start up sailing event usingSport the and toa activate the sponsorship, new ultra-highnow speed foiling Environment work with catamaran.

Bullitt to Retained look after Bullitt’s commercial maximisetothe partnership across a interests and to activate the sponsorship, number of key European territories.

Sport Environment now work with Bullitt to maximise the partnership across a number The next few years promise to be of key European territories. a hugely exciting time for Sport Environment as we look to collaborate The next few years promise to be a hugely across a number of projects in sailing. exciting time for Sport Environment as we There great opportunity innovate, look toiscollaborate across atonumber of particularly with the way sailing shared projects in sailing. There is great is opportunity across social platformswith andthe creating new to innovate, particularly way sailing grassroots initiatives to make sailing more is shared across social platforms and accessible the mass market. creating newtograssroots initiativesWe’re to make excitedmore about the Sportto and forward sailing accessible thelook mass market. to collaborating withthe great people.

We’re excited about Sport and look forward to collaborating with great people.

Conrad Humphreys Managing Director, Sport Environment Conrad Humphreys Managing Director, Sport Environment

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sportenvironment.com

5/ Rodrigo Garcia Sailing was the first sport to run a test event for the Rio 2016 Olympics but even now, less than a year from the start of the Games, it is unclear whether it will be a telegenic triumph or a damaging embarrassment for the city.

ISAF has praised the logistical execution

of its events but the quality of the water in Guanabara Bay, undermined by the practice of dumping raw sewage, must improve. It has been left to sporting director Rodrigo Garcia and his team, including sailing competition manager Walter Boddener, to make sure that

happens. If it doesn’t, a decision must then be made on whether to shift to an Atlantic Ocean site, and a plan fashioned to get that late change to work. Either would be no mean feat, and the sport’s future in South America and beyond could be heavily affected.

down at the end of the year for family reasons. Per Löjdquist, a Volvo group communications and marketing veteran and chairman of the board of the race, will have a great deal of work on his hands steering the process to find Frostad’s successor. The last

edition of the race, Frostad’s third at the helm, represented the culmination of his work to mould the race into an exciting, one-design competition, attractive to established and new sailing markets alike, as well as major B-to-B and B-to-C brands across the globe.

has been refining his vision since his first run out as rights holder for the 34th edition of the Cup in San Francisco in 2013, and having defended successfully, the new set-up, complete with structured warm-up events which began this year

in the America’s Cup World Series, and a continued investment in transformative broadcast and digital technology, has dragged the America’s Cup not just into the 21st century, but catapulted it to the very vanguard of sports marketing.

4/ Per Löjdquist The spot reserved for Volvo Ocean Race chief executive Knut Frostad was hastily re-worked as this publication headed for the printers owing to the Norwegian’s announcement that, after eight years at the helm of the roundthe-world race, he would be stepping

3/ Larry Ellison

Winning the America’s Cup must represent the ultimate prize in global sport since the winner takes not only the Auld Mug itself, but becomes the rights holder in charge of defining the next edition. Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison

16 l BLACK BOOK 2015

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2/ Carlo Croce Carlo Croce’s first term in office will not necessarily be defined by the outcome of the Rio 2016 Olympic sailing events, but their success will go a good way to underlining his own as the president of the International Sailing Federation (ISAF). Olympic politics, and the behind-the-scenes and not so behind-the-scenes pressure needed to be exerted to get things done is the bread and butter of international

federation presidents. Croce has had a steady hand on the tiller so far, but the sewage situation in the Guanabara Bay in Rio is critical. Away from the Games, the Italian has installed a new chief executive at his organisation in Peter Sowrey and changes are afoot in the structuring of the professional sailing calendar as the governing body looks to get more of a grip on the narrative of the sport as a whole.

1/ Sir Keith Mills

Sailing is undeniably a more professional and commercially viable sport thanks to the broad and tireless work of Sir Keith Mills. The British entrepreneur is passionate about the sport and willing to back that passion with investment. A key member of Sir Ben Ainslie’s council as the Briton attempts to win the America’s Cup with his own team, Mills is operating

18 l BLACK BOOK 2015

on multiple fronts in the business behind sailing. Through Teamorigin events, Mills is responsible for the successful running of the Portsmouth legs of the newly-created America’s Cup World Series. Through Open Sports Management, the agency he founded to manage the commercial rights to International Monohull Open Classes Association (IMOCA) events, he is

adding much-needed sports marketing nous to some of sailing’s most fearsome, but previously disjointed events. While his America’s Cup involvement might have the higher profile at the moment, the likes of the Transat Jacques Vabre, the Barcelona World Race, and the Vendee Globe - all IMOCA races – have been set on what could turn out to be a hugely impressive growth curve.

EVENTS 20 ISAF: From the office of the CEO 24 America’s Cup 24 28 30 36 40 42 44

America’s Cup Event Authority Oracle Team USA Land Rover BAR SoftBank Team Japan Artemis Racing Groupama Team France Emirates Team New Zealand

46 Volvo Ocean Race 50 World Match Racing Tour & M32 Series 54 Extreme Sailing Series 60 ESS Sponsor Focus 64 Clipper Round The World Yacht Race 70 Ocean Masters World Championship 76 Tour de France a la Voile

FROM THE OFFICE OF THE CEO THE BRIEFING The International Sailing Federation (ISAF) appointed a new chief executive in July, eight months after the departure of longtime ISAF leader Jerome Pels. Peter Sowrey joined the global governing body from management consultancy Accenture, and a few months into the job, he set out his strategy and his immediate priorities for the Sailing Black Book Book.

Peter Sowrey was installed as the new chief executive of sailing’s global govering body in July 2015.

What was your take on the state of the ISAF organisation when you took over and the major challenges it faced?

Peter Sowrey: What I found was a great team that was inspired, worked here for love of the sport and enthusiasm, and the love of driving change into the sport of sailing. What we’re doing now with the team is getting everyone very focused so they can actually find the deliverables they want to achieve. Our marketing team is looking at rebranding and making sure we’re attacking every part of the ecosystem of sailing; whether it’s young kids coming into the sport or old guys racing on America’s Cup boats, or emerging nations just starting their first attempt at sailing, it’s all part of the overall plan. We’ve got 26 great people here in ISAF. But we don’t want to be the masters of everything – what I mean by that is if there’s a great team out there that does event management or a great team out there that can help us drive our marketing strategy, we’re going to find the best of the best to work with us. We want to be the conductors of sailing: making sure that we work from the youth generation and the disabled generation right up to the big events like the America’s Cup and the Vendee Globe and Volvo Ocean Race and making sure we work at the right levels at the right time. It’s not

20 l BLACK BOOK 2015

always about having to do it ourselves.

There’s a lot in the sailing ecosystem that we can take advantage of.

Have you established a set of priorities about how you want to address things within the organisation?

Absolutely, we’re moving much more into key priorities, which are around a successful Olympics in 2016; the success of our Sailing World Cup platform; our emerging nations programme, making sure we’re helping get kids off the streets and really focused and getting into the sport of sailing; and then on top of that are final key priority is disabled and Paralympic sailing. Sadly we were pushed out of the 2020 Olympics and we really need to focus on making sure we back in for the next one after that. So there’s a lot of focus around that – that’s probably one of my number one priorities.

What’s your progress report on the work being done to ready the Olympic sailing venue in Rio?

We’re keeping a lot of pressure on everyone at Rio 2016, the IOC, the local government, to really work to get the water up to an acceptable level so our athletes can race down there.

And we’re pushing, I would say, pretty aggressively, to really work with them to make some changes and fix some of the problems they’ve got down there with sewage, or we’re going to have to reconsider the whole challenge by the end of the year; whether it’s potentially moving racing outside the bay in Rio or something along those lines. But I think it’s really important we do grow the sport of sailing and it will be absolutely amazing to have the sport of Olympic racing under Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio. That’s my dream; I’m married to a Brazilian; and it will look absolutely amazing as a backdrop. It probably has the potential to become one of the Rio Olympics’ most viewed sports because it’s sitting right there in the heart of Rio, providing they get the water fixed. That’s why we’re keeping the pressure on. But I think there’s the potential to be half a million people on the beach watching the sailing. So it will be a great opportunity from TV - sailing starts at one o’clock which means there’s nothing much else going on at that time. It’s a great opportunity to really inspire South America to become much more involved in sailing as a whole. Brazil’s done a good job, Argentina’s doing a great job and

Leo Correa/AP/Press Association Images

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ISAF

hosting the Youth Olympics the year after, which will be amazing.

There’s a lot of pressure on us to clear the right for Rio and respect the Brazilians and getting that water cleaned up is an absolute legacy for Rio and for Brazil and to be honest the world.

There’s not one sailor that doesn’t want to race there; even the guys who got sick are still absolutely committed to racing down there. And we at ISAF are absolutely committed to working with the government and Rio to push hard to make sure it does happen.

Do you feel at the moment that enough is being done at the moment to address the water quality issue?

I think yes. We’ve all been fighting; and journalists are very good at throwing stories up without the proper set of facts, and we’ve all wanted to make decisions when you have good facts and that’s the way we run the business in ISAF now – based on facts. We’ve

got good feeling that our race courses from a perspective of bacteria in the water are ok. Our launching areas are a disaster still but they’ll be fixed by the time of the Olympics. They are still pumping raw sewage into the marina.

That part of it will get fixed. And in fairness to them the poor people up there in the favelas don’t really care about pretty little sailing boats racing around in the bay. So I think you’ve got to find the right balance, but really focusing on the legacy of Rio is absolutely crucial to us and making sure we don’t put sailors at risk as a whole is absolutely critical.

committee. The people did an amazing job given the fact they’re still in construction mode in the marina; setting up tents and housing for our sailors and all that kind of stuff. So it worked very well logistically. We had our full team down there running the whole end to end process. So everything worked very well from event management, to team briefings, judging, scrutinising the boats - all that stuff was tested end to end. And the event from the water and on the water looked absolutely amazing in the sunshine with the backdrop of Rio. The event was very well done so I would say hats off to the guys in Rio 2016.

Beyond that issue, what have your experiences been of the test events and the logistical progress that you’re making ahead of the Olympic event?

Moving away from Rio, what place do you feel ISAF events will occupy in the calendar?

My ambition is to be a very visible CEO so I was there for the whole test event. The test event was absolutely amazing for the whole Rio 2016

The event calendar is very, very busy and part of our rejuvenated World Cup Series for next year will optimise the Sailing World Cup events to really fit in

Sailors compete in a Rio 2016 test event in the waters of Guanabara Bay this year. Work is still to be done to ensure they are clean and safe come next year.

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THE EXPERT’S VIEW Robert Datnow is the co-founder and managing director of The Sports Consultancy, an agency with a deep history in sailing and an organisation which provides consultancy, venue, sponsorship and broadcast rights sales, feasibility and legal services to all manner of sports entities and host venues interested in making money and investing intelligently in sport. “I think with any change of personnel comes a fresh perspective,” says Datnow. “[Peter Sowrey] hasn’t

Paralympic sailing at London 2012 (right). The ISAF has a fight on its hands to get the sport reinstated on the Paralympic programme postTokyo 2020.

with other major events and different classes as well. Coordinating as a whole is part of our responsibility. We’re going to sit down in November in our executive meeting and really work on the calendar as a whole until we feel that everyone gets the right airtime and the right opportunity to develop. We’re going to work very closely with the Olympic classes but also other classes we look after such as IMOCA and the Volvo guys; making sure that the whole runway for the year, or the next four years, is clearly understood. As we commercialise the sport more and more, that’s going to become more and more of a challenge, hence the need for coming together as a team and as a sailing administration to make sure the diary does look balanced and sponsors aren’t confused.

What kind of opportunities does this present? To have all these outlets of potential interest in all these different series?

We’re going to launch in November a new roadmap for world sailing as a whole. It starts on this journey with nurturing sailing, whether it be youth, disabled, emerging nations, but the whole nurturing service up to the Youth World Cup. And then potentially the next step could be Olympics, or class racing. Then from the Olympics potentially into things like the America’s Cup, the Vendée

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come from a specific sailing national governing body or event, and I think that is going to be refreshing for the organisation. Two areas of priority spring to my mind: the growth of the professional sailing circuit and its relationship with the other sailing events which sit alongside ISAF that are separately managed and commercialised, and how they can work together to create a larger whole.

I think the second focus would be on the grassroots; on sailing clubs,

Globe, the Extreme Series. We’re trying to link it all together as a journey.

All of our theming and all or our branding is going to be around ‘from nurturing to hero’. It’s key to what we’re going to lay out as a route map for the sport of sailing. It’s important we do that because as the sport does become more commercialised it gets more and more confused as well. We’ve got a very clear vision to make sure it’s easier to understand. I was with a CEO the other day and he said ‘well I don’t really get sailing. I get tennis and I get Formula One, but not sailing.’

And I said well that because sailing is not a sport, it’s a lot of sports under the package of sailing. I think a lot of potential sponsors now are getting a little bit jaded around sponsoring things like football or Formula One,

youth sailing and capitalising on the successes of the professional sailing events and the Olympic events, and particular countries that have had success, and growing the base of the pyramid in other countries, making the sport more accessible for sailors as well as spectators and creating what in other sports is called ‘playground to podium’; creating the pathways from participation to podium in a more coherent way, and more widely across the globe.”

and they’re looking for different avenues and different stories.

What’s the potential for sailing? Often it’s been seen as an elitist sport – can you make it a bigger sport than it is or is it about finding the right place for it in the long-term?

Part of our rebranding is to kill this elitist idea. We’re reinventing ourselves, ISAF is going to change its name - it’s no secret - like the guys from World Rugby, to World Sailing. Sailing is no more expensive than horse riding, for example, or no more expensive than a season ticket for a major football club.

But the perception of it is lots of guys in blazers with grey hair drinking gin and tonics on the back of the boat. And that’s an idea we’re going to kill off. 

Nate Gowdy Photography

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AMERICA’S CUP THE BRIEFING Although the match racing for the 35th edition of the America’s Cup won’t begin until 2017, the latest sporting cycle of sailing’s most famous event has already kicked off, with the first Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series event having been successfully held off Portsmouth in the UK in July. The series will see the five teams vying to capture the Cup from Team Oracle USA in 2017 size each other up, gaining qualification points and valuable activation and airtime ahead of the main event. With smaller but faster boats than the previous Cup match in 2013, the America’s Cup Event Authority (ACEA) has attracted a bigger field, and there are commercial contracts in place that make it already a bigger event than the 2013 edition. Harvey Schiller, the commercial commissioner for the ACEA, explains all.

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In 2017, the 35th America’s Cup heads to Bermuda. The international yacht racing series, which dates back to 1851, ultimately remains a simple contest between Defender and Challenger to claim the famous trophy, known as the ‘Auld Mug’, though in its modern form majestic wooden yachts have been replaced with lean carbon-fibre catamarans. Legal disputes, such as the probes into alleged contract rigging for the America’s Cup events that took place in Naples in 2012 and 2013, and the death of the Artemis Racing skipper Andrew Simpson, a two-time Olympic

medallist for Britain, during practice for the last America’s Cup in 2013 have marred recent series. Oracle Team USA won the 2013 edition of the Cup – overturning a near-insurmountable lead to defeat Emirates Team New Zealand in San Francisco – but did so despite beginning the contest with a two-point deduction after members of the team were found to have contravened rules by adding weight to the boat in the warm-up event.

For Harvey Schiller – the commercial commissioner for the America’s Cup Events Authority

(ACEA), the company responsible for organising the 35th Cup – things are progressing well for 2017, with Bermuda ticking all the boxes in terms of venue requirements. “Picking venues in the modern world is much more complex than it ever has been. I mean large cities and areas, no matter where they are, have certain economic challenges,” says Schiller. “And you have to play into the technical side.”

Though Schiller says they were “very, very pleased with the bid from Chicago”, the meteorological conditions were not suited at the time.

The Team Oracle USA boat leads three of its five competitors for the 2017 America’s Cup. Artemis, Team New Zealand and BAR will be joined by entries from Japan and France.

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Harvey Schiller (right) is the commercial commissioner for the America’s Cup Event Authority.

In the end the decision to head to Bermuda came down to a number of factors, such as ensuring the location offered sufficient travel options for fans, sponsorship opportunities, and a suitable time zone for the international broadcast audience. “Bermuda plays very well into Europe as well as in the US,” Schiller points out. “I would say in general we were very pleased that it’s played out this way. There are always a number of regulations that have to do with an international event. They have everything to do with the immigration, taxation, customs, etc. And all of those have been accommodated in the best way possible with Bermuda, so we’re very pleased.”

The North Atlantic island territory of Bermuda (right) will host the 35th edition of the America’s Cup in 2017.

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Before the main event in 2017, a number of Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series (AMWS) events are set to be staged around the world. The first event, held in Portsmouth, UK, in July 2015 saw the British entry, Land Rover BAR, led by Sir Ben Ainslie - the most decorated Olympic sailor of all time - secure first and second place finishes in the opening two races to take an early lead in the series before strong winds forced the second day of racing to be cancelled. The subsequent ACWS events in Gothenburg, Sweden, and Bermuda provide further opportunity for teams to get to grips with the AC45 foiling wing-sailed catamarans and also to score points

for the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup Challenger Series in 2017. “The whole idea of the World Series, different than it has been even in the past where there were a few selected events, is to keep up with the branding of the America’s Cup in front of the public, to give the sailors and these, what are the AC45s and what really will be the enhanced 45s for the Cup itself, visibility,” Schiller says, pointing out that a key element to these events is providing a platform to encourage and activate the Cup’s sponsors, upon whose support the Cup largely depends. “The ACWS gives each of the teams a chance to host an event in their home countries; very much like what we do here in the US with professional sports and they do in Great Britain and other places where you’ve really got to play to your home fans in the best way possible.

And it’s a chance to bring activation of our sponsors. All of our sponsors have global interests so that’s an important part of it as well.”

Louis Vuitton, a long-time partner and title sponsor of the America’s Cup Challenger Series, has returned as the main commercial partner of the America’s Cup in an expanded deal that will see the French fashion house sponsor every stage of the series up to the main event in 2017, for which it will act as a presenting partner.

AMERICA’S CUP Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison (left) has refined his vision ahead of the 35th edition of the America’s Cup.

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Moët & Chandon has also returned as a sponsor, acting as the official champagne of the 35th America’s Cup. While British watchmaker Bremont has joined the sponsorship roster as the official timekeeper, while also sponsoring Oracle Team USA. German automobile manufacturer BMW and Gosling’s rum are among the other major partners to have come on board.

Joining the British boat for the series is the defeated Challenger last time, Emirates Team New Zealand, together with Groupama Team France, Swedish entry Artemis Racing, and Softbank Team Japan - the first Japanese entry in 15 years. The overall ranking position in the ACWS will determine the teams’ starting points in the Challenger Series, which takes place in Bermuda in 2017 to determine which of these teams will compete against Oracle Team USA for the America’s Cup. Only three entries – Emirates Team New Zealand, Artemis Racing and Italy’s Luna Rossa – competed in the Challenger Series in 2013, but the enlarged field has attracted a tranche of big name brands. “We’re very happy for our teams. Ben Ainslie Racing announced Land Rover as their title sponsor, Team France announced Groupama, the French insurance company (as their title sponsor), and a lot of people were concerned whether France would have the funds to continue, and obviously they’re well suited for participation. Emirates Team New Zealand – obviously they have Emirates – but they announced Toyota and we’re expecting many more.”

Schiller says this America’s Cup is set to be the biggest, fastest and most vivid spectacle yet. More TV revenue has already been raised, two years before the main event, than the 2013 edition managed altogether, through deals with the likes of BT Sport, which has acquired live coverage rights for subscribers in the UK and Ireland for all live stages of the 2015-16 ACWS events as well as the 2017 finals.

This agreement sits alongside that of the BBC, with the publicly funded

broadcaster having acquired free-to-air highlights rights for the America’s Cup in the UK, including the 2017 races.

Deals have been stuck with NBC in the US and Canal Plus in France, while Schiller hopes to announce partners in Latin America, Asia and other parts of the world very soon, reaching as many as 200 countries through the various broadcast options offered, from full coverage to highlights packages. “All in all we’re very, very pleased,” remarks Schiller.

“We’re certainly well ahead of where we were for the America’s Cup 34.”

In a marked change from 2013, the boats have been downgraded from the 72-foot AC72 catamarans to smaller 45foot AC45s, which have been enhanced so that they are fully foiling boats, meaning they can rise up off their hulls at speed with just the rudder keeping contact with the water. Trimming their size has added speed and these will be the fastest boats ever raced in the America’s Cup, capable of reaching up to 40mph. Schiller says they will deliver a great spectacle for onlookers, who will be able to see them racing closer in to the shore than in the past.

“They are extremely competitive,” he says. “If you see the videos it’s very hard to differentiate those from the bigger AC72s. The biggest difference with this event and previous events is that it’s important for us to have as many participants as possible and that

means economically the event has to be successful in terms of its partners, its broadcast partners, but really the revenue that’s associated with it, even from the venues. The costs come down dramatically with these enhanced AC45s compared to the larger boats: crew costs, building costs and the logistics, everything else about it. The point about this is that we will be able to use these same boats in the next America’s Cup.” The ability to reuse the same boats for subsequent editions of the America’s Cup played a huge factor in the teams’ majority vote to reduce the boat size ahead of the 2017 event. “No sponsor wants to put a lot of money into an event and then have to reinvent it again or have to lose their place,” Schiller points out.

“For the people behind these things and the companies behind them, there’s no reason to waste any money,” he says. “The important thing is to have a great competitive sailing and sports event. And the next goal for us is to work together for the teams to move forward to do the World Series for the next years after 2017 – for 2018, ‘19, and ‘20 and even into 2021 – to continue the series and return this to what really is a tier-one sporting event.

So our ultimate goals are to have the full co-operation of the teams because of the boat size, the economics and everything else, the participation of their sponsors.” 

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ORACLE TEAM USA Larry Ellison (below right) hoists the Auld Mug after a dramatic victory for his Oracle Team USA team in the 2013 America’s Cup.

Owned by billionaire US businessman Larry Ellison, reigning champions Oracle Team USA will arrive in Bermuda for the 35th America’s Cup in 2017 as the defending team, having claimed back-to-back titles in the past two editions of the international sailing match racing series. After Oracle’s first victory in 2010, over the Swiss-based Alinghi team in Valencia – which marked the first time a US syndicate had won the cup since 1992 - the US boat retained their crown against Emirates Team New Zealand in San Francisco in 2013, staging a dramatic comeback to clinch the series against all odds. Having begun the 2013 contest with a two point penalty after three crew members, who were subsequently expelled from the team, were found guilty of loading the boat with extra weight in the America’s Cup World Series warm-up event in 2012, Ellison’s team came back from 8-1 down to win eight consecutive races and take the series 9-8 in San Francisco Bay. Ellison made his fortune through Oracle, the database software firm he founded in 1977, and established the Oracle sailing team in 2000 to challenge for the 2003 America’s Cup after purchasing American yachtsman Paul Cayard’s AmericaOne sydnicate – the losing finalist in the 2000

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Louis Vuitton Cup: the Challenger contest to take on the Defender in the America’s Cup. A native Californian himself, Ellison’s syndicate represents the Golden Gate Yacht Club from San Francisco.

Beaten by Alinghi in the semi-finals of the 2003 Louis Vuitton Cup, a defeat to Italy’s Luna Rossa team at the same stage in 2007 followed. Oracle Team USA were then selected as the challenger to the Swiss Société Nautique de Genève (SNG) club and its Alinghi syndicate for the 2010 America’s Cup; but only after extensive court action, with the Golden Gate Yacht Club having filed a lawsuit in order to successfully overturn the SNG club’s original selection of the Club Náutico Español de Vela (CNEV) as its Challenger. In the process, Ellison was successful in overruling Alinghi team boss Ernesto Bertarelli’s plans to race in monhull boats for the 2010 America’s Cup, forcing a switch to faster multi-hulls – a change which has remained in force due to Oracle’s hold over the cup since.

Heading into the 2017 America’s Cup, the Oracle sailing team is built up around skipper and helmsman Jimmy Spithill. The Australian was also at the helm for Oracle in both 2010 – when he became the youngest skipper to win the America’s Cup – and 2013. On the management side, fellow Australian Grant Simmer has the day-to-day

operational responsibility as the general manager and chief operating officer, continuing a role he took on in 2012.

Ahead of the 35th America’s Cup, Oracle Team USA is based at Dockyard in Bermuda, where the team will train on the course that they will be racing on in 2017. The team began the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series in Portsmouth, UK, in steady if unspectacular fashion, picking up one second and one fourth place finish, giving them a place on the podium in third at the close of the first day of racing. Strong wind forced the second scheduled day of racing to be cancelled.

In terms of sponsors, British luxury watchmaker Bremont Watch Company has come in at the premier partner level as Oracle Team USA’s official timing partner – while also

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becoming an official partner of the America’s Cup in this category.

BMW, which became the first premium automobile manufacturer to participate in the event as the title sponsor of Oracle BMW Racing at the 31st America’s Cup 2002/03 in Auckland, New Zealand – a role which it continued for the 2007 and 2010 contests - has been brought on board as the team’s technology partner and the German automobile manufacturer’s logo will be visible on the team’s gear. A premier partner with Oracle Team USA, BMW has also become a global partner of the 35th America’s Cup Events Authority (ACEA), the event organiser.

In the official partner tier, Japanbased diesel engine manufacturer Yanmar has renewed as the team’s

official technical partner, having served in the technical category for the previous America’s Cup. The company will provide 8LV inboard marine diesel engines and ZT sterndrive systems for the team’s two 46-foot chase boats, which have been renamed Chase Boat Yanmar 1 and Chase Boat Yanmar 2.

Sail Racing is Team Oracle USA’s official clothing partner – a partnership it also has with the America’s Cup – and the Swedishbased clothing company is responsible for supplying the team with its highperformance sailing gear.

Airbus and Parker have been secured as the team’s third-level official innovation partners. Aircraft manufacturer Airbus has been brought on to share the know-how of its experts in areas such as aerodynamics,

instrumentation, simulation, composites, structures, hydraulics and data analysis. And Parker, a manufacturer of motion and control technologies and systems, has joined the team to assist in the design and implement hydraulic control systems on its racing yachts.

A number of official suppliers have also been secured to support the team’s push for a third consecutive title. A recent deal with NetSuite Inc sees the US-based software company become the official business management software provider, marking the fifth consecutive collaboration with Ellison’s team. BF & M, Dassault Systems, Harken, Mastercam, Pro-Set, SeaDek, WiseKey, PWC, Safety-Kleen and Parker Racor are Oracle Team USA’s other official suppliers. 

The Oracle Team USA boat before the first America’s Cup World Series event in Portsmouth in 2015.

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Shaun Roster Photography

LAND ROVER BAR “It’s very clear that the America’s Cup attracts the best sailors in the world,” says Martin Whitmarsh, the chief executive of Land Rover BAR, of the contest for the oldest international sporting trophy. “It’s the most competitive branch of sailing. It’s the pinnacle of sport.”

Despite a self-proclaimed fascination with the America’s Cup, it was in motorsport, not sailing, that Whitmarsh earned his stripes as an astute leader at McLaren. Having parted ways with the Formula One team in August 2014 following a quarter of a century of service, during which time he rose to chief executive of the group, Whitmarsh accepted the offer from four-time Olympic gold medal-winning sailor Sir Ben Ainslie to join his team, Ben Ainslie Racing – now Land Rover BAR – as chief executive in March. Ainslie helped Oracle Team USA, the American boat funded by billionaire Larry Ellison, to a historic comeback victory in the America’s Cup in San Francisco in 2013, and he subsequently formed the British team to compete in the 35th edition of international yacht racing series, set for Bermuda in 2017.

In Formula One, Whitmarsh relished the adrenaline-fuelled racing from the command position on the sidelines, and departing the sport was not without its difficulties. “I spent over 25 years stood on the pit wall in Formula One and I think that challenge, the adrenaline of that is quite difficult to come away from,” he admits. “I chose to walk away from it and I think it was the right decision at the time. But you still miss racing, that environment and the challenge and the camaraderie and everything that happens around that.”

With that in mind, Whitmarsh confesses that he didn’t need much convincing before accepting Ainslie’s offer. The opportunity to lead this elite British sailing team appealed to those same impulses. “To me it stemmed back to watching the America’s Cup

in San Francisco in 2013, which I thought was a game-changing moment in sport really,” he says. “I just sensed that this might be a new era in this sport, a great challenge to go out there and after 164 years, try and bring this cup at last back to the UK.” Whitmarsh is tasked with building and marshalling an outfit capable of becoming the first British entry to lift the ‘Auld Mug’, as the America’s Cup prize is popularly known, since the yachting challenge was founded in 1851 by claiming victory over the defending US boat on the blue waters of Bermuda. In Ainslie, the most successful sailor in Olympic history, the team has a formidable skipper.

“I’d met Ben (Ainslie) a few times and I have to say I’ve always found him to be, obviously, incredibly competitive, but also incredibly humble and intelligent. I very much had respect for him,” says Whitmarsh of his team principal. “I think with Ben we’ve got a pretty good start to pull together the best sailing team in the world, frankly.

He’s been a great draw”.

For Whitmarsh, the initial challenges have come in ensuring he understands what the competitors are doing and where the rules are evolving, while setting a workable budget, securing commercial partners and building a technical team capable of delivering a competitive boat for Ainslie and his crew. “It’s really identifying the principal performance differentiators,” he explains, “making sure that we get maximum bang for our buck in our investment, that we make a difference, building that up and building that team which hasn’t frankly been built before in this country. This is the first properly funded programme like it.”

A number of partners have already been secured, including Land Rover BAR’s sustainability partner, 11th Hour Racing, a programme which seeks to provide a model of sailing sponsorship that supports sustainable practices to protect the oceans. In the commercial suppliers category the team have support from UK companies like sailing wear

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Whitmarsh (right) believes that British sailing legend Sir Ben Ainslie (left) is the best man to bring the America’s Cup to Britain for the first time in its history

The introduction of the AC45 foiling catamarans (opposite) has significantly reduced the costs of entry to the America’s Cup and increased the speed of the boats

brand Henri Lloyd and construction machinery manufacturer JCB. The announcement of Land Rover as the team’s title sponsor and innovation partner in June 2015 was a major positive, with the carmaker identified

by Whitmarsh as the ideal brand to support the team – its iconic British status and similar core values providing “credibility” to the programme.

“It’s a fantastic business and a fantastic engineering business in terms of the technology and innovation they can bring to the team,” Whitmarsh says. “They are there absolutely genuine with their intent of making a difference technically to our programme.” For Mark Cameron, the global brand experience director for Jaguar Land Rover, beyond the obvious branding and visibility opportunities, the possibility to have a hands-on involvement in a project “absolutely set up to succeed” is a principal driving force behind the partnership.

With Land Rover now on board, there is a strong desire to add further “iconic” British partners who can make a difference to the team’s performance, as Whitmarsh looks to accrue the remaining portion of the UK£80 million budget he has set. “We’ve got reasonable confidence that we will

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create the UK£80 million, and our sense is that that gives us a budget that will enable us to be highly competitive in our bid,” he reveals. “There will be teams with a lot less of a budget than we have, but the boat is one which should cause us to reasonably believe that we can go and have a successful campaign and win this cup.”

With the backing of Ellison, Oracle Team USA have won the last two Cups, and dwarfed their rivals when it comes to outlay on sailors and resources in recent editions. The American is estimated to have spent US$300 million securing the title in San Francisco two years ago. Whitmarsh senses that, after successfully defending the Cup in 2013, Ellison wants to manage his legacy to “leave the sport in a great place”. Following the majority vote by the teams to downsize the boats from the AC72s used in 2013 to AC45s, the costs required to compete have been significantly reduced as these are less expensive to build, and can be taken apart to ship around the world.

“It’s making them affordable, carrying them over as we anticipate and expect to carry this class over to the next Cup as well,” Whitmarsh says.

“This gives a lot more certainty and lowers the barrier of entry and frankly,

even in this cycle, you can participate for a lot less than the budget that we’ve set ourselves – and I think in subsequent cycles the budgets will be much, much smaller which will only draw more and more teams into it. So I think we’ll have a tremendous build for the next cycle of the America’s Cup.” Whitmarsh draws a distinction between the Oracle Team USA type of business model, where funding comes from one wealthy individual, with Land Rover BAR’s model, which is supported by a range of private investors together with commercial partners. One such investor is TeamOrigin, a syndicate first set up in 2007 as Great Britain’s bid to compete in the 2010 and 2013 editions of the America’s Cup, though it subsequently put this on hold in 2010 due to legal and financial concerns. TeamOrigin is led by British entrepreneur Sir Keith Mills, deputy chairman of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) in 2012, who is also a founder, director and shareholder in Land Rover BAR. TeamOrigin is managing the first America’s Cup World Series (ACWS) event in Portsmouth, which is expected to attract as many as 500,000 spectators between 23rd and 26th July.

The ACWS events are taking place ahead of the America’s Cup Challenger Series in Bermuda in 2017, providing teams with the opportunity to earn vital points to carry into the qualifying event, while giving spectators the opportunity to witness top class sailing up close. “[TeamOrigin] are undoubtedly putting on a fantastic event which is our home event, it’s on our doorstep,” offers Whitmarsh.

“So I think we, and frankly the sport, are well blessed in that regard,” he continues. “Given that it’s the first World Series event, it will really establish a fantastic benchmark. I think it will remind people what happened in San Francisco; I think now we’ve got to build from that. We know Ben’s fearsome reputation for competition. I’m sure Ben and the team will be disappointed if we don’t get out and win them.”

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Four-time gold medalist Ben Ainslie (above) is the most decorated sailor in Olympic history, winning medals at five consecutive Games between 1996 and 2012

Members of the Ben Ainslie Racing team (right) pose with their equipment following the signing of a landmark sponsorship deal with Land Rover.

Through the support of the Land Rover BAR Technical Innovation Group (TIG), British industry leaders are combining to contribute expertise in advanced technologies through research and development to complement the existing design team. The team has further tie-ins with Formula wOne through serial title-winning engineer Adrian Newey and Red Bull Advanced Technologies, and Whitmarsh is keen to draw from the proficiencies of the sport he knows so well.

“In terms of performance analysis simulation, that technology, those techniques have really been developed in Formula One and we’re wishing to slingshot our programme in that regard – developing our sailor simulation and simulator programmes,” explains Whitmarsh. “So partnering with a good, strong Formula One team that has that technology is really a good way to accelerate and fast-track that process.

“Adrian himself is a great inspiration for his peers. I’ve worked with Adrian for a decade in my past life, both our past lives for that matter, and we know each other very well and he is incredibly innovative and, as I say, an inspirational figure for our engineering team. So getting him involved in some of those innovation discussions is really going to help deliver some great approaches for the team.”

Concurrent to Land Rover BAR’s sporting quest is an ambition to

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contribute to the ongoing regeneration within the Portsmouth-Solent area; what Whitmarsh labels “a real performance maritime technology feeling and environment” to benefit the local economy. The team are also committed commitment to establishing apprenticeships and training in the region. A new state of the art headquarters to serve the team, which became fully operational in June, was built with the assistance of a UK£6.5 million government grant, and will house the 1851 Trust visitor centre, which aims to inspire

and engage a new generation through sailing and the marine industry, showcasing the sport, innovation, technology and sustainability.

Portsmouth, says Whitmarsh, “was a city that relied on huge dockyards which frankly have been in decline for the last 50 years and I think the creation of this iconic facility in an area of Old Portsmouth is creating that spark, that stimulus for that regeneration programme. So that’s exciting for the image and a sense of progress in that area. I think that people recognise that clearly we’re bringing jobs, money into the area.”

The immediate goal for Whitmarsh and Land Rover BAR, though, is to deliver a statement in the ACWS events and ensure Land Rover BAR is on the start-line as the Challenger to Oracle Team USA in 2017.

Whitmarsh concludes, “we’ve got to go out there and show people, and remind people just how exciting San Francisco was, what the potential this sport has, how it’s now changing, how it’s a more affordable sport than it’s ever been and why the racing is going to be closer, more dynamic, close to the shore, a great spectacle there, but also a great spectacle on TV” 

PORTSMOUTH 21

24 JULY 2016

The Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series returns to Portsmouth for the second time.

2 5 0 , 0 0 0 p e op le w a tched t he rac ing live in P ort sm ou th 2 0 1 5 a nd millions fo l lowed t he rac ing online and on TV. T o f i nd o u t ho w to g e t involved in t he next event c o n ta ct u s a t: info@te am origin.c om

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The SoftBank Team Japan crew (above) demonstrate the new foiling technology at the America’s Cup World Series event in Portsmouth this year.

SOFTBANK TEAM JAPAN It wasn’t until late April that SoftBank Team Japan confirmed their challenge for the 35th America’s Cup. Just weeks out from the first America’s Cup World Series (ACWS) event – scheduled for Portsmouth, on the UK’s south coast, in July – the long-rumoured announcement finally came that Japan’s first Cup entry since 2000 would be funded primarily by SoftBank Corp, the Japanese multinational telecoms and internet company, and represent Osaka’s Kansai Yacht Club.

The team are being led by general manager Kazuhiko Sofuku, a veteran of four previous Cup campaigns, and New Zealander Dean Barker, winner of the Cup with Team New Zealand 15 years ago. Barker has been installed as skipper and chief executive of the Japanese entry following his split with Team New Zealand, and it is now

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down to him to oversee the team’s hastily arranged debut.

“It’s fantastic to be responsible for putting a team together but also to continue to sail and race, which is really what I wanted to be able to do,” says Barker, speaking a little over a week before SoftBank Team Japan are due to take to the water for the first time. “It’s a big challenge and you definitely respect the people that have run these teams in the past because it is a challenging prospect, but it is certainly one that you want to grab with both hands and run with.”

Barker’s first task has been to put together a collective capable of challenging for sailing’s most prestigious prize. As well as calling on the expertise of Sofuku, who last competed in the Cup for Nippon Challenge in 1999/2000 and is currently the only Japanese member of the team, he has so far brought in decorated helmsman

Chris Draper as sailing director, boat builder Adrian Gray and shore team chief Tyson Lamond, as well as former Team New Zealand crew members Jeremy Lomas and Derek Saward.

To help get operational in such a short space of time, SoftBank Team Japan are also receiving a ‘base level of technical assistance’, including staff, from defender Oracle Team USA. “We literally have five sailors here, two shore crew, and then the rest really are being made up with support from Oracle,” explains Barker, who reveals that the long-term aim is to “slowly build up to a point in January where we want to be fully operating out of our base in Bermuda”, where the 35th Cup will be staged.

“We’ve got a couple of people coming in just to provide assistance from the event side and things,” he adds. “Right now, it really is only seven people that are part of SoftBank Team Japan, so it’s

AMERICA’S CUP

a lot of work still to build it up to a fully functioning, standalone team.”

Until now, Barker’s personal role in the team has been a multifarious one, spanning “everything from learning the process of how to relocate families into Bermuda and rent houses and form companies there, through to the logistics around getting the team up and running, going through the process of employing different people and figuring out how the structure comes together and how it all fits within the budget”.

Part of Barker’s role has also been to help source corporate support for the project. Though SoftBank is title sponsoring the team and funding virtually the entire operation – Barker reveals he has “a basic budget which is enough to get us through and do everything at a very good level, but it is certainly tight as well” – a concerted effort is currently ongoing behind the scenes to get more companies involved.

“We’ve got some fantastic support from ACEA [America’s Cup Event Authority]; the guys there are helping put together sponsorship proposals and helping facilitate that,” adds Barker. “We’ve got a couple of people also helping in the background making approaches and things. I had a week in Japan about three weeks ago and that was great. We spent three or four days with the SoftBank team that are responsible for the involvement in Team Japan.

It was really good to meet them and start that process because sailing is something very new for them.”

SoftBank’s involvement in the Team Japan project would not be possible without the blessing of Masayoshi Son, the founder and chief executive of the company who is thought to be Japan’s richest man with an estimated personal fortune of US$14.5 billion. “We were very fortunate to spend quarter of an

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hour or so with him when we were in Japan,” continues Barker. “He was very knowledgeable on the America’s Cup already; I think he’d had a few discussions with Larry [Ellison, team principle of Oracle Team USA].

“We’re hopeful that he will be able to be here in Portsmouth for some or hopefully all of the event. Ideally, we’d take him racing but we’ll see how that develops. But he definitely seems engaged with it, which is great, and hopefully he’ll get to love the sport, which would be fantastic.”

Though SoftBank has little to no experience in sailing, Barker says the switch to smaller, 45-foot AC45 catamarans was a key factor in the company’s decision to enter this time around. “It absolutely allows teams to come in at a later stage and at a smaller cost and to be able to get competitive pretty quickly,” he says. “We’re obviously buying a design package from Oracle and that allows to get going very quickly without having to recruit ten, 15 designers to effectively design all the different aspects of the boat and to get to that level. It would be near-impossible to start today and put that whole structure together.

“It allows us to do that; it means our team can be smaller: we’ll probably

Experienced Kiwi sailor Dean Barker (left) swapped Team New Zealand for SoftBank Team Japan and will work in a joint skipper-CEO role.

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AN AMERICA’S CUP ON JAPANESE SHORES?

Masayoshi Son (right), owner and chief executive of SoftBank.

Japan’s first challenge for the ‘Auld Mug’ since 2000 has brought with it the possibility that America’s Cup sailing could be heading to the country’s shores for the first time.

According to the rules set out in the Protocol for the 35th America’s Cup, challenging teams and their affiliate yacht clubs have the right to host a Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series (ACWS) event in their home country should they wish to do so.

“In terms of growing the recognition and getting the Japanese to come out in support of the team, it would be just amazing to be able to host a World Series event in Tokyo or one of the venues around there,” says Dean Barker, the skipper and chief executive of SoftBank Team Japan. “It would be really quite an amazing spectacle and I think it certainly would engage the public interest a lot. One thing which is very exciting is the fact that we’re re-engaging the sailing public back

only have 35, 40 people, tops, in our team, so teams are a lot smaller than teams of the past. It’s a lot easier to relocate, to manage and everything else. So there’s a lot of good rationale allowing different teams to come in.”

While nobody is genuinely expecting SoftBank Team Japan to be competitive right from the outset, Barker is confident of putting together a credible challenger for the ‘Auld

The SoftBank Team Japan executive team (right) pose with dog and model boat.

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into the America’s Cup after 15 years absence and they’re certainly very excited about it.”

Though this year’s World Series comprised just three events – in Portsmouth in the UK, Gothenburg in Sweden, and Hamilton, Bermuda – the America’s Cup organisers remain confident of staging between four and six in 2016. There is therefore every chance Japan could be on next year’s schedule, particularly since the billionaire businessman behind

Mug’ in two years’ time. “If we do everything well, there is no reason why we can’t be successful in 2017,” he says. “The America’s Cup is quite often determined by the mistakes a team makes in the early stages of coming together and the different decisions that are made early on that have an impact on the final result. It goes without saying you need to have a good boat, it needs to be a fast boat in 2017, and

SoftBank Team Japan’s challenge has already expressed an interest in hosting a World Series regatta.

“We’re already well down the path of these World Series events so time is short in terms of being able to put something together,” admits Barker.

“But that was one thing that Masayoshi Son, the CEO and owner of SoftBank, asked: whether it was possible to have an event in Japan. I guess if he’s keen on it, then it’s a good step in terms of trying to get it to happen.”

you need a good sailing team to race it and you need good shore support.

I think, if we can put those factors together, we’ll certainly give ourselves a good opportunity to be successful.

“In terms of the World Series, we’re putting together a new team here which is going to take time to gel, particularly when you’re sailing against some of these guys who have been doing a lot of sailing together already.

We know it’s going to be competitive right off the bat but certainly with the guys we’ve got, we’ve given ourselves a good opportunity quickly and we’ve got to make the most of the next ten days to try and get ourselves on the pace and be competitive.

“I know, from my own point of view, I’m probably the weak link right now having not really raced foiling [catamarans] since 2013. I know that I’ve got a big job to get back to the level that I expect to be at, but it’s certainly going to be great to get racing again.” 

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ARTEMIS RACING Swedish billionaire Torbjorn Tornqvist (right) has entrusted the management of his Artemis Racing team to former skipper Iain Percy (below right).

Torbjörn Törnqvist, the Swedish billionaire oil magnate who is the owner and founder of Artemis Racing, is a man on a mission. By the end of the 2017 America’s Cup – Törnqvist’s second – it is estimated that he will have sunk some €300 million of his own funds into developing a challenge for the Auld Mug, as he attempts to wrestle it out of American hands and into Scandinavia for the first time in its history.

The sums spent by Törnqvist might pale in comparison to the gargantuan investments of Oracle Team USA’s Larry Ellison, who put roughly that same amount into a single campaign in 2013, but they were still enough to give Artemis the second-highest budget of the four competitors in the 34th America’s Cup in 2013.

Despite this, very little went right following Törnqvist’s €140 million investment into Artemis’ 2013 campaign. Their failures in the competition itself, where they crashed out in the semi-finals of the Louis Vuitton Cup qualification event, however, are cast in the shadow of the tragic death of Olympic gold medal winning British sailor and key team member Andrew “Bart” Simpson

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in a training accident ahead of the race. A former training partner of Sir Ben Ainslie, Simpson’s death sent shockwaves through the world of sailing, and was a contributing factor in the Cup’s move away from AC72 catamarans, the unsafe nature of which was partly blamed for his death. In its aftermath, it was impressive that Artemis put on a challenge at all.

“We decided that we would go on, but not with the existing structure so we tore everything down and let people take decisions on how they wanted to work and move on,” Törnqvist said at the time, adding that they “eliminated an entire management structure within Artemis” following the tragedy, just weeks ahead of the Cup itself. The Andrew Simpson Sailing Foundation, founded by Ainslie, former Artemis skipper and current manager Iain Percy and Simpson’s wife Leah, is Artemis’ exclusive charity partner.

Despite mounting only one previous challenge, Artemis already look like one of the more experienced teams in the line-up, with three debutants – Land Rover Ben Ainslie Racing, Groupama Team France and SoftBank Team Japan – hoping to ride their first waves in 2017. Artemis’ crew reflects this, packing significant experience into their limited years.

Skippering the team this time around is 29-year-old Australian Nathan Outteridge, an Olympic gold medallist in the 49er class at London 2012. Joining Outteridge as wing trimmer is his partner from that event, 27-year-old Iain Jensen. Perhaps most remarkable is their fellow Australian Luke Parkinson who, aged just 25, was part of the winning crew of the 2014/15 Volvo Ocean Race.

Thanks to Törnqvist’s personal financial investment into the team, Artemis are less reliant on acquiring sponsorships for funding than several of their rivals. The majority of their partnerships are technical and logistical arrangements to aid the team’s efforts on the water rather than fund their endeavours. In 2015 they agreed a deal with simulation software developer Altair to become a technical partner.

Altair joins electronics and engineering firm Cosworth, marine safety equipment manufacturer Crewsaver and industrial solutions provider CMS Industries as Artemis’ technical suppliers.

Swedish company Pelle P, formed by sailing legend and Olympic silver medallist Pelle Petersen, is Artemis’ official supplier of sailing wear, while their main official partner is Ulysse Nardin, a prestigious Swiss watchmaker, who joined in March 2015. 

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GROUPAMA TEAM FRANCE Legendary French yachtsman Franck Cammas (right) has been backed

by Groupama in many of his previous sailing endeavours, including his winning effort in the 2011-12 Volvo Ocean Race (above).

Team France’s bid to challenge for the America’s Cup in 2017 is being led by French trio Franck Cammas, Michel Desjoyeaux and Olivier de Kersauson, who announced their intention to challenge in January 2014. The team is representing the Yacht Club de France, which is mounting its sixth participation as a challenging club in the contest and will celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2017. The club’s first challenge was in 1983. Despite France’s proud nautical history, the Yacht Club de France is seeking to become the first French sailing club to win the America’s Cup. In July 2015 French insurance group Groupama was confirmed as

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AMERICA’S CUP

the main sponsor of the Groupama Team France boat for the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series (ACWS) events through to the main event in 2017. According to Stuart Alexander of the Independent, the deal is worth €5 million a year (US$16.8 million in total) for each of the three years of the sponsorship, which is thought to cover 80 per cent of the team’s budget.

The Groupama Team France entry has been given the support of Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French defence minister, and Patrick Kanner, the minister for cities, youth and sports, who were both present at the official sponsorship announcement of the French entry for the 35th America’s Cup in June. Desjoyeaux said at the time: “On a technological level

sailing is a very complex sport, because we’re at the interface between the air and the water. In France, we have the knowledge as well as the culture to develop and sail foiling catamarans propelled by a wing. You just have to look at the number of French architects, engineers and sailors who make up the overseas teams to understand that. It’s down to us, within Groupama Team France, to unite this talent”.

Team skipper Cammas and French insurance group Groupama’s partnership stretches back to 1998, when the insurance group first launched the Groupama Sailing team sponsorship project with Cammas. Cammas remains a special representative and ambassador for the group, and while racing on board

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Groupama-backed boats the French skipper has won a host of major races contested in single-handed and crewed configuration. As well as picking up the Jules Verne Trophy in 2010, he set the North Atlantic crossing record in 2007 and the Trans-Mediterranean record in 2009. Cammas also claimed victory in the Route Du Rhum, in 2010, and the Volvo Ocean Race in 2011/12.

Desjoyeaux is a decorated French sailor with a tranche of solo and double-handed ocean racing titles.

He became the first sailor to win the Vendée Globe twice when he backed up his 2000/01 victory with a win in 2008/09. And de Kersauson, 71, has twice claimed the Jules Verne Trophy, in 1997 and 2001, among his other sailing achievements.

Joining the trio of sailors is Bruno Dubois, who has been brought in as team manager. Dubois was previously the manager of North Sails Europe and more recently team manager of Dongfeng Race Team for the Volvo Ocean Race.

As well as the America’s Cup entry, the team will also participate in smaller yachts in the Tour de France a la Voile, the Extreme Sailing Series and the International C-Class Catamaran Championship. 

French sailing veteran Olivier de Kersauson (left) is part of Cammas’ crack team.

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EMIRATES TEAM NEW ZEALAND The Emirates Team New Zealand boat parading for the crowds ahead of the first America’s Cup World Series event in Portsmouth this year.

Where stability has been the name of the game for defending champions Oracle Team USA, it has been a rather different story for the team they defeated in 2013. Emirates Team New Zealand have undergone substantial changes since the end of that race – perhaps not surprisingly, given the spectacular collapse it took for them to surrender an 8-1 lead to Oracle, eventually losing 9-8.

Their captain for that race, Dean Barker, left Team New Zealand in March 2015 under controversial circumstances, having been offered an on-shore role by chief executive Grant Dalton. Little over two months later, Barker was unveiled in his new joint role as chief executive and skipper at America’s Cup debutants SoftBank Team Japan. Barker, a part of Team New Zealand since 1995 and a veteran of four America’s Cups

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with the team – three as skipper – took with him not just significant experience, but also a measure of continuity from previous campaigns.

Barker’s departure signalled the beginning of a significant restructure for Team New Zealand, one which continued apace in June when they shed a further three members: grinders Winston Macfarlane and Derek Saward and, most significantly, long-standing chief designer Nick Holroyd, who had worked on the team’s last four America’s Cup attempts. With Holroyd goes a wealth of intellectual property built up over a near-20-year career working with the team on America’s Cup campaigns.

Replacing Barker is 37-year-old Australian Glenn Ashby. Alongside him is New Zealander Peter Burling, who at 24-years-old is comfortably the youngest helmsman in the America’s Cup line up. Despite his young years, Burling comes with the experience of

winning a silver medal at the London 2012 Olympic Games in the 49er class, only missing out on gold to Australia’s Nathan Outteridge – now Burling’s counterpart at Sweden’s America’s Cup entrant, Artemis Racing.

Into Holroyd’s quite significant shoes steps Daniel Bernasconi, who spent six years in the vehicle modelling division at the Mclaren Formula One team before swapping the tarmac for the ocean, joining up with United Internet Team Germany for the 2007 America’s Cup and then Alinghi in 2010.

Despite the clear pedigree of Burling and Bernasconi, however, Team New Zealand are nevertheless entering the 35th America’s Cup campaign in something of a state of transition.

Furthermore, following the announcement in April that there would not be a pre-regatta event in Auckland, New Zealand’s prime minister John Key hinted that the

AMERICA’S CUP

team’s government funding was under threat – after a NZ$36 million (US$23 million) contribution (of Team New Zealand’s total NZ$100 million budget) had been made toward the team’s efforts in the 2013 edition.

Despite a government-sanctioned impact assessment finding that previous America’s Cup campaigns had offered a direct economic benefit to New Zealand of NZ$74.4 million, Key stated in a television interview that “we’re at the end of the road” with regards to funding team’s endeavours with taxpayers’ money. “With the event being held 100 per cent in Bermuda, that becomes a really challenging issue to go beyond the NZ$5 million we’ve already put in,” he said.

This left Team New Zealand – already hindered by what was the second-smallest budget among challengers in the 34th America’s Cup – wholly reliant on their sponsors to meet

able to release a statement confirming the team’s intention to enter the 35th America’s Cup. Turner stated that, thanks to their sponsors as well as the private backing of benefactors such as New Zealand-based retail mogul Sir Stephen Tindall and Swiss-Italian millionaire businessman Matteo de Nora, the team would not require government funding to mount a challenge.

Finally, just a few days after the challenge was confirmed, Japanese carmaker Toyota renewed its sponsorship of the team in a deal that would see the partnership reach the quarter-century mark by the beginning of the America’s Cup itself in 2017.

As Dalton commented at the time, “Toyota has been a sponsor of this team for almost as long as some of our young sailors have been alive.”

Team New Zealand have also received help from old rivals, with former Challenger of Record Luna Rossa offering them the use of their AC45 catamaran for testing and development purposes. Italian team Luna Rossa withdrew from entry into the 35th America’s Cup after a dispute with the event’s organisers over the change from 62ft to 48ft catamarans – a dispute on which Team New Zealand sided with Luna Rossa.

The Italians clearly felt compelled to return the goodwill and have offered their support to Team New Zealand throughout the campaign. 

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the bare minimum US$80 million– US$100 million generally estimated to be the amount necessary to compete, putting their participation on the starting line in Bermuda in jeopardy.

Thankfully for them, their sponsors were able to offer a semblance of stability.

Long-standing title sponsor Emirates Airlines became the first to reaffirm their commitment to the team in early May, agreeing to an extension of the deal that had seen them take the naming rights to Team New Zealand across the 33rd and 34th editions of the Cup. Dalton described the deal as “a brick in the wall, but a significant one.”

Just two weeks later Omega, an even longer-standing sponsor, recommitted itself to Team New Zealand. The luxury watch brand has been a partner of the team since their winning campaign of 1995 and the renewal of its deal came as a significant landmark for Team New Zealand, reiterating the team’s ability to capture blue-chip brands as major sponsors.

Despite this, early in June, Dalton told a press conference that a ‘multimillion dollar injection’ was needed, claiming that the syndicate would be ‘gone by the end of the month’ without immediate intervention.

If Dalton’s statement was intended as a cry for help from private investors, it appeared to work. As that ‘end of the month’ deadline approached, Team New Zealand chairman Keith Turner was

Emirates Team New Zealand chief executive Grant Dalton (left) is an experienced campaigner.

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VOLVO OCEAN RACE THE BRIEFING Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing, led by skipper Ian Walker, won the latest edition of the nine-leg, nine-month, 38,739 nautical mile race, beating out six other competing boats to the prize. The race began in Alicante in Spain in October 2014, took in stopovers in the likes of Cape Town, South Africa, Sanya, China, Auckland, New Zealand, and Itajai, Brazil, before finishing in Gothenburg, Sweden in June this year. The 2014/15 edition of a race that was first staged in 1973/74, represented the dawn of a new era for the Volvo Ocean Race. The fourth event to be run under the control of the Volvo Group, the race used a fleet of identical onedesign boats – the Volvo 65 – for the first time. According to the Volvo Ocean Race’s director of news and media Jon Bramley, the results justified the organisers’ strategy.

The 2014-15 edition was something of a new dawn for the Volvo Ocean Race. What effect did the changes have?

Jon Bramley: The big news before the Race started was the introduction of a new one-design boat, the Volvo Ocean 65, which marked an important break from tradition in the 42-year history of the race. For the first time in 2014-15, the boats were built by the same consortium as strictly one-design, down to the last millimetre. So all seven teams were competing on a completely level playing field and that made it more attractive for sponsors because they knew that if they had a boat in the field then they had an equal chance of winning, depending on the performance of the crew – it was all about seamanship, not how

Teams must battle with fearsome conditions in one of the most gruelling races in professional sailing.

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much money you had to spend on improving your boat’s design. And it was borne out in the race itself, which was overall as close a competition as we’ve ever had. From the first boat to the last, there generally wasn’t much more than 24 hours difference after more than three weeks’ racing at a time during a leg. The new boat came through with flying colours in terms of exciting racing and it also proved itself very reliable – it was a much stronger boat than its predecessor.

Fewer breakages, much more robust, but also pretty quick. Combined with this, was the introduction of The Boatyard maintenance centre, which Boatyard ensured all boats were equally maintained both before and during the race and enabled the teams to cut back drastically on the size of their own shore crews which slashed their costs hugely.

Can you point to any particular new team that competed in the last edition as a direct result of the new boats?

We welcomed back women in the race for the first time in 12 years with Team SCA. Again this is linked to the boat because it was designed for females to be able to sail it as competitively as men who naturally are stronger physically. They were generally placed well among the fleet for large parts of most legs and indeed they won one – coming into Lorient in Leg 8 - so that was a big achievement. The handicap that they had was that a generation of women sailors have not had the chance to compete in this race, and so they were more struggling on an experience level than on general capability.

It remains to be seen whether the SCA company will come back; we’re currently negotiating with them. But we’d certainly love to see women back in the race for 2017-18.

SCA – a feminine hygiene brand – were an interesting new sponsor for this edition. Can you point to any sponsorship activations that you feel were particularly noteworthy from across the race?

I actually think the standout was from SCA. In fact I’ve just received an email this morning from the person that was

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running their campaign in 2014/15 saying how happy they were with the results. They were fantastic with their general marketing, both before the race and during the stopovers; They also produced their own television show, showing the building of their team which was called ‘No Ordinary Women’, and that did pretty well. And they made use, as a lot of the teams do, of the celebrities we saw. A lot of household names as usual came and looked around the boats – tennis champion Rafa Nadal, for example, was in Abu Dhabi; as a guest of the MAPFRE team. We’re starting to get people who actually climb up the mast for selfies. The Prince of Sweden did that and that was a very successful way of bringing attention to a race – he clambered up a 100ft mast for a ‘selfie’ from the top. Miss World, Rolene Strauss, did the same in Cape Town. But it’s very safe – in dock at least. It’s not so easy in the open sea when it’s rocky.

But I suppose the biggest news event of the race by far was the story of how Team Vestas Wind recovered after sailing into a reef in Leg 2 at the end of November last year. This was an incredible story from start to finish.

First of all, the crew managed to escape unscathed with cuts and bruises but no more, despite hitting a rock in the middle of the Indian Ocean miles from anywhere at pretty fast speed. To make matters worse, the crash happened in shark-infested, and the skipper Chris Nicholson led his crew to safety in the pitch dark before they were picked up by the local coast guard. And then later the boat was retrieved from the reef, pretty much a wreck, and then over the next seven months or so the boat was pieced back together. That in itself was an amazing story, a refusal by all involved not to give up when the odds looked so stacked against them. The whole story won huge worldwide coverage. And, thanks to the communication set-up on the boat – with the help of our partners Inmarsat and Cobham - we were able to keep our fans around the world up to speed at the time of the incident on what was going on in real time.

You’re putting together a comprehensive follow-up report to be released later in the year.

Anecdotally, what can you tell me about the feedback you’ve had from sponsors and partners?

It’s all been very positive. With the exception of one team – Alvimedica who’ve got their own financial reasons for not doing the race again, we’re talking to all the other companies about the possibility of returning which is a very good situation to be in, as well as a lot of new, would-be campaigns that are coming forward. Having said that, we are loath to overplay prospects for the next race until they are safely in the bag. But I think it’s fair to say that the overall outlook looks bright for us. We’re looking in good shape with all our non-sailing stakeholders – companies like our kit partners Musto, for example, are in for a two-race deal.

And we’re talking to a lot of others who look like they will be doing the race again – Inmarsat and Cobham among them. The media results universally are showing growth on previous editions which is very good news. We’ve put a lot of emphasis on our redesigned app which was very successful; a lot of new followers for the race coming through that avenue, so we’re very pleased from that point of view. And I’m currently doing a TV broadcasters’ survey in the top 15 markets that we targeted

The fleet sets off on the second leg of the 2014/15 race from Cape Town to Abu Dhabi.

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THE EXPERT’S VIEW Robert Datnow is the co-founder and managing director of The Sports Consultancy, an agency with a deep history in sailing and an organisation which provides consultancy, venue, sponsorship and broadcast rights sales, feasibility and legal services to all manner of sports entities and host venues interested in making money and investing intelligently in sport.

He knows the Volvo Ocean Race well, having worked with the organisers for over decade. “The Volvo Ocean Race remains the pinnacle of off-shore sailing for all its stakeholders, partly I believe because it continues to innovate and evolve,” Datnow says. There have been many commercial evolutions in the Race over the years and several significant ones from the last Race

Team Vestas Wind (right) escaped from sharkinfested waters in the Indian Ocean after running aground on a reef in Leg 2.

come to mind. The first is the adoption of one-design for the fleet. That has been a game-changer for the Volvo Ocean Race for a number of reasons.

The race has been closer and it’s now a test of seamanship, rather than a test of both seamanship and design. Just to take a couple of examples over some of the longest legs: in the leg from Itajai to Newport, which is just over 5,000 nautical miles, we watched as three minutes separated first and second.

From Auckland to Itajai, which is about 7,200 nautical miles, four boats finished within five nautical miles of each other.

The second product of one-design is the significant reduction in costs for the teams, which raises the prospect of more national teams competing and a more sustainable group of teams that

can invest in other areas, on activation, on talent, on media and being focused on enhancing the overall brand of the team and their return on investment.

The race has been very strong at attracting a business to business audience and it remains strong. The number of corporate hospitality tickets that are sold continues to increase. It is also continuing to invest in media and the accessibility of the spectator experience. The presence of the onboard cameraman is not new for the Volvo Ocean Race, but it is different from a number of the other races.

That will continue. The ability to be able to interview the skipper about tactics during the Race and to get live feedback, remains engaging and sets Volvo Ocean Race apart.”

and again universally the feedback has been very positive about the quality of the production and the audience it’s received.

What are you measuring in the report, and what are the next priorities priorities for the organising team are going towards the end of 2015 and into 2016?

The report is focusing not only on the media results but what makes this event different and special from other global world class sporting events. We’re a successful media operation with our own media house delivering television, picture, text, web and social media content, but one of the great draws for sponsors for the Volvo Ocean Race is the unique B2B opportunities: the chance to host customers on board their boats and take them out with the guys that are doing the race. So you really get a first-hand experience out in a competitive environment. The report also covers the footfall that we have had from fans just coming to the 11 stopovers – 2.4 million visiting ten stopovers and a pit stop in The Hague

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– that we had during the course of the race. And obviously all the TV figures, online, print, social media and so on.

Our immediate strategic priorities are securing as many as possible of the teams and stakeholders that we had from this race for the next one. I don’t think we’re going to be seeing any team announcements until well into Q4 of this year if not Q1 of next year, because that’s the way negotiations take place and company budget timescales

tend to work. The beauty is they’ve already got the boats that they’ll be competing in. We are also securing the route for the next race.. We need to make sure that the course provides exciting racing again and the stopovers make sense for our stakeholders too from a business perspective, that we’re going to places that their guests want to go to. And we will be rolling out that route announcement in Q1 and Q2 of next year. 

GEORACING, A NEW WAY TO WATCH SAILING EVENTS Trimaran is a French leading provider of CGI, 3D, and visual effects for television and sport.

The company has developed an innovative GPS tracking and virtual visualization system for outdoor sports named GeoRacing, able to manage live GPS data and produce virtual timing, speed information, distances, heading, wind direction and many others statistics.

GeoRacing offers turnkey solutions for TV channels, event organizers, clubs, teams, or sponsors, tailored to their specific needs. GeoRacing has already been successfully used during international sailing competitions such as the SOF, the Delta Lloyd Regattas, the Tour de France à la Voile, The Route des Princes, The Bullitt GC32 Racing Tour or the Star Sailors League.

Could you explain to us how it works?

Each participant is equipped with a GPS tracker which sends in real time location data to our cloud where they are analysed and converted into 2D and/or 3D graphic representations. Virtual representations are instantly transmitted either at TV, on large screens or on web and GeoRacing apps.

The first purpose of our solution is to give to spectators the opportunity to better understand what is happening during races and to increase media coverage of events.

What makes GeoRacing stand out from other existing tracking systems companies?

www.georacing.com

The sailing world is a highly competitive and innovative market where providers must continuously improve their service offers. Today, we are the only provider able to propose a different kind of tracking system in GPRS, satellite or radio frequency.

We have the largest range of services with 2D and 3D views of competitors, available on TV, large screens, web, mobiles and tablets. Our technologies have been designed to be very intuitive and to simplify the logistics for organizers. No dedicated software is needed, no special plugins such as Java, Flash or Unity. The system works with a simple Internet connection on any devices. Moreover, we can produce a complete 3D virtual sailing programme from our editing room in Paris, then streamed the video feed to large screens and digital devices, or connect our 3D engines directly on location, when TV channels are producing the show. Our background with TV sports programmes is clearly our strength.

Why did you decide to become the official Sailing Black Book technology partner?

We are very aware of the commitment the the Sailing Black Book has into the sailing world. Becoming the official technology partner gives us the opportunity to extend our business network and to improve our media coverage.

We are proud that the Sailing Black Book got in touch with us to introduce our services to their partners and companies which trust them. It’s also the confidence of sailing experts that recommend our technologies and skills.

Are you involved in other partnerships?

We are the official GPS tracking partner of the Bullitt GC32 Racing Tour and have been for two seasons but we also provide tracking to the Star Sailors League. Besides that, we will be the provider of 3D views for the next Vendée Globe, and we have signed with the Tour de France à la Voile and the GenèveRolle- Genève Race a two years contract.

What’s next for GeoRacing?

We are emerging from a long phase of development, we are still growing and we would like to be the most relevant system for sailing events, clubs and teams in the short run. It is why, we continue to innovate and create new products and services for our customers. Very soon, we will launch a new club offer and novelties in terms of GPS devices.

For more information about GeoRacing please do not hesitate to visit www.georacing.com or to contact david.barbosa@trimaran.com

WORLD MATCH RACING TOUR & M32 SERIES THE BRIEFING Officially sanctioned by the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) as one of only five ISAF Special Events, the World Match Racing Tour (WMRT) is the annual world championship of match racing. Already, 2015 has been a momentous year for the world tour. In January, the WMRT suffered the loss of its title sponsor as the UK branch of forex company Alpari went into liquidation. Quick to react, by June the tour had a new owner and a new vision. Swedish company Aston Harald AB, led by Håkan Svensson, entrepreneur and sailing enthusiast, acquired the Tour business to add to the company’s portfolio of yachting businesses including the M32 high performance multihull boatbuilding business, and the M32 Series, an annual series of regattas for M32 owners and teams in Scandinavia, soon to expand to the US and Asia. The management board of WMRT, including executive director James Pleasance, was retained, but a process to transition the tour from monohulls to the M32 multihull was triggered. As Pleasance explains, there are plenty more changes in the pipeline for the longest running global professional sailing series, and the M32 Series.

Could you outline the key changes at the WMRT over the last 12 months?

James Pleasance: 2014 was a milestone year for the World Match Racing Tour with British skipper Ian Williams clinching his record fifth world championship title. The start of our 16th season this year was challenging with the unexpected liquidation of Alpari UK in January, however we were delighted to reach an agreement with Aston Harald AB, owned by Håkan Svensson, to acquire the business.

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Håkan has a long history in sailing sponsorship: his former company Berg Propulsion was main partner to Ken Read’s Puma Ocean Racing team in the 2008-2009 Volvo Ocean Race, and he continues to support Freddy Lööf, the Swedish Olympic sailor and tactician for the current Swedish America’s Cup team, Artemis Racing As a result of the new ownership, the WMRT has now become part of a much bigger group in Aston Harald and the company plans to rapidly grow the Tour both in existing and new markets.

One of the key game-changers moving forward, and also one of the main reasons for Aston Harald acquiring the Tour, is that we will introduce the M32 multihulls to the world championship from 2016, the first time the tour has ever competed in multihulls. Aston Harald owns and builds the M32 at our headquarters on the island of Hönö on the west coast of Sweden and there is naturally an objective to attract new M32 owners.

Since 2012, twenty-three M32’s have been built to owners mainly in Europe

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and the USA. In 2013, the company launched the ‘M32 Series’ to provide a regatta circuit for owners. The popular Series has grown quickly in Scandinavia with eight or nine boats competing regularly at events in Oslo, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, Helsinki and Stockholm.

For 2016, the M32 Series plans to add new events both in Europe, the USA, and potentially Australasia.

The addition of the WMRT to the Aston Harald portfolio now provides an extra level of competition for professional teams to advance from the

M32 Series to the world championship stage. While the M32 Series is solely a fleet racing series, the WMRT will combine both fleet racing and its principal format of one-on-one match racing, the same as the America’s Cup. In July, we also announced a record US$1million cash prize for the winner of the World Match Racing Tour from 2016, as well as the prize money available to teams at individual events.

The net result is we are creating a solid pathway for up and coming sailors to enter the multihull racing scene with

the M32 Series, and grow their career, income and profile on the World Match Racing Tour stage.

When will the changes come into force and what will the new WMRT and M32 Series calendar look like?

The current [2015] WMRT season will finish at the Monsoon Cup event in Malaysia at the end of January [2016].

As a further change for next year the WMRT final event will move to Marstrand, Sweden at the end of June

The move from monohulls to one-design M32 multihull boats will transform the World Match Racing Tour under its new ownership.

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Aston Harald owns the rights to the M32 model and manufactures the boats at its base in Sweden (right).

– the Stena Match Cup Sweden- which will be competed in M32s. Therefore, there will be a short season between February and July 2016, and the annual championship season thereafter will run from July to July.

We plan to have 12 WMRT World Championship events per season from 2016/2017, each with up to three qualifying events. We also plan to increase the number of teams per event from 12 to 20, which will make the Tour more accessible for more sailors.

The entries will be selected largely from the ISAF match race rankings, as they are at the moment.

For the M32 Series, the Scandinavian Series will run from July to September with new events to be announced in Europe and the USA in early 2016. As a fleet racing format, the M32 Series will compete up to nine boats on the course at any time.

Where would you like the events to be held, and what’s the process for signing the venues up?

We will work to grow the existing venues for both the WMRT and M32 Series events as we know many of them are in ideal locations and markets. We also want to introduce new venues in suitable new markets for the M32, for example the Middle East and Australasia. The process for signing venues is simply by way of an application which we will then establish the suitability of the venue and infrastructure of the organisation.

There is also a very strong value proposition for new events in terms of media exposure from live TV coverage, and sponsor activation via hospitality.

One of the key advantages, however, is for both WMRT and M32 Series events, the boats are provided either by the owners (for the M32 Series) or by us (for WMRT events) thereby providing a turnkey operation for venues. We fit two M32s in a single 40-foot container so they are easy to ship and can be set up in a matter of hours; they even don’t require cranes to launch them.

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How can owners and teams start sailing the M32?

The easiest route to sailing an M32 is to buy one. At the same time we are creating M32 training academies in Europe, USA and Australasia by building three fleets of eight boats, each fleet to be based in the respective academies. The boats will be available for testing, training and racing as well as corporate events and for charter to the WMRT events. After a year, the boats will be available for sale and replaced with new boats, which will create and grow a used M32 market.

In turn, this will make purchasing an M32 more affordable.

How much does an M32 boat cost and what are the different levels of competition?

The retail price of an M32 is US$250,000 complete with sails and road trailer. There are a number of levels of competition available to an owner or team, starting with a ‘GT Series’, essentially for owners looking for some fun but competitive racing.

US professional sailor and CEO of North Sails Inc. Ken Read was one of the first to buy an M32 in his home town of Newport, R.I which quickly attracted several other owners to form a local racing circuit in the Newport bay.

For teams wishing to campaign their boats, the M32 Series then provides the platform for them to race competitively on a regional circuit with professional race management, media coverage

and VIP hospitality which they can offer back to their sponsors. Former World Match Racing champion Taylor Canfield has been campaigning his US One team successfully on the M32 Series over the last two years.

Defending World Match Racing champion Ian Williams also purchased a boat to compete in the latter part of the 2015 M32 Series.

And then there is the World Match Racing Tour, for skippers and teams to race on a world championship match racing level, adopting the same discipline and format as the America’s Cup. At the WMRT level, the competition combines both fleet and match racing with one-on-one match battles between teams. At WMRT events, the boats are supplied and equal, so it requires a true test of sailing skill.

Has the new WMRT ownership brought about changes to the commercial model?

By acquiring the Tour, Aston Harald AB has already invested significantly in the property, however we will retain the name as the World Match Racing Tour. The commercial model remains largely unchanged; we will seek additional global partners and host venues to grow the profile of the tour and also invest in the prize money for sailors, as this is one of our key objectives. One of the additional revenue streams under the new ownership however is the growth of the M32 class worldwide and, in turn, the opportunity to sell more boats to potential owners, teams, and clubs.

What has the initial feedback on the changes been from the WMRT and M32 varied stakeholders – competitors, sponsors, media and host venues?

From a media and teams perspective the feedback has been hugely positive, largely because of the rapid development and appeal of multihull racing after the success of the 2013 America’s Cup in San Francisco. The ‘new’ Cup following has attracted many

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young sailors into the sport and into multihulls, as well as the current tour sailors. For those looking at becoming the next America’s Cup champion, the M32 Series and WMRT offer the ideal pathway. As a TV product, multihulls flying at over 30 knots just metres in front of spectators clearly has a ‘wow factor’ appeal, and events will be able to capitalise on that for their spectators and partners, particularly with the guest sailor programmes allowing VIPs to sail on board during races.

The group is investing heavily into new camera, branding and tracking technology which will also create a more interactive TV viewer experience and appeal for sponsors.

Will the changes affect the WMRT’s connection with and sanctioning by the International Sailing Federation (ISAF)?

ISAF were well aware of the change in ownership and were kept well informed throughout the process – they have been very supportive. We have always worked closely with ISAF, and we value

the association with them both as an ISAF Special Event and as an official ISAF World Championship. We have an advisory committee on which representatives of ISAF are involved, so we will be developing many of the new changes together with them.

We are one of the few official World Championships in the sport and that means a great deal, not only for us as WMRT, but for our partners, and for the sailors that are winning it.

Did the demise of former WMRT title sponsor Alpari – which declared its UK operation insolvent in January – catalyse the deal that saw Aston Harald come in?

The conversations with Aston Harald actually started last year. I had the opportunity to meet with Håkan Svensson around April [2014] and we started some discussions about the future of the Tour. It’s fair to say the insolvency of Alpari UK may have accelerated the discussions but it was more as an additional factor rather than because of it.

Are you building out the WMRT and M32 team on the back of Aston Harald’s investment?

Absolutely. By joining Aston Harald as an existing business, the WMRT has already benefitted from a larger resource within the group, including working alongside the M32 Series team led by commercial director Martin Sohtell. Former World Match Racing Tour champion Magnus Holmberg also joined in August 2015 as the group’s sporting director to oversee the development of both properties.

The production of the M32 boats is led by Martin Krite, a former winner of the Volvo Ocean Race and America’s Cup sailor. Finally, from the race management side, WMRT tour director Craig Mitchell has joined forces with Mattias Dahlström, race director of the M32 Series.

Aston Harald and Håkan Svensson’s vision for the M32 multihull, M32 Series and WMRT is a long-term plan, and at the pace we are expanding each of the respective businesses, I foresee our group growing very quickly indeed. 

The M32 boat is quick and easy to handle, and is flexible enough to accommodate a VIP guest as part of the crew.

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EXTREME SAILING SERIES THE BRIEFING The Extreme Sailing Series will enter its tenth season next year in rude health, with the 2015 edition having been its biggest to date. Nine teams - named after blue chip partners such as SAP, Red Bull, Gazprom and Oman Air – made it to the start line this year for 11 months of competition, taking in nine events, or Acts.

New venue Hamburg joined last year’s debut hosts St Petersburg and Sydney on a calendar that spans three continents, and visits exciting markets in the likes of Muscat, Qingdao, Singapore and Istanbul. At this year’s Cardiff Act in June, series founding father Mark Turner gave the Sailing Black Book his top-to-tail assessment of a competition that is now firmly established on the global sailing calendar.

The Extreme Sailing Series has enjoyed great success in its ability to attract global brands such as SAP and Gazprom (right) to its boat sponsorship positions.

All sports have their flagship events: those rare, defining moments in the calendar towards which everything else seems to build. Many reach their climaxes with the Olympic Games; others have a World Cup or Super Bowl to shape themselves around.

Sailing is slightly different.

“One thing in sailing,” says Mark Turner of OC Sport says with a slight sigh, “is that we’ve always got this little thing called the America’s Cup going on in the background.”

“Sometimes it’s going on, sometimes it’s in the courts, sometimes I’m not sure what it’s doing. But that’s quite a big event in the background that we need to be conscious of and make sure we don’t become victims of.”

If seems it seems odd to talk of being ‘conscious’ of your sport’s biggest competition and to discuss it in terms of being a ‘victim’ of it, then that’s probably because the America’s Cup is an odd event. The recent history of the ‘Auld Mug’ – the oldest international sporting trophy in the world, and

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among the most revered – has been marred by recurring legal battles and disputes over rule changes. Due to its defender/challenger format, this means that often it’s not even clear if or when the next event will take place.

“It’s a strange beast,” says Turner.

“It’s probably the strangest trophy in the whole of sport. When someone wins it they get to change the rules and change the whole game, so it’s not the most reliable property you can have… but it’s got 160 years of glitzy billionaire magic behind it.

“And it works – if it didn’t work it wouldn’t get the sponsorship. When then on top of that you’ve got a bunch of wealthy guys underpinning it, you can put on a big show, as Sir Keith Mills will do in Portsmouth in a few weeks’ time [for the America’s Cup World Series event]. There’s a lot of private funding that will make it work.”

Rewinding a little, it’s clear to see why Turner might find the ‘glitzy billionaire’, private funding element of the America’s Cup a touch frustrating.

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His company, OC Sport, are the organisers of the Extreme Sailing Series (ESS), which is Turner’s own brainchild, and were the management group behind the Dongfeng Race Team entrant into the recently concluded 2014/15 Volvo Ocean Race. The ESS and the Volvo Ocean Race happen to be among the few events in world sailing which are entirely commercially financed, taking all of their funding from sponsors and brand partners.

“Everything else in sailing has private money, one way or another,” says Turner. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but it definitely marks us out on different territory.”

The journey through that different territory has meant a long, concerted effort to make sailing more appealing to a mass audience, slowly expanding on the traditional fanbase of those ‘wealthy guys’ who have long been the sport’s main demographic. The America’s Cup,

Mark Turner (right) at an Extreme Sailing press event.

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of course, attracts massive sponsorship deals itself, but is not wholly reliant on them, whereas commercially funded ventures are under pressure to exhibit themselves as a desirable package to sponsors. Attracting bigger sponsors means growing your support base.

“You can’t make an event add up from a brand perspective if you’re only showing yourself to the core sailing community. It’s a decent sized community and it’s a wealthy community so it’s a good target for most brands, but it’s not big enough on its own. You have to go wider.”

Understanding this is crucial to understanding the nature of the Extreme Sailing Series. The ESS has always been focussed, says Turner, on “bringing the sailing to the people, rather than hoping for it to happen the other way around,” and the whole format has been devised with that in mind. The traditional problems of attracting a mass audience to sailing – remote locations, races occurring over long distances and durations, complex rule systems – have largely been overcome admirably by OC Sports with the ESS. The stadium format means that not only are the venues located in accessible areas of some of the world’s most iconic cities, but also that an entire race can be seen from a single vantage point. Because of this it is much easier to follow a race and understand the action that is taking place in front of you. Technology has played its part in this development, and Turner argues that the complexity of sailing can now actually work to its advantage.

Courtesy of German software giant SAP, the technology partner of the ESS and also the title sponsor of one of the racing teams in the series, each event now features a prominent ‘second screen experience’, where data from on-board computers is visualised on screens around the stadium, helping to illustrate and explain the events happening on the water.

“Sailing is a complex sport but that’s not a problem, it’s actually an opportunity because people get pulled into it and they want to understand

more. The tools that SAP developed allow us to take that complexity and turn it in useful information to explain what’s going on and I think we can go a lot further with that.”

In terms of expanding the demographic, this certainly seems to be working. According to Turner, surveys at ESS events show that their audience breaks down at between 85 and 90 per cent of people from a non-sailing background. Furthermore, having been once, people are catching the sailing bug and returning the following year.

“You can see on social media, people coming back again and looking forward to coming back again. In Cardiff we have a bunch of people who’ve been every single year and they come from the other side of the country. People come, they enjoy it, and they want to come back.”

Through that same social media measure and other metrics, OC Sport can measure the growth of the audience they’re speaking to across their various media channels. Turner claims that from a community of two and a half million back in 2007, the ESS now commands a global audience of around 50 million, factoring in event attendance, social media, and the seven-part TV series that is distributed around the world to 55 broadcasters and shown in 80 different countries.

Such growth is impressive, but Turner knows it is no excuse to start treading water. “It’s an ever-evolving thing. We’ve been around longer than many sailing events that come and go. I think we’ve clearly established a new segment with the stadium sailing aspect, but also we’ve managed to put ourselves at the top of the pyramid in terms of professional, global, sponsor-funded sailing. But the key thing for us is that we keep on innovating, and keep evolving.”

The 2016 series will be the ESS’ tenth, and Turner is describing the next phase as “ESS 2.0”, with a raft of new developments to come. The biggest of these is the move to a new foiling boat, faster and more image-friendly than the Extreme 40 catamaran, which has been a staple of the ESS since the beginning

– and, in fact, was the catalyst for the series’ inception.

“In summer of 2006 we were approached by a media agency representing iShares, a part of Barclays, who were looking at different sports, evaluating where they should be – they’d just been sponsoring Floyd Landis in the Tour de France, which had gone a bit wrong,” Turner explains with a laugh.

“They were looking for a fresh start and analysing different sports. They looked at triathlon, rowing and sailing.

We took them for a ride in one of these boats [Extreme 40 catamaran] as a guest experience and they just were blown away by it, so we actually built the event for them in summer 2006 to launch in January 2007, with the first act in April or May 2007.”

The guest experience element that Turner mentions has remained a crucial part of the series. Over the course of race weekends, VIP guests and members of the press are invited to take on a ‘sixth man’ role on board the boats, gaining an up close and personal experience of what’s actually going on out on the water, something almost unprecedented in sport, where the divide between spectator and participant is usually abundantly clear.

“Ultimately sailing has one very unique thing and that is that you can stick someone in the driving seat and behind the wheel,” says Turner. “In a year across our events we’re probably getting guests sailing 80-85 per cent of the time. It’s an experience that is radically different to what people get at anything else they’re invited to.”

One thing that Turner is keen to avoid is any act of the ESS being what he refers to as “just another match”.

Part of the mission to bring sailing to the people is ensuring everyone’s experience is unique every time; that everyone, from first timers to hardened veterans of the waves, can get something out of the day. ”Whether you’re a sailor or a nonsailor it doesn’t matter, you just take different things, you take a different level of experience. We don’t have to

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change the experience particularly.

Sailing is very open. You’re mixing with the athletes on the water and back on land which is a very different experience to other sports where you’re maybe a bit more disconnected.”

Crafting that experience begins in the planning stage, when Turner and his team are working to find the eight locations they need for the season’s calendar. After putting that debut event together so quickly with just four venues, all of them in Europe, Turner says that OC Sport “lost a lot of money” at first. It became apparent that to attract the biggest sponsors, the ESS needed to be visible in the best, most marketable territories, where its potential clients’ customers were based.

This meant pushing the boat out and taking some risks early on to get into those territories, opening up to nontraditional sailing venues.

“The challenges are there for any global event. You get a great venue and then there’s civil unrest in the country. We were in Rio the year there were riots [2013, during the Fifa Confederations Cup soccer tournament], so that came apart.

Istanbul, we had to cancel an event.

We’ve had our fair share of challenges, but it hasn’t stopped us taking things on and trying to get to those iconic cities. It’s also about going to markets that are valuable for our sponsors.

So, yes, we want somewhere that is a good stadium and a good sporting

arena and has the conditions such as the wind, but if you restrict yourself to the best sporting venues in the world you won’t get to many places that have commercial value, that’s just a fact.

“You can go to Porto Cervo in Sardinia and have a great time and great sailing will happen there, but when it comes to brands wanting to be near their clients and their public or iconic media positions, you have to be a bit daring, to be honest, and that comes with risks trying to manage that. By definition the markets that brands want to invest in are the markets that are emerging and are developing and are more dynamic.”

The ESS calendar is long, their route expansive – the 2015 edition began in early February in Singapore and will run until the mid-December event in Sydney, taking in various locations across Europe and Asia in between – and, given that there are generally six weeks between events, there is already not much of a post-season break. Taking into account the difficulty of shipping eight forty-foot catamarans and all the other necessary equipment between venues, not to mention the organisation and administration involved in each act, the current eight-event agenda has little room for expansion. As such, in order to maintain visibility in as many areas as possible, Turner and OC Sport attempt to vary both the venues and the kinds of cities they go to from season to season.

“It’s good to stay at a venue three

One of the Extreme Sailing Series’ USPs is its truly global calendar and the organisers’ determination to sail in some of the world’s most iconic cities.

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The ESS has grown from four events in Europe to eight globally, doubling the number of teams.

or four years but sometimes it’s good to go to fresh venues. There’s always a little bit of a dilemma between going to the really big cities, which may be super iconic but it’s quite hard to exist and be seen in a big way, and going to a smaller city where the whole town gets behind it in a big, big way.

“We try to cover different areas of Europe and Asia, so eight events is not quite enough to always be on every continent. But a brand is usually coming in for three or four years so over that period they might end up touching 12 markets. There are not that many events in sport that are truly global in that way. Sailing can go to pretty much every kind of country, from countries that have a massive sailing following to countries where there’s very little.”

One of the latter countries is – or was – China, where Turner’s major focus has been over the past three years, since he helped to form the Dongfeng Race Team, a major step in promoting the sport in the country. Dongfeng’s third-place finish in the Volvo Ocean Race, which included victory in two of the nine legs, was a magnificent achievement for a first-time entrant.

The team was China’s third-ever entry into the competition, and by a considerable margin their most

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successful yet. Along with the ESS’ now regular fixture in Qingdao, where they have held an annual act since 2012, OC Sport is making great strides toward exploiting the commercial potential for sailing in the Far East.

“Our Chinese team in the Ocean Race with Dongfeng is groundbreaking really, trying to take this sport into China, and that’s been a pretty challenging few months but hopefully we’ll sign a new partnership with those guys and put another Chinese team together for the Volvo Ocean Race over the next three years.

“And China is fundamental to most companies, so it’s a fixture of what we do. We might even end up with two ESS events in China in the future. A few months ago we had an event with Land Rover in Shanghai, we took a Land Rover-branded boat and it was the first time ever that any race boat had ever sailed right in the heart of Shanghai, on the Yangtze River.”

Land Rover coming aboard as the first of two key series partners – the second space is still waiting to be filled – was a landmark moment for the series. The automotive manufacturer’s commitment to the sport was reinforced recently when it joined Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR), the British sailing legend’s entrant into

the America’s Cup. For Turner, this not only demonstrates the success of Land Rover’s excursion into sailing sponsorship with the ESS, but also the compatibility between the America’s Cup and the rest of the sailing world.

“Three years ago, Land Rover were not in sailing, it was just not on their radar. The ESS was the first sailing thing they did and it’s worked, and they’ve decided to back it and back it in an even bigger way with BAR, which I think is a very positive reflection on what we’ve done in the ESS with them.

It shows there’s a great brand that is very committed to the sport now in two different but complementary ways.

“We don’t necessarily need to see ourselves in competition [with the America’s Cup]. Sailing can benefit from it, sometimes it hurts the sport, the uncertainty of the Cup, what it does to salaries of sailors, which becomes commercially unrealistic sometimes with all the private money in there, but at the end of the day I’m sure it’s a net benefit and we’ve existed alongside it very happily for the past few of years.

We’re in a different space in being purely sponsor-backed, we’re on an annual calendar, happening every six weeks. The two have knitted well together even if that’s not an agreed plan.”

With the America’s Cup World Series event in Portsmouth this month, Turner feels that awareness of the competition is high in the UK at the moment, and is eager to capitalise on that. Indeed, it was Turner who first introduced Land Rover to BAR – “because I think they fit together very well, Land Rover and a British campaign with Ben, who is a very good ambassador for the sport.” If the Land Rover link-up with BAR is successful and strengthens their brand association with sailing, this can only be a positive for the ESS as it continues its development.

“It’s a big chapter for us. The sport is more and more accessible, more and more exciting to watch, and more and more visible than ever. The challenge now is to capitalise on that.” 

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The Extreme Sailing Series attempts to offer a complete package to sponsors, including VIP hospitality and the chance to showcase their brands (above).

A RISING TIDE THE BRIEFING At the thin end of the sporting wedge, with more sports competing for fewer resources, the role played by sponsors is radically dierent. The Extreme Sailing Series has succeeded in attracting and retaining several high-proďŹ le partners in its nine-year existence. Some of its major backers discuss what drew them to the series, and what keeps them coming back.

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Mere hours before Mark Cameron, brand experience director at Land Rover, speaks to the Sailing Black Book at the end of June, his company announces a historic title partnership with Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR) for the upcoming America’s Cup. Though the deal includes all the expected branding opportunities, Cameron’s focus was on how Land Rover would activate from a practical perspective. “The important thing about the America’s Cup partnership with BAR,” he says, “is that we want to partner with properties that give us the opportunity to bring to that partnership our expertise and skills.”

When Premier League soccer giants Manchester United revealed their list of official global partners in 2013 – including Mister Potato, the club’s ‘Official Savoury Snack Partner’ and Beeline, their ‘Official Telecommunications Partner in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos’ – it was met with widespread derision. But it also showed the gulf between the way sponsorships activate and operate at varying levels of professional sport.

Farther down the ladder, it is not enough simply to associate your brand with a sporting property: it is often crucial to use such relationships as an opportunity to demonstrate your product.

“There’s a lot in our advanced technology, innovation and engineering teams that we can bring into the Ben Ainslie team,” says Cameron. “We have a whole load of engineers, advanced technologists and designers who can help make a boat go quicker, on top of the talented designers he’s got already, to try and plug some of those gaps – in knowledge, capability and computing power – to help the team, but also to show off what we are capable of. This is about the power of Land Rover to help [BAR’s] efforts in the Cup.” The BAR link-up is Land Rover’s second in sailing in recent years, after it began as the main series sponsor of OC Sport’s Extreme Sailing Series (ESS) in 2012. In recent years, the ESS has proven to be one of the more successful smaller sporting properties at attracting

sponsors, with much of this success coming down to the platform it offers them to showcase their products.

“We’re now in our third season as main partner [of the ESS],” says Cameron. “What we did four years ago was reassess more widely in terms of sponsorship strategy where we wanted to invest and were we wanted the brand to be, and why.

“That was based on quite a lot of statistical analysis about our customers and our target customers and what their passions and interests were. And we were able to identify, firstly, that sailing was a key area, along with rugby and equestrian sports.”

After its sponsorship deal with the Rugby World Cup, sailing is perhaps where Land Rover can be seen to be making the biggest push. The brand does have some history in the sport – during the 1980s it was the title sponsor for the famed Round the Island Race, an annual yacht sprint through the Solent and around the Isle of Wight. But Cameron describes that involvement as “ad hoc”, as opposed to the more deliberate, focused strategy based on statistical market analysis that it has in place today.

“Having decided that sailing was an area we wanted to invest in we went through quite a lot of study and research, spoke to a lot of people who were connected to various things going on in the sailing world,” Cameron says.

“And a lot of the roads pointed toward the Extreme Sailing Series.”

Many of the sponsors followed those same roads – first locating sailing as a key area, and then homing in on the ESS after noting its increasing commercial potential. Indeed, a theme among the ESS’s partners is their interests in multiple sailing properties, with several of them having clearly identified the sport as both relevant to their brands and growing significantly enough to be worth their investments.

Of the ESS’ five main partners – Land Rover, SAP, Edox, GAC Pindar and Marinepool – Edox is alone in having the ESS as the only sailing property

in its portfolio. The fact that the ESS is sharing sponsors with prestigious long-distance sailing events such as the America’s Cup, the Kieler Woche and the Volvo Ocean Race is testament to the commercial potential investors are seeing in the competition.

For GAC Pindar – the joint venture between Gulf Agency Company Logistics and sailing sponsorship veteran Andrew Pindar – events like the ESS are not just opportunities for demonstrations, but help to create a whole new avenue of business within themselves.

“We had the idea of creating this business [GAC Pindar] within that particular niche vertical of marine leisure logistics,” says Sean Bradley, group marketing director at GAC. “A sports programme like the Extreme Sailing Series was seen as an ideal vehicle to showcase our ability in this particular field. So through that [working] agreement and the logistics of moving the equipment around the world, and having our team in it, we were getting the best of both worlds, really. We were able to showcase our expertise from a business point of view but then with all of the branding that we get from having a team there we also benefit from publicity, media, and everything that comes with that.”

Pindar himself, business partner and sailing team head at GAC Pindar, has been involved with sponsoring sailing properties for 35 years, including several round-the-world attempts.

In recent years, he says, the tide has turned within sailing sponsorship because of the developments in the way the sport is distributed and viewed.

“A lot of minority sports – let’s remember sailing isn’t football, it’s not cricket, it’s not rugby or motorsport, it’s the top end of minority sports – benefit from social media, where people can elect their own channels of interest,” he explains. Though this helps visibility, Pindar insists it is more necessary than ever for sponsors to engage in the property, to do something more than just put their brand name out there.

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ESS SPONSOR FOCUS

Land Rover has used Extreme Sailing Series events as an opportunity to showcase its products (right).

“Any sponsorship needs to prove its worth,” he adds. “As much as it can be about media returns, the media return has to mean something, otherwise you’re just shouting into the big blue yonder. [GAC Pindar] have got two different hats on here. We have a team in the event, and we have the logistics contract. We had a team in the event before we won the logistics contract. So there’s a business there and then there’s business promotion here, but they have to combine at some point. We’re promoting a business by showing what we can do out there on the water.”

Andy Tourell, event director at the ESS, concurs. “Having an event partnership, and the power that a human story brings, that a team brings… having those two together is really complementary,” he says. “You get the exposure through the event and you get the human story through the team, and when the two come together it’s really powerful and you can see that demonstrated by the fact that half of our series partners also have a team.”

The ‘human story’ is one of the main drivers of the social media revolution in sponsorship of smaller properties – particularly within an image-friendly sport like Extreme Sailing. As Pindar points out, “the ‘extreme’ dimension of it makes it very exciting: it generates images, and images are very important.

Photographers are fascinated by seeing these boats skim through the air; this is a sport which really responds to that kind of imagery.

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“If you can get the YouTube hits, the Instagram hits and everything else like that,” he continues, “then suddenly you’ve got a very different measure to, ‘How many column inches have I got in The Daily Telegraph?’”

For the ESS, that measure is clear: 85,000 followers across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Though there is room for improvement, Pindar is less concerned with figures, and more with ensuring that sponsors keep their focus on the real goal.

“It’s about multi-channel communication, because it’s often through traditional media – print or TV or radio – where the content causes people to do a search,” he suggests. “Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, all that stuff, is initially driven by mainstream media and once the people have then got into the new media, then sometimes they might drop the traditional stuff, but they reinforce one another. Woe betides you if you think you can do away with any one channel of communication.

“I see far too many people who get carried away by the property that they’ve got, or they get hung up on the brand or some technology, rather than remembering what they’re trying to do, which is sell more stuff. We’re not here to have sport for sport’s sake. Sport is a tool and the stories around sport and the imagery around sport are the tools that allow us to sell more of something.”

The sponsors themselves have their part to play. By sharing images with their existing audiences and by

encouraging crossovers – as in Land Rover’s work with both BAR and the ESS – they contribute to what Pindar describes as ‘the virtuous loop’ of sponsorship, where every element feeds into every other and, as he explains using an apt metaphor, “that rising tide will lift all boats”.

“OC Sport are good at helping the individual companies and sponsors to work on that to promote their own products, and through that promote the event as a whole,” he says. “There’s a mutuality to it. And that enables you to have that virtuous loop which means that every time you’re doing something well, you’re feeding your own position as well as everyone else’s.”

Cameron says, “At the end of the day it’s all about interesting content.

It’s in our objectives to connect the world of Land Rover to a sailing property; it’s about finding those connecting points. The tip-over angle on an Extreme 40 boat is about 40-41 degrees, which is exactly the same as on one of our Land Rovers. So you can draw some very interesting parallels, just trying to explain beneath the surface what these two worlds are about – interesting facts and content.

“Social media is obviously about being ‘of the moment’, so when there are interesting things happening in a race or before a race, we try to work out stunts that we can to produce and get that out there to the huge numbers of followers that we have on our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr.

Actually, some of the pieces we do around sailing get more interest than some of the traditional stuff we do.”

Balancing major sports sponsorships with those at a lower level, Cameron says Land Rover is “clear that the Rugby World Cup and the ESS serve very different objectives”.

“Obviously,” he adds, “the investments we make in a massive event like the Rugby World Cup are more than we’d make in a niche event like sailing. It’s about setting out your objectives and then understanding what you’re going to measure. The great thing

ESS SPONSOR FOCUS EXTREME CLUBBING

about sailing is that not only do our customers enjoy it but, given that we make fantastic tow cars, customers who have their own boat can tow it so there’s a product connection there as well.

“We also do product demonstrations on site at ESS events. We have an obstacle course for the Land Rover, which is quite a ‘wow’ experience. So we’ve got some good ways of creating customer engagement in the product which we can utilise. Rugby doesn’t quite give us that same connection, but it gives us massive reach.”

For all the technological development and changes in the way the sport is distributed and consumed,

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An enormous part of the ESS’s success with sponsors is its ‘Extreme Club’ VIP centre, the pavilion within the stadium where sponsors and their guests can gather, share ideas, and put on product demonstrations for the public.

Andy Tourell explains that the idea to create an “open-plan networking facility” at each act was central to the commercially funded nature of the series, in ensuring sponsors would want to keep coming back, and keep bringing guests with them. “There’s a lot of overlaps and conversations that spark from guests turning up here and wanting to be involved,” he says.

“Over the weekend we expect north of 50,000 from the public. It’s not just about sailing, it’s about putting sailing in a package that’s appealing to the public. So we’ll have BMX demonstrations, high-wire events, go-karting, food and drink stalls,” says Tourell. “It’s about creating a family day out so they come down and see the racing and understand the racing.”

Sean Bradley, group marketing director at GAC Pindar, describes the Extreme Club as a “fantastic platform to be able to entertain VIP guests and also rub shoulders with VIPs from the other leading teams, like SAP and Red Bull, for example. It’s a great platform

Spectators watch the day’s racing from the Extreme Club, one of the Extreme Sailing Series’ key selling points to sponsors and their guests (left).

to be introduced to like-minded businesses and to seek new business opportunities as well.”

Andrew Pindar says, “95 per cent of our guests are not from my niche of marine sports, they’re from the other areas GAC works in. In the promotional side of it I want to deliver for GAC and

Pindar acknowledges the importance of doing the basics well, and making sure you’re always connecting with the human story. Mark Turner, executive chairman at OC Sport and one of the founders of the ESS, was the brains behind marketing Ellen MacArthur’s solo round-the-world expedition. As far as Pindar is concerned, that is the model to follow.

“If someone is going to do something spectacular, sail around the world, then that will draw media attention and there’s a value attributable to that,” he argues. “That’s what Mark Turner did with Ellen. If you get this incredible and diminutive woman to sail an amazing

our co-sponsors great value; that they know they’re winning more business and greater traction with their customers. The Extreme Club is great because we can guarantee our guests will have a fantastic experience even if they’re not interested in sailing when they arrive.”

boat and do very well in races, and smash world records, then the media would follow, and therefore it became a sponsorable property.

“It’s important to reflect back on things that were being done very well 25 to 30 years ago that people have almost forgotten about,” concludes Pindar. “People have got themselves too wrapped up in technology thinking that HD TV might be the answer but at times a crackly line with Ellen Macarthur in tears is just fine. It’s almost better than HD TV, because it’s about the raw emotion, the things that are going to cause people to remember a moment.” 

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CLIPPER ROUND THE WORLD YACHT RACE THE BRIEFING The 2015/16 edition of the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race got underway in tragic circumstances this autumn as Andrew Ashman, a British paramedic and experienced yachtsman representing the IchorCoal team, suffered a fatal injury whilst reefing the main sail approximately 120 nautical miles off the Portuguese coast.

It was the first fatality in the history of the race, which is now in its tenth edition.

Spearheaded by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and William Ward, the Clipper Race and its successful commercial model – which sees ‘ordinary’ people raise money for a place crewing alongside a professional skipper – are now firmly established.

The 2015/16 edition of the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race began in London on 30th August, with a 12-strong fleet of 70-foot ocean racing yachts setting sail from the British capital’s St Katharine Docks as they embark on a 40,000 nautical mile voyage that consists of eight legs across six continents and will take 11 months to complete.

This year’s edition comprises 14 stopovers at coastal locations across the globe, some better known than others.

From London the teams head south to the Brazilian port of Rio de Janeiro before crossing the southern Atlantic to Cape Town in South Africa. From there, a hair-raising 4,750-mile traverse of the Southern Ocean takes the teams to the Western Australian town of Albany before four further stopovers on the Australian east coast and Tasmania.

Heading north, the race’s Asian swing takes in Da Nang, Vietnam and

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Qingdao, China before a gruelling cross-Pacific sprint to the Americas, where stopovers in Seattle, Panama and New York await. The teams then visit Londonderry in Northern Ireland and Den Helder in the Netherlands before a return trip to London completes their epic adventure in the summer of 2016.

Now in its tenth edition, the Clipper Race’s heralded concept, in which amateur sailors race alongside qualified skippers, has seen the event forge something of a niche within the sport of sailing. Over 700 crew members representing 42 nations have registered to compete over the course of the race with the intention of completing a single leg or, in some cases, the whole route. In line with the race’s promotional motto of enabling the 'ordinary' to take on the extraordinary, 40 per cent of entrants this time round had never sailed before starting their training.

Though all participants are trained to the standard required of such a lengthy and unpredictable race, the challenge facing each of the crews was tragically highlighted just days into this year’s edition when Andrew Ashman, a British paramedic and experienced yachtsman representing the IchorCoal team, suffered a fatal injury whilst reefing the main sail approximately 120 nautical miles off the Portuguese coast. It was the first fatality in the history of the race.

As is the norm for the Clipper Race, boat sponsors this year include a mix of corporate brands such as Garmin,

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CLIPPER ROUND THE WORLD YACHT RACE

Mission Performance, LMAX Exchange and PSP Logistics, and a number of tourism authorities that use the race for promotional, trade and branding purposes. A government-backed effort from Great Britain and entries representing the cities of Qingdao and Derry-Londonderry-Doire are all returnees to the fleet and stopover schedule this year, joined by two debutants in Da Nang, a former French colonial port located on the central coast of Vietnam, and Visit Seattle, the tourism arm of the US state of Washington’s largest city.

For the corporate brands involved, the Clipper Race is seen as a valuable marketing platform to grow awareness internationally whilst forging business relationships in key markets worldwide, with the event’s stopover model having become its chief selling point. Team sponsors benefit from named and branded yachts that essentially serve as prominent floating billboards, creating a focal point for global activation and exclusive access to business events and in-port sailing. UK technology firm LMAX Exchange, for example, will use its first Clipper adventure as an

opportunity to host a number of events in major financial centres including London, Sydney and New York, where clients will be invited to the race village.

In addition to team sponsors, several of which double as host ports, Clipper Ventures, the company which organises the event, has brought on board its usual array of central fleet sponsors. Stormhoek Wines, apparel brand Henri Lloyd, Praxes Medical Group and timekeeper Elliot Brown have all taken packages at this level of partnership, while a host of official suppliers have also been signed to

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THE EXPERT’S VIEW Robert Datnow is the co-founder and managing director of The Sports Consultancy, an agency with a deep history in sailing and an organisation which provides consultancy, venue, sponsorship and broadcast rights sales, feasibility and legal services to all manner of sports entities and host

Clipper Ventures founders William Ward and Sir Robin KnoxJohnston (right) preside over an event that this year set off from an iconic London landmark (below).

supply specific goods or services. Icon, the global branding agency, has created the livery for each of the 12 boats in the fleet while Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, is serving as the event’s official charity partner as well as backing a team entry, with crew members taking part in fundraising activities throughout the race.

With teams hailing from all over the world and interest in competitors differing from country to country, Clipper Ventures has instigated a new broadcast model for this year that comprises what it calls ‘territoryspecific co-production partnerships’ to focus on individual national teams and participants. To that effect, the organisers agreed terms on a major programming package with Beijing Television (BTV), its first in China, in April, with BTV set to follow the

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venues interested in making money and investing intelligently in sport.

According to Datnow, the Clipper Race is “a testament to the increasingly popular appeal of endurance sports events” The race’s commercial model is one that Datnow sees echoed in endurance

progress of the Chinese team Qingdao.

As part of the deal, BTV has its own cameraman aboard the Qingdao yacht for the whole race as well as access to all official race footage from a range of fixed and manned cameras on all competing boats, in addition to helicopter, onwater and land based cameras.

participation events around the world.

“We see a sustainable and growing market for people from normal walks of life wanting to participate and to pay for an endurance sports experience, in this case crossing the world’s oceans.

We see this trend increasing in sailing, as we do in other sports.

“It is the first time we have embarked upon a co-production of this scale to produce a comprehensive Chinese language documentary series, news, sports and online coverage about the Clipper Race which will focus on the entry from the former Beijing 2008 Olympics sailing city of Qingdao,” explained Clipper Ventures' global business and communications director Jonathan Levy.

TV production and distribution of the Clipper Race is handled by 1080 Media TV and BBC Worldwide respectively. London-based 1080 Media TV is the race’s official host broadcast partner, producing two series of 25-minute shows focusing on the sporting and human drama of the event.

BBC Worldwide then distributes these series to broadcasters around the world.

According to Clipper Ventures, the previous edition of the race, in 2013/14, achieved record viewership numbers, with a cumulative audience of more than 3.3 billion people in over 200 countries seeing news coverage in the press, radio, TV and online. 

Thierry Martinez / GITANA SA

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OCEAN MASTERS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP THE BRIEFING Open Sports Management (OSM), the organisation created in 2013 to internationalise and commercialise IMOCA ocean racing, has just entered its second two-year cycle. Strong relations with event organisers and a clear, structured calendar – have already resulted in a stronger narrative overlay for a group of events that represent some of the toughest challenges facing professional sailors globally, the solo or double-handed ocean races – including the fearsome Vendee Globe – that make up the Ocean Masters World Championship. Peter Bayer, the one-time chief of the Innsbruck Youth Olympic Games, was installed by IMOCA rights holder Sir Keith Mills to run OSM. Two years into the job, he satisfied that the foundations have now been set for the Ocean Masters World Championship to kick on.

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OCEAN MASTERS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP

Peter Bayer: First there’s the Rolex Fastnet in August, then we go into the Transat Jacques Vabre, which will be an exciting race. This championship cycle is the one leading up to the Vendee Globe and we are as a class sold out.

We have 25 active teams. There are no more boats available at the moment. All the competitive boats are sold. Whilst, yes, there are teams who are still looking for sponsors and might sell if they don’t find them, it is really tricky to find a boat that is able to finish in the top five or ten. Then we race back from St Barts to Europe. On 29thMay, we start from New York back to Vendee, and then 6th November it’s the Vendee Globe.

Will all 25 boats compete in all five of the races?

We’ll see 22 at the Transat Jacques Vabre, and then the return race we’ll see about 15. The New York to Vendee we’ll have about 15. And then the Vendee Globe is 25. Some teams, like Rich Wilson from the US, only have budgets that allow them to do the Vendee Globe. There are other teams who are still working on building a new boat and they might be ready by spring 2016. So in some races we won’t see the full fleet. Our goal two years ago was to have a consistent fleet of ten doing the Ocean Masters at each event, and we are far above that at each event now which is great news.

Two and half years into the OSM project; could you explain the journey the organisation has been on, and assess the success you’ve had so far?

We took over something which was quite rudimental in its structure.

There was amazing content. There were amazing stories and a very interesting history. But it took us quite some time to establish structures, be it in terms of communicating, be it in terms of how we engage with the teams and the organisers. That was the focus in the very early days. If I look at it today, how the organisation is run, how we interact with the teams and the sponsors, the organisers, I think we’ve achieved something very stable and something that runs very smoothly. That’s something we’re quite happy about.

Just to give you some examples of how we’ve structured the calendar: we have a round-the-world race every second year. The Barcelona World Race and then two years later the Vendee Globe, then two years later the Barcelona World Race again. We’ve

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

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The first two-year Ocean Masters World Championship ended with the Barcelona World Race earlier this year. What does the calendar look like for the current two-year cycle?

Peter Bayer (right) has run OSM since its foundation in 2013.

established very strong relations with those pillar events. In April this year we signed with the Barcelona World Race for the next three editions. We’ve agreed to run Barcelona World Races up until 2026. We’ve got a commitment from the city, which is obviously very encouraging for us, and we are today working on a very close partnership in terms of organising the event. With our pinnacle event the Vendee Globe we have a very close relationship in terms of commercial approach, be it how we approach the sponsorship market or in terms of communication. We had joint appearances in Germany and in China.

We work together very closely. Mostly on our side, we invest into international communication for the Vendee Globe, and we do work together on the commercial side in finding sponsorship for the event.

Some significant news is that we’ve established a new event around the Vendee Globe, like we did last year with the New York to Barcelona as a warm-up event for the Barcelona World Race. Next year we’ll do a New York to Vendee. The calendar again will be a bit easier, a bit more structured, because it’s something that we want to do in the future: we have a roundthe-world event, and in the spring before that round-the-world event, the teams will do a warm-up event in those respective cities – Barcelona, and then the Vendee region. Around that, we are now working on new events and new ideas in terms of 2017; extending the circuit into the Middle East and Asia.

So in terms of the structure and the programme, we’ve achieved a lot.

In terms of communication, potentially we could do more. One of the things we’ve always been trying to do is not to go too fast in our communication and making huge investments in certain media in certain countries because we wanted to adjust our communication strategy really to our big partners.

At the moment we are negotiating with two very big partners for two significant sponsorship packages for the Ocean Masters. Around those

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partnerships, we will redefine our communications strategy. If you’re asking me for an honest analysis, yes I know that not too many people today know the Ocean Masters, but I do see that as an advantage in terms of a potential partner who signs up with us for a long-term period, he can literally own the sport of ocean racing.

What are the OSM objectives and where do the revenues come from?

We are five people working full-time here in Lausanne, Switzerland. We have a network of agencies with whom we engage now quite intensively. Influence Sports, based in London, is one of them. It’s an agency run by Alistair Watkins who is well known in the world of sports through his work with in Formula One. He has a very good network and we’re very happy with the work that Alistair is doing for us. So in a way, the team has grown.

Our agreement with IMOCA is a long-term one, so the same thing holds true for our business plans. The OSM revenue streams are built around the Ocean Masters, around exploiting the rights which we’ve acquired from IMOCA – sponsorship rights, media rights. Personally, I believe the sports that make significant money from media rights – that might be football or the Olympics – make it through TV rights.

But I don’t think sailing is one of those sports and I don’t think it will be in the near future. So to cut a long story short, our main revenue stream is sponsorship.

A landmark deal for us was the extension of the Barcelona World Race for the next three editions, and in creating new properties like the New York to Vendee, where OSM is the organiser. Also, we’ll run an event which we own later this year after the Transat Jacques Vabre, which goes from France to Itajai in Brazil. We’ll go up north with the fleet then and race back in December from St Barts to Europe. That will be called the B to B – the Back to Brittany. We’re working on a new name as we’re about to sign with a new arrival city but I can’t disclose it yet. France would be the obvious place, but we try not to go to France since one of our goals is to internationalise the class, and not only stay in France all the time.

Other sailing series drive revenues through stopover ports. Your races run from A back to A or from A to B and so you only have a maximum of two potential host cities. How difficult is the sell, and have you implemented structures at the beginning and end of races in order to have the host city get bang for their buck?

For a city like Barcelona, it’s obviously a great advantage that no other city is involved. They’re getting three months of exclusive communication that no other city is getting. Something that’s new in terms of our discussions with the class is that we have started talking about potential stopovers for a race like the Barcelona World Race. The commercial model is one side, but the revenue through cities is something, looking at the whole city discussion across all sport, there is a history of exploiting cities, of taking the money and running – be it Fifa World Cup or the Olympics – and then trying to go to the next one.

People always hope there will be another emerging country that will come up with a big cheque because they have the money and they want to put sports on their agenda. I think we have to be very careful with our approach to cities.

I take my own case with Barcelona as an example: the political landscape

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A meteorologist and skilled tactician, Canada’s premier yachtsman is fully prepared to take on the ultimate challenge — racing around the world alone.

Q:What makes Canadian Ocean Racing unique?

A: This program was built by volunteers across Canada with one mission: getting Canada to the Vendée Globe. The team has been able to crowdfund enough money to enter the Transat Jacques Vabre Race in October 2015. COR fans are not only dedicated, but they have a stake in the game.

Q:Who are the COR fans?

A: COR fans have been brought “onboard” through grassroots engagements.

We’ve opened up O Canada to the public, and we have been welcomed with open arms. From $20 to several thousand dollars in individual donations, we have organically built our team from the great generosity and support of our fans.

Just over half of our fan base is from Canada, while the rest hail from over 45 different countries around the world. Our fans are hooked — our social media content boasts high engagement and reach numbers and our fan base is continuously growing.

Q:What does that fan engagement look like?

A: Our videos are always our most high performing content, produced exclusively by sailing media production company - Portside Productions.

Each video averages hundreds of views while platform-specific content, such as instagram photos and videos, always garner high interactivity.

Q:How has COR been building up to the Vendée Globe?

A: For our launch tour in Summer 2015, the team sailed from Vancouver to Halifax via the Panama Canal, then to Toronto, Kingston and Quebec City — logging over 7000nm and hosting over 25 public and private events. From team building and hospitality sails to local races, COR has already made a major impact on the sport in Canada, just in one summer.

Q:What’s on the horizon?

A: Canadian Ocean Racing intends to compete in the both the Transat Jacques Vabre Race and the BtoB Race in Fall ‘15. In Spring ‘16, the team will race to/from New York City, having the Summer of 2016 to train and tour for the Vendée Globe in Fall ‘16.

Q:How are corporate partners benefitting from their relationship with Canadian Ocean Racing?

A: Our gear sponsor, Helly Hansen (HH), has featured some of COR’s top media on their own social channels. The team is always seen donning HH gear for all press and public interactions — bringing the brand front and center for coverage on Canada’s media heavyweights such as CBC, CTV, and ICI Radio-Canada.

Helly Hansen has also taken clients, employees and members of the press out on O Canada, providing key stakeholders with unforgettable experiences.

Currently seeking title sponsorship, contact Meg Reilly at mreilly@canadianoceanracing.com for more details

of course we’re happy if we can generate revenues from those cities, but more because some of our partners, potential partners, believe in the opportunity of activating their partnership in a stopover. It would enable them to touch a different continent, to touch a different key market for them. If someone wants to have a contact point in China, for example, we also have the option of organising a new race. We could also do a race that stops in China.

Single-handed ocean racing now has a narrative umbrella and a cohesive strategy for the future.

has changed dramatically, but still, because of the very good relations we have with the city, and because of the model which is still around a real sustainable partnership, we have a confirmation from the new mayor that he thinks the Barcelona World Race is a very interesting asset of the city. They definitely want to continue with this event, and they’ve looked at many other sports events and properties. They’ve been critical about lots of things, but the Barcelona World Race is something they really think is worthwhile doing because we’ve done a lot of things with the organisers around the sailing. We’ve brought a lot of new, interesting angles and assets into the sport and into the sailing community. One example would be the congress we did last year with the city of Barcelona for Unesco – the One Planet One Ocean conference. That brought together 600 scientists from all around the world to present the status of our oceans and the relation of our oceans with the climate. It’s one of the leading topics in the COP21 conference in Paris this year. That’s something that convinces people that we are bringing value. We’re not only coming and asking for a cheque, we actually do something that helps the city in terms of real results, image, tourism, return on investment and so on.

We do think it’s interesting to do stopovers, especially for the Barcelona World Race 2018 and beyond. It’s an option. And also for the new races we’re looking at for 2017. But not in terms of a commercial host city approach. Yes,

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Is there a delicate balance for you to strike there in terms of maintaining the integrity of non-stop ocean racing events?

There is no doubt that the Vendee Globe concept will never change. It’s the pinnacle event of sailing because it’s one man and he’s sailing all the way around the world alone without any assistance.

That will never change. But we believe in building the story of an ocean master who finally competes in the Vendee Globe event. The concept would allow for one race that includes stopovers.

I wouldn’t be too worried about that.

We’ve just come up with a new hook – ‘Ocean Masters – where sailors become heroes’. Everything is coming together.

We know what kind of story we want to tell. We know what kind of partnerships we want to have. We officially announced our Unesco partnership last year in Paris.

We work on a very interesting concept there which is about delivering data on a constant basis from the Southern Ocean because that’s something that’s very, very important to the scientific world. We’ve got these sailors who do these incredible things, but at the same time, they’re not only sailors who become heroes. They’re voyagers out there supporting our planet in getting healthy and in identifying real problem areas. We’ve got plenty of things lined up ready to tell, and as soon as we’ve got the partnerships signed, we can announce all of those.

What can we expect from the Vendee Globe next year in terms of a new way to get the stories out?

That’s one of the things that the Vendee Globe guys are working on together with us – the technology that we need to have a better understanding of what happens on the boats, which will include more live features. We are working on a solution which allows us to have more mobile equipment on the boats, which will allow the skippers to do instant shots, and short live interviews and reports from the boats. On the other hand there is a clear commitment from the Vendee Globe together with us to go out and reach a more global market. We have lots of new skippers joining the class and there are some underdogs which we haven’t mentioned yet. There is a new team from Ireland, for example. There is a team entering the Vendee Globe next year from the United States. There is a team from Canada entering the Vendee Globe. There is an Hungarian team entering the Ocean Masters. We do start to get this international traction and that will obviously be seen at the Vendee Globe, with all these international teams at the start. So it’s internationalising and it’s bringing in new technology.

It will also be very exciting when the Transat Jacques Vabre comes round because that’s the first time we will see all the new generation boats in the water. IMOCA has again taken a huge step forward in terms of innovation and how to make monohulls faster.

They’ve added foils to the monohulls.

They’ll all be at the start for the Transat Jacques Vabre, and what it means for the Vendee Globe is that the record for round-the-world solo navigation from Francois Gabart of 78 days should under normal circumstances be broken.

What are your priorities for the next 12 months?

Everything is ready now for the big marriage with a partner, so today we’re engaged. I’d be very happy next year to tell you that we married and we had a wonderful honeymoon, and we look forward to a brilliant future with a couple of kids hopefully! 

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OCEAN MASTERS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP

TAKING OFFSHORE OFF SHORE THE BRIEFING The Channel Island of Jersey has built a reputation for itself as an offshore banking haven. Now, plans are afoot to transform it into an offshore sailing hub.

British entrepreneur and former London 2012 deputy chairman Sir Keith Mills founded the new Ocean Masters World Championship in 2014 to breathe new life into International Monohull Open Class Association (IMOCA) sailing.

The class, founded in its first iteration in 1991, comprises offshore racing IMOCA 60 monohulls of 18.28 metres.

Associated with some of the most fearsome offshore sailing events in history – double and single-handed transatlantic and round-the-world races

that last for months – the class has benefited in recent years from Mills’ investment and his vision. In the Ocean Masters World Championship, IMOCA now has a new brand, new events, and a clearer narrative structure: four or five events across a two-year series, at the end of which a champion is crowned. The new format has been designed to attract new competitors, new sponsors, new investors and new fans, and to diversify a strand of sailing that had come to be dominated by France and the French.

The second two-year cycle in the new era begins this November with the Transat Jacques Varbre, a double-handed race across the Atlantic following the traditional coffee route between Le Havre in France and Itajaí in Brazil; a new event scheduled to start in December, the Transat, a single-handed transatlantic voyage from Plymouth in the UK to New York or Newport in the US; another new event that will see the fleet head back across the Atlantic to Les Sables d’Olonne in France; and then

Jersey’s Phil Sharp (above) is not only plotting victory in the Vendée Globe but also wants to be the first man to sail around the world nonstop with zero emissions.

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the brutal quadrennial round-the-world race that is the Vendée Globe, scheduled to start from Les Sables d’Olonne on 12th November 2016 and finish three months or so later in the same port.

Although it is now the climactic event of the Ocean Masters World Championship, the Vendée Globe is much like the Monaco Grand Prix in that it runs, to a certain extent, to its own commercial beat. The French seem to like their grand sporting occasions to be as taxing as possible; the Vendée Globe is part of French sporting folklore, sitting alongside those other two great endurance events, the Tour de France and the Le Mans 24 Hours.

20 boats started the last edition of the fabled race in 2012/13. 11 finished.

Hoping to embark on his first Vendée Globe in the next edition – and indeed to set sail at the opening Ocean Masters World Championship race later this year – is Phil Sharp, a young Briton inspired by the Millsification of the series, and a man whose plan is exactly the sort of thing that Sir Keith himself would encourage.

Already one of Britain’s most successful offshore sailors at 34 years old, Sharp, who trained with the Artemis Offshore Academy, won the 2006 edition of the quadrennial single-handed transatlantic Route du Rhum race in a class 40 monohull.

In 2005, shortly after graduating from Imperial College in London, he competed in the Mini Transat, a single-handed race from France to Brazil in 21-foot boats. After three weeks and 4,500 miles, he finished in fourth place overall, the second-best British result in the 30-year history of the race. In 2011, he finished the Solitaire du Figaro in his first attempt at the multi-stage race, becoming the highest-finishing Briton in the process.

Having based himself in Lorient, the Mecca of offshore sailing on the west coast of France, for the majority of his career, Sharp has a new challenge in his sights, and a new base back on the Channel Island of Jersey where he was born.

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Sharp has set up a management structure – Phil Sharp Racing – to frame and guide his offshore sailing efforts.

The objectives of the team are simple, he says: to be the first British team to win the Vendée Globe, and, secondly, to be the first boat to circumnavigate the globe non-stop without emissions.

“If I’ve got the right platform underneath me, I can definitely go out there and win the Vendée Globe,” the Jerseyman says. “It is basically the most challenging sporting event in the world today. It’s about getting the best, most reliable boat. Let’s not forget that to finish first, first you have to finish.”

Sharp has set himself an ambitious six-year plan – one that he’s calling ‘The Vendée Globe Energy Challenge’. With the timeframe already tight, he plans to buy a second-hand boat for the 2016 edition of the race, refit it, then work on the design and construction of a bespoke vessel for the 2020 edition of the Vendée Globe.

“We don’t have a boat confirmed yet but there’s a couple of options we’re looking at,” he explains. “It’s not like we have a huge array to choose from because there’s an enormous amount of interest for the Vendée Globe and a lot of the boats have already been confirmed. But I think we can safely say that there are going to be two or three teams, or skippers, current boat owners, that aren’t going to get to the start of the Vendée Globe. And we’ve definitely got an option with one of those. We hope to confirm that by the end of the year, if not before.”

The price for a second-hand, Vendée Globe-ready boat is anywhere between UK£1 million and UK£2.5 million, with a new boat costing around UK£3.5 million. Depending on the amount of research and development a team wishes to undertake – and the IMOCA 60 is an evolution class – annual budgets range from UK£1.5 million to UK£2 million.

Sharp explains that he has funding in place to secure the purchase of a boat for 2016, and a team in place around him to drum up the requisite support

from sponsors and suppliers that should fill out the rest of his budget. Pierre Horsefall, a former Jersey politician and current chairman of the Jersey Opera House who was instrumental in bringing a stopover of the Clipper Round the World sailing race to Jersey in the early 2000s, sits on the Phil Sharp Racing advisory board. So too do Will Carnegie, an experienced offshore sailor who managed a team in the BT Global Challenge sailing race, and a number of executives from across Jersey’s extraordinarily active financial landscape.

“To go out and do something like this takes a lot of time to organise,” says Sharp. “Four years is the time between Vendée Globes and it’s not a long time. It’s very much a race against the clock. Unfortunately until you have the sponsorship revenue established, it’s very difficult to get miles in on the water. And it requires a lot of planning and set-up time.

“Ideally we want to kick things off for the Transat Jacques Vabre in November,” he continues. “This is the only evolution class in offshore sailing, now the Volvo’s gone onedesign. So it’s stolen the limelight in terms of the technical and performance advantages on the water, which makes it a very exciting class.

“The foil technology is something that’s becoming very prominent. People are looking to increase the power of boats with foils. They’re not going to physically lift the boat out of the water, but they will significantly increase the righting moment of the boat itself. It’s early days with that and it could be that they take quite a lot of time to get right.

“For a team like us – a new team looking to get established in the class – it’s quite a high risk to start putting completely new foils on the boat which are unproven and untested. It will be a case of being brave, waiting for a bit to see how the new foils perform with the bigger teams, and meanwhile in the background be doing research and development on them, and then when we’ve got the budget and we’re ready to do a new boat project with a new foil

OCEAN MASTERS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP advantages of those, and the fact that we can explicitly link performance to renewables as well, which is something that no one else has yet done. We only have to look around at the Volvo Ocean Race fleet, the Clipper fleet: they all rely on diesel technology for power generation, and frankly I think this technology belongs in the 20th century.

We really need to adapt to do something much more ecologically efficient and something that is hopefully going to help with our energy independence as well.”

For his Vendée Globe Energy Challenge project, Sharp – who has a master’s in mechanical engineering himself – has established technical partnerships with the energy futures lab at Imperial College, Southampton University, and the National Composites Centre.

“We’ve got a pretty good idea about the technology and we’re in the process

of putting together technical supplier partnerships for that now,” he explains.

“We’re going to be using thin-film solar technology. It’s very light and very good in low-light conditions as well.

We spend a lot of time in the Southern Ocean, a lot of time with overcast skies.

Some of the new technology works really well in low-light conditions.

“We’ll have hydro generators as a back-up, and also wind energy, so we’ve got three sources of energy that we can harvest, and that will give us an opportunity to avoid the intermittency issues of renewable energy. The plan is to get the most competitive second-hand boat we can find, and then take off the diesel system and put our renewable system on board. That will be in the form of hydrogen storage and fuel-cell technology. That’s the bulk of what sits underneath the deck.” 

Sharp hopes that sailing success can help to diversify the economy of his home island, Jersey (below).

JERSEY SHORE Jersey is a very strong offshore finance centre but they really recognise the need to diversify their economy,” explains Phil Sharp of the Channel Island. “They are very interested in creating some technical industry over here. What technology, exactly, remains to be seen.

“For instance, the States of Jersey has now got the right to develop a lot of the sites around the coast of Jersey for renewable energy – for tidal stream turbines – and that’s something they really want to push in the coming years.

That could attract a lot of industry to the island. So using this sailing project to showcase the fact that Jersey is interested in that space and has expertise in that area is important.

“This is also a great B2B platform for Jersey globally, for external relations and for attracting new businesses to the island, by taking an advanced platform that endorses the best of what Jersey is about: it’s an offshore centre but it’s also poking its nose into some new, interesting areas and renewable energy

is one of those. We’re interested in global people with local links. We’re not going to confirm a headline sponsor that is exclusively Jersey. It’s going to be Jersey-linked, and if they’ve got a Jersey HQ then that will definitely be beneficial for us. It’s a very well-connected place so a lot can evolve out of it.

“We’re looking to sell naming rights and boat naming rights for a headline sponsor. According to Kantar, the average returns in media value for the fleet are five to one. But it’s all in the activation. It’s safe to say that if you do a good media campaign, and you get a reasonably good result, ten to one is quite common.

“But sailing is a lot more than that.

It’s about delivering unique hospitality on a mobile, global platform, and we want ours to be an innovation platform, and for technical sponsors or for large blue-chip companies with technical interests, it’s really more of a product demonstration. So if these guys can actually use some of their technology on the boat, it not only gives them a great marketing platform, but it gives them an R&D platform as well. The big thing is for them to be able to say that we chose to rely on their technology from any part of the globe and in some of the most hostile places on the planet.”

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package where we can hopefully get a competitive advantage.”

There is an element of technological research and development, of course, that Sharp is already undertaking with gusto. A week before competing in the Mini Transat in 2005, her encountered problems with the generator on his boat. “I didn’t have enough to buy a new generator, but I did have enough money to buy another solar panel,” he recounts. “So I decided to go on solar energy alone.

It actually worked extremely well. I basically had a continuous, reliable capture of energy during the day and it was an invigorating feeling to be just collecting free green energy. You weren’t lumbering all your energy around as weight on the racecourse with you.

“It was in 2012 that I began to focus heavily on demonstrating pioneering renewable technologies and the

TOUR DE FRANCE A LA VOILE THE BRIEFING Since its inaugural edition in 1978, The Tour de France a la Voile has grown into one of the most famous annual sailing events in France. Running for three weeks every July, it mirrors its cycling namesake in doing exactly what its name suggests. Linking the English Channel to the French Riviera, the racing comprises a series of nine ‘acts’ – a conscious decision by the organisers to echo the successful terminology of the Extreme Sailing Series. Each act is made of two types of regatta: a three to four hour coastal race from a start town to a finish town, and then a day of short, sharp match racing regattas as close to the shore as possible. The venues for these regattas are known as ‘nautical stadiums’, a language that again echoes that used in the Extreme Sailing Series. A testing ground, over the years, for most of France’s most promising young sailors, the Tour de France a la Voile’s popularity began to flag in the 2000s, as prohibitively priced and unspectacularly performing one-design boats put entrants off.

Surprisingly, given the competition’s name, the Tour de France a la Voile had no formal connection to the annual cycling grand tour that takes place at the same time each year. Not until 2012, at least, at which point Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), the owner and organiser of the Tour de France cycling race, the Dakar Rally, and another 60-odd events every year, bought out the previous organisers and set about transforming the fortunes of the event. Following the successful conclusion of the 2015 edition of the race this July, Tour de France a la Voile director Jean-Baptiste Durier sat down to explain ASO’s sailing strategy.

What was the state of the series when ASO bought it in 2012, and what were your immediate changes?

Amaury Sport Organisation’s (ASO) JeanBaptiste Durier (right) is the director of the Tour de France a la Voile.

The previous organisers chose a boat – the M34 – that was not good technically and it was a bit too expensive. It was just a nightmare; we bought the Tour with 15 boats, then in 2013 there were 12 and then last year there were nine, so it was a bit complicated. So one and a half years ago we opened secret talks with all the most famous skippers in France, plus media, plus partners, plus institutions like the federation. We said to them, ‘you all love the Tour de France a la Voile; everyone says they love the competition and they’d love to come back on the Tour, but the Tour is about to die. So what do we have to do to make you come back to give new life to this Tour?’ After a long period of discussions, we came to the revival with the first time in history a multihull as the official one-design of the race. The boat is now cheap; it’s €55,000. It’s not

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expensive. Also we really wanted to have competitive regattas really close to the shore. In July it’s the holidays in France and our goal is to open it to the public who aren’t originally sailing fans. That’s what we’re going to do with these new boats.

How did you choose the boat and what has the take-up been?

It’s the DM24. It was created by a guy in French Brittany four or five years ago. He saw this multihull revolution in sailing generally and he said, ‘wow wow wow! There is now the America’s Cup in a multihull, everyone wants to do multihull so I want to create a cheap multihull, technically accessible, originally not for top professional sailors, but for good sailors, guys who

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TOUR DE FRANCE A LA VOILE

sail Formula 18, or in J80, who want to try multihull and want to buy a not too expensive boat and to enjoy regattas at high speed.’ We came with the Tour de France. Our goal was to get a not expensive boat, and an accessible boat – a virtuous circle, and the make all the conditions for people to come back en masse to the Tour. Once we announced the new boats last year, I don’t know what happened in French sailing, but it surprised us! Everyone wanted to do the Tour; it was the place to be. In less than 48 hours after the opening of the registration back in October 2014 we were sold out. We’ve got 28 teams – a lot of French stars of offshore and also a lot of Olympic sailors, stars of match racing, guys who have done the America’s Cup. They’re all enthusiasts of the boat and the sensation it gives.

Generally speaking the participation

budget for a team in the Tour de France is from €60,000 or €70,000, which is a really amateur budget, to €200,000 for a professional team. In this budget, you’ve got the boat, either rental or amortisement of three years, then after that you’ve got registration, logistical costs like housing and catering, technical assistance, communication.

Was the tweaked format successful?

It’s three weeks, nine acts, and two different types of regattas. We are in a city for two days, as well as for the start and the finish, in which we stay for three days. The first day of each act is always devoted to a coastal race – about three to four hours. That allows us to showcase our race at iconic points of the French coast. That’s part of the history of the Tour so we absolutely

wanted to keep it within the format.

The second day of each act is a regatta in what we call a nautical stadium.

It’s inspired by what we can see in the Extreme Sailing Series. Here, we’ve got really short regattas of 12 to 15 minutes, really close from the shore.

We split the fleet into two groups of 14 boats. We run short regattas all day long, which we broadcast with live commentary – it’s a show with music, jingles and everything. We really try to create all the conditions of a sailing show for the public.

The annual threeweek Tour de France a la Voile includes races along the shore as well as short-burst ‘stadium’ racing.

How do you put together the broadcast production?

One of the strengths of ASO is that we can produce the broadcast ourselves.

During the event, we have a broadcast production of 20 people, and then we

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The one-design DM24 boats used in the Tour de France a la Voile are hardy and flexible enough to be beached (right), adding to a unique party atmosphere in the host towns along the route.

have really good coverage in France.

Worldwide, we’ve got an incredible coverage given the size of the Tour because we produce a 52-minute summary which is broadcast in 190 countries. This is not something that’s always happened; this is the synergy we exploit: when our executives sell the rights of the Tour de France and the Dakar Rally they put other ASO events in the deals. We’re really seeing a growing interest from international media.

Where do the revenues come from?

The main revenue stream is sponsorship. We’ve got 60 to 65 per cent of the revenue from sponsors.

We’ve got the stopovers – the host cities and towns – and they pay a financial contribution to welcome the Tour. Then we’ve got the registrations of the teams. The fourth area, which is becoming more and more important for us, is hospitality – VIP tickets. That’s becoming a good part of the revenues. Then we’ve got merchandising and some TV revenues but they’re not large enough to be important. We’ve got approximately 15 sponsors. The major partner is Yanmar.

It’s a Japanese company which builts engines; they’re well known in the nautical world. They build engines for ferries and ships but they’re growing now in personal boats and smaller boats. They sponsor the Oracle sailing team in the America’s Cup too.

How many spectators did you have for 2015?

It’s always complicated to give figures because we’re in an outdoor environment. We’ve got a popular event on the Tour with a 3,000 square metre village with gigs every night.

We know that our main sponsors give goodies away, and they give approximately 200,000 of them away during the three weeks of the Tour. So that’s what we count. It’s a figure! What we can say is that this new format really attracts a new public to sailing. Putting

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sailing really close to the shore during summer really excites people. It’s a different audience – the same as are excited by sports like surfing.

You have the caravan, the sponsors, the host towns. Has there been a conscious effort to replicate elements of the Tour de France cycling model?

We do it with a lot of humility because the two events have totally different scale. But our objective is to replicate the model of the cycling Tour de France. The cycling event lies on two pillars: the sport, and the party. 50 per cent of the guys along the road say they do not really like cycling but they’re there for the caravan and the atmosphere; that’s what we’re trying to recreate with the sailing event. One part of the job is to develop a top sporting challenge, and the on the other hand we organise a roadshow with a lot of partners. We’ve got animations on beaches and we offer to the public the possibility to try nautical activities like stand-up paddle, like small boat sailing and windsurfing.

With these new boats, we can beach them. We do not have to go every time in every city to the harbour. We just create paddocks, like in motorsport.

In half the cities we visit we put the boats directly on the beach. In Nice we organised our paddock directly on the

famous Promenade des Anglais. The mayor was very impressed, he told me ‘wow, this is the first time I see boats on my promenade – it’s so crazy.’ Our goal commercially is not only to offer to the partners a sporting event, but really a big roadshow as well. As far as the cycling Tour de France is concerned, we exploit a lot of synergies on the media side, notably, we put regularly in France – almost daily – images of the sailing Tour de France directly in the live coverage of the cycling Tour de France, which means that they split the screen in two and for two or three minutes they speak about the sailing Tour de France. It’s an amazing opportunity in terms of TV audience for us. The average audience of the cycling Tour de France on France 2 is more important than the top moment of the audience of the men’s final at Roland Garros. For us, to get images in there is a key point.

How is next year shaping up?

We should be sold out. I’ve been receiving an email pretty much every week since January from French and international sailors wanting to take part. We won’t have space for everyone but that’s a good problem to have! I don’t know yet how many boats we’ll accept for 2016 but it will probably be between 30 and 40 boats. We’ll open the registration in late October. 

#roadtorio

Š Jesus Renedo / ISAF

International Sailing Federation The World Governing Body for the Sport of Sailing

For information about partnership opportunities contact: marketing@isaf.com | Tel: +44 (0) 2380 635111

sailing.org

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• Technology: advanced facilities such as GPS tracking and live streaming of the race provide high-levels of audience engagement and a focal point for social and interactive activation.

• Social media: the event enjoys a strong social media presence with 4,790 Facebook & 7,830 Twitter followers and provides significant opportunities for unusual and creative audience engagement for brands that share similar values.

For more information on sponsorship opportunities with the Round the Island Race, please contact: Dave Atkinson | dvatkin@gmail.com | +44 (0) 7889 790698 | +44 (0) 1403 264219

www.roundtheisland.org.uk

Introducing 55 South – Americans Charlie Enright and Mark Towill Team Up Again for the Volvo Ocean Race 2017-2018 The leaders of the USA entry in the 20142015 Volvo Ocean Race - Charlie Enright, 31, of Bristol, RI, and Mark Towill, 27, of Kaneohe, HI - exceeded expectations in the pair’s first around-the-world-race.Team Alvimedica’s achievements included winning the final leg, nine podium finishes (four offshore and five in-port) and first to Cape Horn.

Enright, the race’s youngest skipper in the last running of sailing’s Everest, and Towill, team general manager and watch captain, are seeking commercial partners for the 2017-18 race with their newlylaunched campaign, 55 South.

55 South is born from the team’s greatest achievement in their inaugural campaign – first to the iconic landmark of Cape Horn at 55 degrees latitude in the Southern Ocean.

Charlie Enright: Q: The last edition of the race was your first and you were the youngest skipper and only USA entry - what is driving you to do the race again?

A. Mark and I have some unfinished business. We achieved a lot in our first race around the world both on and off the water. Now we believe we know what it will take to win.

Mark Towill: Q: You and Charlie are something of a dynamic duo – how does your partnership work?

A: Charlie and I first sailed together in Disney’s Morning Light project, then again at Brown University where we decided to team up for our first Volvo Ocean Race. Charlie stays focused on performance and the racing side while I manage the business and marketing end of the campaign in addition to sailing. It takes excellence in both of these areas to win a race as challenging as the Volvo and to deliver a positive ROI for the team’s partners. We always say getting to the start line is the hardest part – the racing is easy in comparison – well maybe not in the Southern Ocean!

Charlie Enright: Q: What has you convinced that you can win the next Volvo Ocean Race?

A. Our learning curve last time was steep and we had the privilege to learn from some of the best and earned their respect along the way. We hope to get our partners on board early so that we can get out on the water training in 2016 to raise our game and as well as fully leverage the opportunity.

Charlie Enright: Q: Aside from winning the race, what other goals have you set for the next edition?

A. We are committed to continuing our role as Ambassadors for 11th Hour Racing and ocean health. We witnessed first-hand the devastating damage to marine life and our oceans from marine debris and plastics. We have the ideal platform to communicate ocean health issues and solutions.

Mark Towill: Q: Why should a company consider investing in the Volvo Ocean Race?

A. The business-to-business platform is unique, offering world-class hospitality and compelling activation opportunities in key global markets.

Engaging stakeholders with once-in-alifetime experiences, the Volvo Ocean Race consistently delivers results.

Mark Towill: Q: Why should a commercial partner choose 55 South over another syndicate?

A. Together we will build a talented team capable of winning but also a team of smart, caring people who will deliver a valuable return to a partner in markets around the globe. There are two races within the race: to succeed both in business and in sport. We are committed to winning both on and off the water. Join us in the journey!

www.55south.com

mark.towill@55south.com Tel. +1 808 223 5947

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Ports of Call Volvo Ocean Race Ocean Masters World Championship Rio 2016 Test Event

PORTS OF CALL THE SALING BLACK BOOK PRESENTS A SELECTION OF HOTSPOTS - KEY PORTS OR STOPOVER VENUES - FROM AROUND THE WORLD OF PROFESSIONAL SAILING.

Bermuda will host the 2017 America’s Cup

Sydney remains an iconic sailing destination

Nam Y. Huh/AP/Press Association Images

Auckland has been a popular stopover on the Volvo Ocean Race

Chicago is set to host events in the America’s Cup World Series

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CREATING MOBILE SOLUTIONS FOR THE WORLD OF SPORT

NETCO SPORTS PROVIDES COMPLETE SET OF SOLUTIONS

WE SERVE MORE THAN 100 CLIENTS AROUND THE WORLD: BROADCASTERS, WORLDWIDE EVENTS, LEAGUES AND FEDERATIONS, STADIUMS AND ARENAS, CLUBS.

Contact us to learn more about Netco Sports’ experience in developing market leading second screen solutions

Call: +33 (0) 1 44 83 06 67 Email: contact@netcosports.com

www.netcosports.com

VOLVO OCEAN RACE THE 2015/15 EDITION OF THE VOLVO OCEAN RACE TOOK NINE BOATS NINE MONTHS, NINE LEGS, AND 38,739 NAUTICAL MILES TO COMPLETE. ABU DHABI OCEAN RACING TOOK THE VICTORY IN WHAT WAS THE MOST COMPELLING EDITION OF THE RACE YET.

Teams battled the elements from Alicante, around the world to Gothenburg

New one-design boats ensured close finishes across the race

Team Vestas Wind reach shore after grounding on a reef in the Indian Ocean

Let the celebrations begin

The MAPFRE team get wet

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Audi Melges 20, 2015 Nationals at Sperry Charleston Race Week

SPERRY CHARLESTON RACE WEEK April 14-17, 2016 | A Regatta Unlike Any Other What’s the No. 1 multiclass regatta in the United States?

Sperry Charleston Race Week, which regularly draws close to 300 entries with some of the best sailors in the world on board. The regatta attracts affluent and influential participants from across the country and around the world. In fact, it’s the largest keelboat regatta in North and South America. Here’s why.

Charleston, South Carolina, USA – one of the top tourist destinations in the world – is among the best sailing venues on the East Coast, offering numerous advantages: -- International Airport -- Superb Hotel and Restaurant Options -- S upportive local government (Charleston Area Convention and Visitors Bureau) -- S ubtropical climate (average springtime temperatures range from 58F (14.4C) to 72F (22.2C).

And the event venue at the Charleston Harbor Resort and Marina is unparalleled: -- O verlooking Charleston’s picturesque, fully protected harbor -- O nsite hotel and restaurants as well as a 400-slip marina -- E asy access to nearby restaurants and bars What’s more, Sperry Charleston Race Week is known for its professional race management of 18 classes on six inshore and offshore courses. The event has generated 20 years of phenomenal growth and has been recognized with U.S. Sailing’s One Design Award for Regatta Excellence.

And many boat classes have utilized Sperry Charleston Race Week for their major championships.

There’s no secret why Sperry Charleston Race Week is America’s must-do regatta.

-- C onsistent wind (springtime average from 9 to 18 knots)

The most prominent regatta in North America First run in the late ‘90s, Sperry Charleston Race Week is a homegrown regatta that has always emphasized fun, on the water and off.

Competition is open to monohull and multihull sailboats up to 80 feet.

www.charlestonraceweek.com info@charlestonraceweek.com | Tel.1-843-628-5900

OCEAN MASTERS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP THE FIRST TWO-YEAR CYCLE OF THE NEWLY BRANDED OCEAN MASTERS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP CAME TO A CLOSE IN APRIL THIS YEAR WITH THE CONCLUSION OF THE BARCELONA WORLD RACE. THE SERIES COMPRISES THE KEY EVENTS IN THE IMOCA SAILING CALENDAR - INCLUDING THE LEGENDARY VENDEE GLOBE.

The Hugo Boss team carves through the ocean in the Barcelona World Race

Rights holder OSM created a new event to start in New York

25 boats are signed up for next year’s Vendee Globe

The Hugo Boss team is one of the best known in IMOCA racing

Safran Sailing’s new-generation IMOCA Open 60 boat

A little helping hand in port

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The Spanish-Chilean crew manning the Neutrogena boat finished second in the latest edition of the Barcelona World Race

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RIO 2016 TEST EVENTS

Athletes practise in the shadow of Christ the Redeemer

Leo Correa/AP/Press Association Images

Canada’s Isabella Bertold overlooked by Sugarloaf Mountain

Leo Correa/AP/Press Association Images

Leo Correa/AP/Press Association Images

THE AQUECE RIO INTERNATIONAL SAILING REGATTA TOOK PLACE FROM 15TH TO 22ND AUGUST THIS YEAR IN THE MARINA DA GLORIA IN NEXT YEAR’S OLYMPIC HOST CITY. WORK TO CLEAN UP THE WATER CONTINUES APACE.

Athletes from the Nacra 17 Mixed Multihull class return to Flamengo beach as dusk falls

Visible pollution on the shores of Guanabara Bay

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A refuse collection boat gets to work in the dirty waters

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