FROM THE OCEAN TO THE CITY... Changing perceptions - Breaking new ground Pushing boundaries - Engaging audiences around the world
A global sports marketing and events company specialising in professional sailing and outdoor events Contact: francois.vergnol@ocsport.com OC_ad_v1.indd 1
01/09/2014 10:17
FOREWORD
FOREWORD Nearly two years into my term as President of the International Sailing Federation and there are exciting times ahead for our sport. I stated that my mission was to do three things and to do them well and I believe that we are well on track to achieve this. There is encouraging interest from sponsors across all areas of our sport, both from companies new to the sport and continued commitment from long term partners. The professional sailing events continue to go from strength to strength with those such as the America’s Cup, Volvo Ocean Race and PWA offering unique opportunities from this diverse sport. In a hugely competitive market place, in terms of securing fans and commercial support, they represent an important opportunity to promote sailing to young people. Over the past twelve months we have seen a significant increase in interest from broadcasters which can only benefit all of us. From the sailors, event organisers and governing bodies to the sponsors and partners we are all part of an incredible sport that is steadily staking its claim in a busy marketplace. The inaugural ISAF Sailing World Cup Final will take place this November in Abu Dhabi which I believe will be a turning point for the series. Creating a pinnacle event for the elite sailors campaigning for the Olympic Games is a critical move in increasing the commercial appeal of this dynamic element of our sport. Olympic sailing is thriving and the increasingly professional approach by the sailors deserves the same from event organisers. The Rio 2016 Olympic Games is rapidly approaching, with the first test event completed in August and over 1200 sailors from a record breaking 84 nations vying for national qualification at the Santander 2014 ISAF Sailing World Championships. There is no doubt in my mind that it will be a significant Olympics for sailing. The location is fantastic, for the first time in many years our athletes will be right at the heart of the Olympic Games and we are aligned with the goals of the IOC in achieving universality in the sport. I am excited by the tasks ahead and am always happy to hear your thoughts and ideas. Yours,
Carlo Croce ISAF President
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 3
POWER 20
EVENTS
8
20
ISAF: Carlo Croce
26
America’s Cup
32
Volvo Ocean Race - team-by-team
44
Volvo Ocean Race - a look back
48
Clipper Round the World Yacht Race
54
Extreme Sailing Series
64
Alpari World Match Racing Tour
70
Ocean Masters World Championship
74
Rio 2016 - Olympic preparations
76
M32 Cup
78
52 Super Series
81
RC44 Championship Tour
Power 20 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:
4 l BLACK BOOK 2014
CONTENTS
CONTACTS
STYLE
86
Contacts by Company
108
Hotspots 2014
90
Contacts by Surname
120
Gallery: AWMRT and Volvo Ocean Race
EDITORIAL David Cushnan Eoin Connolly Michael Long Finlay Hutchison DESIGN & PRODUCTION Daniel H Brown COMMERCIAL Nick Meacham Peter Jones William Dobson Jon Abraham Bhav Sahota OPERATIONS Yéwandé Aruleba
PHOTOGRAPHY Action Images Press Association
NOTICES: Black Book is published annually. This is the second edition. Printed in the EU.
Black Book is published by: SportsPro Media Ltd 5 Prescot Street, London E1 8PA, UK Tel: +44 (0) 207 549 3250 Fax: +44 (0) 207 871 0102 Email: info@sportspromedia.com Web: www.sportspromedia.com
SUBSCRIPTIONS: Single copies of the Black Book 2014 are available at a cost of UK£149, and delivered anywhere in the world at no extra charge. Copies are available by logging on to www.sportspromedia.com or www.sailingblackbook.com
(SportsPro Media Ltd is part of the Henley Media Group Ltd www.henleymediagroup.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 2014 l 5
A NEW LOOK AT SPORTS MARKETING
Background Name: Sam Holliday Company: SHG Consulting Job Title: Managing Director I have been fortunate enough to work and compete within professional yacht racing for a number of years. My involvement began when I was introduced to Miranda Merron (1st place Transat Jacque Vabre) and Halvard Mabire (2x winner of the Quebec SaintMalo) during the build up to their highly successful Class40 campaign on-board Campagne de France. I went on to run their communications, something SHG Consulting still do. Since then I have also worked alongside Mike Golding OBE as he launched his IMOCA60 Gamesa, Hannah Jenner during her successful Transat Jacques Vabre campaign in which she placed 3rd on-board 40 Degrees, and have worked closely with America’s only Class40 event, the Atlantic Cup. I was also instrumental in the set up of the highly successful Plymouth Sailing Team – a team I also co-own.
Who are SHG Consulting and what do they do?
What’s next for SHG Consulting?
SHG Consulting is a sports marketing company specialising in offshore and grand prix yacht racing. Our aim is to provide a personal, tailor-made service to professionally manage our clients racing commitments, marketing, PR, and sponsorship strategies whilst delivering a strong return on investment. At SHG Consulting we know from experience how stressful professional sport can be that’s why we make sure we are on hand to assist with all aspects, enabling athletes and sponsors to focus solely on achieving the best possible sporting success. As a young and vibrant team we can bring new and innovative ideas to the forefront and we understand the importance of maximising market presence for both athletes and sponsors. Whilst we recognise the importance
of yacht racing is about much more; and it is our aim to deliver a successful, bespoke and balanced campaign.
Autumn is an exciting time for SHG Consulting as we approach one of the largest shorthanded offshore races in the world! The Route du Rhum leaves the French town of Saint-Malo bound for Guadeloupe on the 2nd November, and we are lucky enough to be involved with three highly competitive entries. Miranda Merron will sail Campange de France, Halvard Mabire will sail their new steed Campagne2France and the races only American entrant, Matt Scharl, will sail on-board Bodacious Dream. In addition to the long list of races we are progressing exciting deals for a number of other clients – it is an exhilarating time for all involved. For more information on SHG Consulting or to have a conversation about your campaign and sponsorship requirements please do not hesitate to contact us directly via sam@shgconsulting. co.uk or (+44)1285 643312
www.shgconsulting.co.uk
POWER 20 8
Power 20 Our ranking of the most inuential players in global sailing over the last 12 months.
In the next pages you’ll meet the 20 most influential people in professional sailing, as ranked by the Sailing Black Book. We’ve taken into account the previous 12 months and the coming year and amongst the key criteria are experience, entrepreneurship, profile and achievement. With the final shape of the next edition of the America’s Cup still to emerge, it is perhaps no surprise to see that community heavily represented on the list. But the start of the Volvo Ocean Race, the beginning of a new cycle for the Clipper Round the World race and a looming Olympic sailing regatta at Rio 2016 also feature strongly. As ever, lists like these can only ever be subjective; the following is merely a starting point for discussion. Let the debate begin. This is our 2014 Power 20.
20/ Sam Davies d(17) Briton Sam Davies has been on the single-handed sailing scene for nearly a decade. She has two Vendee Globe completions under her belt and is now preparing to sail the Volvo Ocean Race as part of the all-female Team SCA, the entry funded by the Scandinavian hygiene products manufacturer. The experienced Davies will be an integral
part of a crew put in place at least in part to help develop more female professional sailors. Davies is also likely to be back for another tilt at the Vendee Globe in 2016, when she and the race as a whole will benefit from the commercial backing of Sir Keith Mills and his new Ocean Masters brand. That may be the moment when her profile rises still further.
19/ Sir Robin Knox-Johnston d(7) A bona fida sailing legend, Sir Robin Knox-Johnston is still active both as a participant – he plans to compete in November’s Route du Rhum single-hander – and as the frontman for the Clipper Race. The 75 year old shows no signs of slowing down and has just overseen another
successful edition of the round-theworld race for amateurs. Plans are already well advanced for the next one, in 2016/17, with Clipper safe in the knowledge that it has the best possible ambassador – KnoxJohnston’s stories and anecdotes are legendary – steering its ship.
18/ Torbjörn Törnqvist NEW It has been a busy year for Torbjörn Törnqvist and sailing has, at times, hardly been the priority. In March, the Artemis Racing team owner made the business pages by taking control of oil trader Gunvor Group. The Swiss-based company’s operations were threatened with disruption when
8 l BLACK BOOK 2014
the US Treasury placed sanctions on Törnqvist’s co-founder, Gennady Timchenko, as the crisis in Crimea escalated. By buying Gennady’s 43 per stake, Törnqvist held 87 per cent of a company with revenues in excess of US$93 billion. On the water, the Swede’s Artemis Racing team is
gearing up for another America’s Cup challenge, after the tragedy of losing Briton Andrew Simpson in a training accident last year. The Artemis name is also found in the RC44 championship, where Törnqvist himself competes alongside his America’s Cup skipper Iain Percy.
THE POWER 20
17/ Pedro Campos NEW September as the title sponsorship had not been sold. The fact that Campos has managed to pull a team together is no mean feat given Spain’s dismal economy and few would bet against it being competitive. A big personality and one of the biggest names in the history of the Volvo Ocean Race, the race will be all the better for his presence over the next nine months.
THE POWER 20 / 1
Pedro Campos and his Spanish team are Volvo Ocean Race regulars but they left it late to confirm their fifth successive attempt at the gruelling round-the-world race. It wasn’t until June, just a handful of months before the fleet was due to depart Alicante, that Campos was in a position to confirm his involvement, although the team still lacked a name at the start of
16/ Sir Charles Dunstone NEW It was no surprise to see Sir Charles Dunstone front and centre of the launch of Ben Ainslie Racing in June. The team’s chairman and one of the founding investors, he will help Ainslie navigate the corporate world as the Olympic champion looks to shore up his UK£80 million budget. Dunstone has been there and done that, founding Carphone Warehouse and now chairing TalkTalk Telecom
Group. He is also very much a sailing man, as a boat owner and a racer – he won the 2003 Rolex Fastnet Race with Enigma. After a brief flirtation with the America’s Cup through Sir Keith Mills’ ill-fated Team Origin project, Dunstone has been lured back by Ainslie’s ability and the prospect of a well-funded, expertly-led British challenge. He will play his part in turning that solid idea into reality.
15/ Jo Grindley NEW There are few as well connected in the world of professional sailing as Jo Grindley, and that may well come in handy as she settles into her latest role, assisting Sir Ben Ainslie with funding and promoting Britain’s challenge for the America’s Cup. Grindley, a former marketer at Lloyds Bank and match racing sailor, founded Into the Blue, sailing’s pre-eminent public relations, marketing and events agency, in 2005. Clients range from sailors, including Ainslie, to brands like JP Morgan, and events. A close confidant of Ainslie, Grindley was appointed as Ben Ainslie Racing’s head of commercial, marketing, communications and events in 2013 as the challenge was launched. It is a broad brief, certainly, but one that certainly merits her inclusion on this list of influential members of the professional sailing community.
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 9
14/ Richard Brisius d(12) Hugely respected, as much for the understated way he goes about his business as his achievements, Richard Brisius is the go-to man for any major brand looking to put together a professional sailing team. His Atlant Ocean Racing team has lent a hand to the likes of Ericsson, Assa Abloy and EF over the years. His latest project, however, is perhaps the most challenging of all. He has been hired by SCA, the
personal hygiene product manufacturer, to train up and then run an all-female team in the 2014/15 Volvo Ocean Race. To his great credit, Brisius has no desire to promote the Atlant name over the brand he is contracted to. As he puts it: “We are totally integrated with SCA. That’s the way we like to work. We come from Atlant, a company, but we keep that super low profile. It’s not part of the story, really. We are SCA.”
13/ Grant Dalton d(8) It falls to Grant Dalton to pick not only a team, but an entire nation, up from the floor. A successful challenge for the 34th America’s Cup looked certain when Emirates Team New Zealand (ENTZ) raced into an 8-1 lead in the first to nine Cup match against Oracle Team USA last September. But there are no certainties in sport and in the months since that gut-wrenching defeat, Dalton, the team’s managing director and driving force, has been evaluating the options. He found initial funding from the New Zealand government, essentially a stopgap to help him find money from other sources, and in August a new challenge was made official. Dalton’s moves from here will be closely monitored by everyone in the Cup. He is quite simply too experienced and too determined to be ignored.
12/ William Ward NEW Understated and perhaps sometimes underestimated as a result, William Ward must take a large slice of the credit for the Clipper round-the-world race’s much-admired expansion in recent years. The concept of pitching ordinary people into an extraordinary scenario, racing around the world on a racing yacht, is superb and the execution has been exemplary. The 2013/14 race, which concluded in London in July, attracted
10 l BLACK BOOK 2014
the likes of the Jamaican Tourist Board and Dutch firm De Lage Landen. The event also has an enviable roster of host cities and stopovers. Ward has been an integral part of almost every deal, providing the type of solid commercial thinking which dovetails superbly with the enthusiasm and storytelling ability of Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, who remains the public frontman of the event. It is a winning combination.
GET CONNECTED
TO OVER 500,000 VISITORS AND 100 BRANDS GLOBALLY ON THE ALPARI WORLD MATCH RACING TOUR
FOR MORE INFORMATION: WWW.WMRT.COM/SPONSORSHIP
11/ Peter Bayer NEW The one-time chief of the Innsbruck Youth Olympic Games has enjoyed something of a crash-course in the world of professional sailing over the last year, since being hired by Sir Keith Mills to run Open Sports Management, the agency Mills’ created to manage the commercial rights to IMOCA races. In the intervening period, Bayer has worked on new
events – June’s New York to Barcelona double-handed race was the first – and on securing corporate partners for the newly-branded Ocean Masters World Championship. Progress over the next 18 months or so, in the lead-up to the standout race in the class, the Vendee Globe, will be a fascinating test of the both the strength of the product and Bayer’s mettle.
10/ Jerome Pels NEW Few know more about the governance of sailing than Jerome Pels. The current ISAF chief executive began sailing aged just six and joined the world governing body as competition officer in 1997. In the intervening 17 years, he has held many of the organisation’s senior positions: events manager, director of sailing, secretary general and now CEO. Working to new president Carlo Croce’s vision, it is the Dutchman who has been tasked with ensuring the new
Sailing World Cup annual season-finale is a success and who must ensure that Rio 2016 organisers take heed of the concerns over water quality expressed by sailors and national federations in the build-up to the next summer Olympics: the Games, of course, are ISAF’s biggest shop window. Further ahead, Pels is involved in the early planning for the 2018 edition of the ISAF world championships, which will be staged in the Danish city of Aarhus.
9/ Mark Turner d(6) A majority stake in OC Sport, the current name of the company Mark Turner founded back in 1993, was sold recently to French media group Télégramme Group. But Turner remains at the helm as executive chairman and, despite an expansion into outdoor, mass participation events, OC Sport remains an agency rooted in sailing. It owns and operates the Extreme Sailing Series, which has had its biggest year yet in 2014, and has taken on a new, long-term project in recent months, guiding Chinese vehicle manufacturer Dongfeng through a not insubstantial Volvo Ocean Race campaign. Few in the sport have Turner’s understanding of how the business of professional sailing works. For many in the industry, he and OC Sport continue to set the benchmark.
12 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Located on the French Riviera, with connections in the main harbours on the Mediterranean Sea (Port Vauban-Antibes, Port Camille Rayon, Mandelieu-La-Napoule, Port de la Rague, Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Port de Cap d’Ail, Monaco, Marina Port Vell Barcelona, Marina degli Aregaï, etc…) BerthForYacht will be your premium partner in helping you finding the mooring you need for your Sailing or your Motor Yacht Berthforyacht.com is the specialised website dedicated only to the sale and purchase of moorings from 6m up to 110m. Therefore, our demanding international clientele benefits from a fully private and personal service as we assist them in finding a mooring to purchase in the marina they wish. Our key principles are accuracy, efficiency and confidentiality. As international berth broker, we advise you regarding the choice of the best marina in France or beyond in accordance with your priority and requirements, and help you find the best berth suitable for your yacht in terms of dimension and navigation preferences. Berth For Yacht is offering moorings for sale for Super and Mega Yachts and will be delighted to advise you for a purchase as a profitable investment.
©Vertige Photo
Whether you are looking for a berth, an investment or you wish to sell, do not hesitate in visiting our website www.berthforyacht.com and/or to contact us at + 33 (0) 625 953 256.
Berth Sales – www.berthforyacht.com – contact@berthforyacht.com – Tel +33 (0) 625 953 256
8/ Larry Ellison d(1) In conceiving a new, more extreme America’s Cup, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison’s ambition could not be faulted. The 34th edition of the Cup, Ellison’s first as puppet-master, was by no means perfect but it has set a skeleton template for the future – big, rapid catamarans, crewed by armoured athletes, filmed and brought to life for the viewer at home by state-of-the-art broadcast technology. As the 35th Cup comes together, expect a more refined version of Ellison’s vision – cost control is certainly an area that needs to be addressed. Whatever, this influential billionaire will never be too far from any of the key decisions.
7/ Rodrigo Garcia NEW Rodrigo Garcia’s responsibilities go well beyond sailing, but the Rio 2016 sports director will be the man the sport will be looking to as the Games approach. The water quality in Guanabara Bay has been the subject of
much discussion and concern in recent months and, despite a successful test event in August, preparations from here on will be monitored closely by ISAF and the national sailing federations who will send their athletes
to compete. The Olympics is sailing’s showcase: it is too big an opportunity to miss. That means Garcia and Walter Böddener, Rio’s sailing competition manager, have just become two of the most important people in the sport.
6/ Patrizio Bertelli c(13) Now that Larry Ellison has his hands on sailing’s biggest prize, Patrizio Bertelli might be the man who has spent the most on the America’s Cup without ever winning it. The Italian chief executive of Prada will be back again for the 35th edition, providing the funding and strategic direction for Luna Rossa Challenge. Prior to the new generation boats getting out on the water, he, as the main man at what is expected to be the new challenger of record, will no doubt be a strong voice in determining the shape of the 35th Cup. Few, certainly, have as much experience: this will be Luna Rossa Challenge’s fifth campaign; it has been a mainstay of the competition since 1997. Might the 35th Cup, due to take place 20 years after his America’s Cup journey began, be Bertelli’s moment?
14 l BLACK BOOK 2014
THE POWER 20
5/ Sir Keith Mills d(4) THE POWER 20 / 1
Sailing is one of Sir Keith Mills’ greatest passions so it came as little surprise when he was announced, in 2013, as the new owner, through a start-up agency called Open Sports Management, of the commercial rights to International Monohull Open Classes Association (IMOCA) events. It is, by all accounts, a considerable investment for a man who already owns the Alex Thomson Racing team and was the brain behind Team Origin, an America’s Cup challenger that was sunk by the legal shenanigans around the 33rd edition. It remains to be seen whether Ocean Masters, the new umbrella brand for IMOCA events like the Transat Jacques Vabre and the Vendee Globe, will galvanise new media, fan and commercial interest in offshore sailing. But the backing of an entrepreneur as credible as Mills makes it a distinct possibility.
4/ Sir Ben Ainslie c(10) For anyone doubting Sir Ben Ainslie’s influence, the British government’s decision to award his Ben Ainslie Racing team some UK£7.5 million of public funds to build a new base in Portsmouth must have been telling. Ainslie, the multiple Olympic champion, can open doors at the highest level, an ability which must stand his America’s Cup challenge in good stead. After his starring substitute performance for Oracle Team USA in San Francisco in 2013, he is now leading a British challenge – a UK£80 million project to bring the Auld Mug back to where the America’s Cup began. His ability on the water makes him a formidable competitor and the early signs are that he has made all the right moves in putting together a challenge capable of going all the way. It would be the crowning glory of an already stellar career and nobody would be surprised if he managed to pull it off.
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 15
3/ Knut Frostad c(5) Leaders are paid to take the big decisions and there can be no denying that Knut Frostad, the Norwegian chief of the Volvo Ocean Race, did that in June 2012 when he introduced the onedesign rule into the round-the-world race. It is a transformative change, designed to reduce costs and attract more entries. Indeed, there are those who believe that costs had become so prohibitive that there might not have been a race at all had Frostad not acted as he did. That’s as maybe, but the cost and effort which has gone into executing such a major change to the whole fabric of the Volvo Ocean Race has been a lead-from-the-front project, overseen by
a man who is beginning his third edition as chief executive. That seven teams have been attracted – an upturn in fleet size when the trend across sailing’s biggest
events is in the other direction - is a tribute to his cool, calm and collected leadership. The true fruits of his labours will be seen over the next nine months.
2/ Russell Coutts c(3) A legendary sailor, Russell Coutts continues to play a powerful role in the America’s Cup – and never more so than now. The American has been in the employ of Larry Ellison for many years, steering Oracle Team USA through the choppy waters of a lengthy legal campaign against Alinghi, delivering Ellison his dream of successfully challenging for the Auld Mug, and then organising what Ellison hoped would be the first act in a new, high-octane era for sailing’s grandest competition. The 34th America’s Cup was initially plagued by problems, but a remarkable finish saw the Coutts-led American team retain the trophy. In the months since that thrilling duel on San Francisco Bay, Coutts has been putting the first pieces of the next Cup in place. The protocol, eagerly anticipated and always contested by challengers, was released in June, with the aim of creating a more cost-efficient, commercially successful proposition. The jury is still out on that, however, and despite smaller boats and fewer crew members, there will only be five challengers. Coutts, as ever for the man tasked with arranging the Cup, has plenty on his plate.
16 l BLACK BOOK 2014
THE POWER 20 / 1
THE POWER 20
1/ Carlo Croce c(2) Midway through his first term in office, Carlo Croce is beginning to make his presence felt and his influence is only set to grow as his plans for a season-ending Sailing World Cup become reality. The event, designed to promote the Olympic classes when the Games aren’t happening, has found a home in Abu Dhabi, where local promotion and investment will be significant. The first edition is scheduled for December. Looking further ahead, continuing
concerns over the quality of the water in Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay, where the Olympic sailing regatta is scheduled to take place in 2016, is likely to require strong, decisive leadership from the world governing body. Croce, who replaced Göran Petersson as ISAF president in 2012, has been tasked with making tough decisions but has already positioned himself as a reformer. The Italian, whose father Beppe was president of ISAF between 1969 and 1986, has
put good governance and relationshipbuilding at the heart of his presidency – he is aware that ISAF, whilst sailing’s global governing body, can only have so much control over the established big beasts, the America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race. Nonetheless, with an Olympic Games looming and the major professional properties going through periods of major change, he has a considerable claim as the most powerful and influential man in professional sailing.
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 17
The MAGAZINE app allows you to read the latest edition of SportsPro and access our extensive online magazine archive
Powered by
SportsPro’s free NEWS app delivers up-to-the-minute industry news, analysis and information direct to your device
Call: +44 (0) 20 7549 3250 | Email: info@sportspromedia.com
GET INSIDE THE INDUSTRY
www.sportspromedia.com
EVENTS 20
ISAF: Carlo Croce
26
America’s Cup
32
Volvo Ocean Race - team-by-team
44
Volvo Ocean Race - a look back
48
Clipper Round the World Yacht Race
54
Extreme Sailing Series
64
Alpari World Match Racing Tour
70
Ocean Masters World Championship
74
Rio 2016 - Olympic preparations
76
M32 Cup
78
52 Super Series
81
RC44 Championship Tour
FROM THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT THE BRIEFING The International Sailing Federation (ISAF) hopes the new Sailing World Cup end-of-season regatta in Abu Dhabi will help raise the profile of sailing’s Olympic classes outside the Games themselves.
20 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Carlo Croce, president of sailing’s world governing body ISAF, reviews the first 18 months of his presidency and looks ahead to the rest of his first term at the top of the sport.
Carlo Croce is approaching the midway point of his first term as president of the International Sailing Federation. The seventh president of the organisation – his father Beppe led the governing body between 1969 and 1986 – has made an immediate impact, bringing to life his vision of an annual Sailing World Cup season finale which he hopes will one day become the sport’s “pinnacle event”. Abu Dhabi, has agreed to play host to the first six editions, agreeing a contract until 2019, with the
inaugural competition set to begin on 26th November. Featuring the top 20 sailors of the year in each of the Olympic classes, the Sailing World Cup Final has been conceived both as an annual showcase for the sport and a method of building interest over the course of the full World Cup season which, in 2015, will comprise five regattas prior to the Middle East denouement. To draw the various stakeholders and the global sailing community together has not been the work of a moment,
but in Abu Dhabi Croce believes ISAF has found the ideal venue. The emirate already has the requisite facilities in place, is an established stopover on the Volvo Ocean Race and has a strong record of investing in and hosting sporting events to further its appeal as a destination. “I just knocked at their door to see if they would be interested,” Croce, speaking in August, reveals, “and they were excited. This will provide a lot of opportunity for sailors. We will only need to build what we call a sailing
ISAF Abu Dhabi (left) has hosted the Volvo Ocean Race and plans to make the Sailing World Cup a regular part of its sporting calendar, alongside marquee events like its annual Formula One race.
EVENTS / 2
village – a few tents, not very much – but the place is beautiful, in November the climate is 20 degrees and the wind comes from the sea so sailing can be done very close to shore.” ISAF is working with three stakeholders in the Middle East, the Abu Dhabi Sailing & Yacht Club, the UAE Sailing & Rowing Federation and the Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority. Critically, the resource-rich emirate has agreed to fund and provide the boats for the annual regatta, a not insubstantial cost. “We looked for places who could afford this and also for them it is a good project, because they are willing to invest in sailing and have an academy for young people from their country. These boats will be used for this project, the boats will be kept there. It is a huge investment, but the whole thing makes a lot of sense.” A number of wildcards from the emirate will be invited to compete in the 2014 regatta, allowing local sailors to gain experience on an elite stage.” From 2015, qualification for the Sailing World Cup in Abu Dhabi will depend on performance in the preceding five World Cup regattas. Next season’s schedule is still in gestation but will include events in Weymouth, the London 2012 Olympic sailing host, and Hyères, France. Both have signed four year contracts, while Miami and Melbourne, both of which have existing deals in place, will also stage regattas. The certainty offered by a consistent calendar will, Croce hopes, yield benefits in other areas. On his election in November 2012 he outlined four areas of focus: establishing the Sailing World Cup as a regular season-finale; increasing the universality, to use the International Olympic Committee’s word of choice, of sailing by assisting emerging markets; creating a new constitution for continental members of ISAF, in order to ensure everyone is following the same hymn sheet; and attracting more sponsors. “We are working hard on sponsorship deals and
for sponsors Abu Dhabi is interesting, for different reasons,” Croce says. “They have opportunities to get in touch with very important markets”. The Italian says ISAF is inching towards signing off with three sponsors, one from the US, one from the UK and the third from Russia. “The movement is happening but it is a big effort,” he says, adding: “I think the idea has been very well accepted by the market. For the sponsors, they will have the same venue each year – a very tiny comparison with Formula One.”
THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS As Croce plots the growth of the Sailing World Cup, however, his plans have left inevitable question marks about the future of ISAF’s quadrennial Sailing World Championships. The 2014 edition took place from 8th to 21st September in the northern Spanish city of Santander. The world championships are staged every four years and, since 2003, have been ISAF’s showpiece event, its
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 21
biggest regatta outside the Olympic Games. In 2014, 1,400 sailors and over 80 nations were expected to attend, with the competition gaining added significance by doubling as an Olympic qualifier for Rio 2016. This year’s world championships also determined 15 of the 20 qualifiers in each class for the inaugural Sailing World Cup, before the new system of qualification through the five World Cup regattas comes into effect for 2015. In May 2014, meanwhile, ISAF announced the Danish city of Aarhus will stage the 2018 edition, following a bid put together by the Danish Sailing Association, Sport Event Denmark, Sport Aarhus Events and Sailing Aarhus. With Croce intent on establishing the Sailing World Cup and the crowning of world champions each year as the sport’s “pinnacle” moments, there is
22 l BLACK BOOK 2014
an obvious question mark over how the quadrennial world championship fits in. It is a question Croce admits he doesn’t yet have all the answers to. “Of course, this is a problem,” he starts, speaking before Santander 2014 had begun. “Santander was there already and I think it is a pinnacle event. For 2018, we did not want to go against an event which is so important – at the moment, the world championships for the Olympic classes is a pinnacle event for sailing. We think we will use Aarhus as a qualifier for the World Cup. The only thing that hurts is that you have a world champion in Santander and then a World Cup champion in Abu Dhabi – this is not easy to understand, but we have to accept it.” With the 2018 event already locked-in, Croce does not rule out disbanding the world championships
in 2022 if, by then, the yearly Sailing World Cup has gained traction. “If the Sailing World Cup becomes the sailing event for sailors – I hope and think it will – I’m not sure about the world championships,” he concedes. “We also have each class with a world championship every year, so we might think about it. If the Sailing World Cup becomes a huge success it might be possible that we think about not having a 2022 worlds.”
DELIVERING A VISION Almost halfway through his first four year term, Croce says the organisation’s leadership group, including the ISAF vice presidents – Nazli Imre of Turkey, Greece’s George Andreadis, Briton Chris Atkins, Adrienne Greenwood of New Zealand, American Gary Jobson,
ISAF change from national associations used to working in a certain way. Croce is aware that, for some, change can be jarring, but insists that any initial scepticism about his World Cup plan has been dissipated by finding a willing host partner and April’s appointment of former America’s Cup executive John Craig to run the season-finale regatta. “It was a message to the market and we invested,” he says of Craig’s arrival. “He is important to show we are not messing around, we really are trying to do our best. “What we have seen this year is that the sailors are very keen, [the World Cup] is an opportunity for them to get a professional career and become well-known. The coaches have always asked for such a system, because it gives a sense to the whole season - they know where they will be going and what’s going on. Some of the national member associations were afraid, at the beginning, that it would be more expensive - more expensive than the old system. But now I think the vast majority is absolutely with us because they have seen that it will not be more expensive than it used to be, but also that it will give them a bigger opportunity to get sponsors. If the World Cup becomes an event covered by the media, the MNAs will be able to send a team to a place and tell their sponsors. It’s interesting. At this moment, as far as we know, they are quite happy, there is no real concern.”
THE OLYMPICS: RIO AND BEYOND Of rather more concern to Croce and ISAF, in line with many Olympic sports federations, is progress in Rio de Janeiro, where the local organising committee and IOC are facing something of a race against time to ready the city for the Games in 2016. As other sports fret over the delivery of venues, ISAF’s primary concern is the quality of water in Guanabara Bay, where the Olympic regatta will
be staged. The water there is heavily polluted, a result, according to Croce, of 70 per cent of the surrounding housing “not officially being there” and therefore no policing of where household waste goes. “It’s an enormous problem,” Croce says, adding that ISAF has been engaged with the IOC and Rio 2016’s local organisers for two years to try and find a solution. Bold Rio bid plans to raise the standard of water in the area have come to nought and the deadline to fully solve the problem by Games-time has long since passed. Some measures, such as stopping several pipes of untreated waste from flowing into the bay and a ban on ships unloading fuel just outside, will be taken to try and reduce the problem. Given ISAF’s concerns, early August’s sailing test event in Rio was particularly significant. “People went there concerned and doubtful,” Croce admits, candidly, “for the pollution and for the wind conditions. Both things were much better than expected. There were about 350 sailors and they had a very good sailing week. It was windy and the conditions were very good.” As for the pollution, Croce says this: “It will not be perfect but I think we can solve 50 per cent of the problem, not all of the problem.” He is also keen, however, to keep the issue in proportion. “It can become a legend – it can sound like we’re going to a terrible place, but the test event was not as bad as we expected. Yes, it is polluted but there are already significant improvements from a year ago.” Unlike at London 2012, where the sailing regatta was staged, very successfully, some 135 miles away, in the south coast town of Weymouth, the Rio 2016 Olympic event will be in the heart of the city. “The backdrop is amazing,” Croce confirms, but while staging the regatta in the Olympic city has advantages in terms of imagery and ensuring the sport feels part of the Games, he explains that a balance must be struck to retain sporting credibility.
The first Rio 2016 test event (left) left organisers satisfied, although plenty of work still remains to ensure Guanabara Bay is ready to stage Olympic sailing.
EVENTS / 2
China’s Quanhai Li and Uruguay’s Scott Perry – and chief executive Jerome Pels, have “done fantastic work”. “This has been a fantastic group with a lot of competence and will,” he adds. “The Sailing World Cup we have achieved – we hope it’s a success, but at least we have put it on the table. With sponsors, we hope to announce these three deals and that will be a big help for us to build up a better World Cup, but also invest money in academies around the world to help emerging nations have the chance to compete.” With ISAF reliant on its Olympic status for the bulk of its revenues, it is no surprise that Croce has prioritised participation in new markets, both in terms of direct funding and setting up the structures which will fuse relationships between ISAF as the global governing body and the national member associations, or NMAs. “The IOC doesn’t mind if five Australians win five medals in the Olympic Games,” he says. “Universality for them is all-important and therefore so it is for us. If we get more money from sponsors, we can afford to have emerging nations. “We are also working hard on continental organisation. We want the continental federations to be much more closely connected to ISAF. In the past we have not been able to work very closely with them, because they were living without any help from us. That, in China, as an example, meant they were supporting only four of the Olympic classes and investing in boats which are not in the Olympic classes, which was ridiculous. We want the whole movement to have the same targets so we are working on a new constitution for the continental federations, which we will present in Palma de Mallorca in November. We will have a network of agents around the world we can support and they have to follow what we are looking at – the calendar, the classes, the academies. The whole thing has to work together.” Much of making Croce’s vision for sailing a reality requires a mindset
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 23
Weymouth (below) was a standout host of the Olympic sailing regatta in 2012, although the ISAF president believes a careful balance must be struck at major events between made-for-TV courses and ensuring sporting credibility is retained.
CARLO CROCE ON…
THE AMERICA’S CUP “It’s a pinnacle of sailing and we are very happy we have five challengers this time around. Of course we were excited when we had the last couple of races in San Francisco, because it was beautiful to watch – luckily, because if it had ended up 9-0 or 8-0 it would have been dull. The whole thing was saved by the last few days. It was very good and very exciting. The America’s Cup, even with such sophisticated boats, is, for the young boy who wants to go sailing, very interesting to look at. You promote sailing very well with such a spectacular event. We are very keen on that and we want to support it as much as we can, if we can. It’s an opportunity we don’t want to miss so I hope it’s going to be a success. We don’t know where it will be held. It’s
In Rio, most of the racing will take place outside Guanabara Bay, with only the medal races taking place inside, where television cameras will be able to more easily cover the action but Croce warns that sailing “should not make a mistake in the future” and adds: “Sailors
24 l BLACK BOOK 2014
been quite complicated to set up the new world, because it’s so different. In my heart, I think America’s Cup is a very good promotional weapon for sailing so we are all in favour.”
keep the old way, I think that’s a big mistake. [Sir Keith] Mills has done very well, he is welcome.”
OCEAN MASTERS
“I think the idea of the one-design boat is great. It will help a lot to get more challengers and Knut [Frostad] is one of my favourite sailing managers – he is doing a lovely job. It is a very good choice. I’m surprised they have seven boats. I expected they would have more, but maybe the economic situation is so difficult around the world that you have to accept it. I think it’s a good regatta, we like it very much. For the young people to see it go round the world is very important and the racing is well followed. It’s very good that they have survived so many difficult years, that’s already a very good result.”
“It’s a future. Whoever has the culture, the competence and the means to promote sailing in a professional way, we are absolutely excited about it. We think that professionalism is only good for sailing. For example, there are some moments where there are specifications, where you have to have an amateur and a professional on a boat and I’m not sure that’s good. For me personally, the only way to promote the sport is becoming sponsored and professional and have the media cover the sport. We can’t just dream we are different because we
train for years on classic sailing courses to go to the Olympics, We don’t want the Olympics to become a joke - with a very short course on television, in front of the media, it becomes a gamble. We need to compromise to keep the show but also not to betray the guy who has been
THE VOLVO OCEAN RACE
sailing for four years who gets to the Olympics and a far more modest sailor can beat him because the course is a joke. We have to be careful with that. Sailing is full of classic people, conservative people and we have to respect that – to keep the quality of sailing up to what they expect. We could think of a normal course in the future and then the last 200 metres of the windward leg could be in a stadium. We don’t want to spoil, for television, our tradition.” It is those types of conversations that Croce and his team are expecting to have with officials in Tokyo, the host of the summer Games after Rio, although as August turned into September the original sailing venue planned for 2020, Wakasu Olympic Marina, was under review because of potential disruption to nearby Haneda airport. “We have three different opportunities,” Croce says. “The first step is the shore facilities and then we will get into the more technical sailing issues, to make sure the course will be what we expect. I think we will get a good place in Japan.”
# ,-., +& &
! " # $ "
% &
' & # & ( & & ) *
AMERICA’S CUP THE BRIEFING The Auld Mug (right), reputedly the oldest trophy in sport, will be contested for the 35th time in 2017.
After a memorable winner-takes-all finale to a troubled 34th America’s Cup in San Francisco in 2013, sailing’s most famous event has spent the last 12 months in a phase of renewal. A new Cup cycle promises much, even if the slow pace of developing a new format and structure is a perennial frustration. Five challenges, including new teams from France and the United Kingdom, have been accepted by defender Team Oracle USA, with the next Cup match scheduled for either San Diego or Bermuda some time in 2017. As is often the case when the Auld Mug is concerned, however, there are still more questions than answers as 2014 draws to a close.
Endlessly fascinating, endlessly frustrating, the archaic structure of the America’s Cup is, for better or worse, like nothing else in modern sport. The event is reborn with each edition, with new rules, new teams, a new venue and, critically for an event which requires financial support from sponsors and broadcasters to thrive, a distinct lack of consistency. The 35th edition is currently scheduled for some time in 2017 but, a year on from the dramatic conclusion to the 34th Cup, there was still no confirmed venue – San Diego and Bermuda beat Chicago to make it on to the final shortlist – or precise date for the next instalment of sailing’s most well-known event. The process of effectively creating an event from scratch every time is, inevitably, a lengthy and complicated one. It took until June for the new protocol, the rules by which the 35th Cup will be governed, to be made public by the Larry Ellison-owned defender Team Oracle USA. As many predicted at the time, the opportunity to take advantage of the remarkable finish to the 34th edition, when Ellison’s team dramatically overturned an 8-1 deficit to defeat Emirates Team New Zealand is a winner-takes-all final race on San Francisco Bay, was lost. The Cup, bound by its great history, is simply not structured to allow commercial certainty and long-term planning. Aside from the standard armwrestles over the rules, the 34th Cup will be remembered for Oracle owner Larry Ellison’s new vision for sailing’s
26 l BLACK BOOK 2014
premier event as an action-packed extreme joust, and the safety and financial concerns which resulted from his choice of the AC72 catamaran. The death of Artemis sailor Andrew Simpson, arguments over the safety changes that followed, and a dwindling number of challengers – only three made it as far as the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger selection series – made for a stressful start to what the San Francisco organisers had dubbed the ‘summer of sailing’. When Team Oracle USA was found to have broken technical regulations, incurring a two-point deficit in the Cup finals, and New Zealand surged into a dominant lead, it looked as though Ellison’s dream had become the dampest of damp squibs. Fortunately for the often-reclusive billionaire and sailing fanatic, a Cup that had at times threatened to spiral out of control will now forever be recalled as a classic sporting battle – certainly, it makes the list of both the greatest comebacks and collapses in sporting history. “We ended up with four challengers and we had hoped for a lot more than that so we really had to deal with a challenger series that was somewhat truncated, and, of course, those problems were magnified significantly by the Artemis tragedy,” recalls Stephen Barclay, who was director and chief executive of the America’s Cup Event Authority, the independent body which ran the 34th Cup. “Those things all had to be dealt with but I think, even then, everyone
saw the potential of the boats. Even though the competition in those early races mightn’t have been as close as some would have liked, we didn’t need to go back too far in history to see that the challenger series usually is very one-sided in the early races and it’s only when you come down to the challenger series final and then the America’s Cup match that it really captures global attention. And that was done in spades. It delivered in every way, capturing the media’s attention and capturing the attention of the local populous.” Barclay dismisses suggestions that the Cup did not deliver for its host venue, arguing that such criticism was politically motivated. “A game sport in San Francisco is taking potshots at Larry Ellison and so Larry has a very big target on his back and a number of vocal politicians and past politicians get lots of airplay and print media by taking potshots at Larry,” Barclay says. “We felt a lot of that early on and I also noted that it was absolutely silent during the month of September, when the racing was phenomenal. With regards to the people, it was a very different story. We had to lock the gates in San Francisco. People voted with their feet and they had a phenomenal experience with the Cup. “On the financial side of it, from the city’s point of view, I’ll use their figures: it cost them US$11.5 million if they include all of their costs, of police, security, rubbish collection – every single cost they could find and they come up with the total of US$11.5
EVENTS / 2
AMERICA’S CUP
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 27
million to bring the America’s Cup to San Francisco. On their numbers, it returned about half a billion dollars, about US$400 or US$500 million of economic benefit. By any measure, it was a fantastic success.” Boosted by graphic-heavy, if expensive, television coverage the like of which sailing had never seen before, the stars of the show were the new generation AC72s, rapid, foiling and undoubtedly spectacular, albeit expensive, catamarans. For the 35th Cup, however, they will be replaced by a slightly smaller AC62. That change, it is hoped, will ensure the Cup retains its spectacle but help rein in spiralling costs – a budget of US$100 million was not enough for Emirates Team New Zealand during the last campaign. Crews will be limited to eight people in another stab at bringing budgets down. Still, though, the cost of competing for, let alone winning, the America’s Cup remains high – probably too high, especially given the lack of certainty about venue or date. That was underlined when, just days after the publication of the protocol, challenger of record Team Australia surprisingly withdrew from the competition. The return of Australia to the Cup had been trumpeted by organisers when it was announced, almost as soon as racing ended in San Francisco in September 2013. “The timeline is the killer in this Cup,” said Iain Murray, who had been hired to lead the Australian challenge on behalf of wine entrepreneur Bob Oatley and his Hamilton Island Yacht Club, by way of explanation. “Sponsors want to know where the venues are, and the dates. The gap gets pretty wide trying to get the sponsors to commit against the timeline of the expenditure.” As the Australian challenge evaporated in July, several of the other proposed challengers came together to offer a joint statement of support and to underline their intention to compete. “All the elements for the success of the event are there,” said
28 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Max Sirena, the skipper of recurrent challenger Luna Rossa. “After the 34th America’s Cup it is no longer questionable how spectacular the fullfoiling wing-sail catamarans are.” Sir Ben Ainslie, the team principal of his eponymous entry, added: “We are really focused to help build a successful and sustainable America’s Cup for the future. The America’s Cup is about pushing the technical boundaries of the sport through continued innovation. The AC62 will again be incredibly exciting to watch, both on and off the water, all the ingredients you need for a great sporting event.” There will be five challengers for the 35th America’s Cup, but it is undoubtedly Ainslie’s decision to pursue a British challenge that had provoked the most interest in the 12 months since the Olympic champion was substituted on to Team Oracle USA’s boat in the 34th Cup match. His challenge, which is backed by a number of British entrepreneurs including Sir Keith Mills and Carphone Warehouse founder Sir Charles Dunstone, was formally announced in London in June. “This is the last great historic sporting prize never won by Great Britain,” Ainslie said. “It has always been my ambition to mount a home challenge.” The team has a budget of UK£80 million, around 40 per cent of which will be from private investment, and the search has begun for major commercial partners. Ainslie’s influence in the UK was underlined in July when it was announced, somewhat controversially, that the British government had approved UK£7.5 million in funding for Ben Ainslie Racing to build its headquarters in the city of Portsmouth. Portsmouth City Council will contribute a further UK£1.4 million to a project which will create jobs for around 90 people. The new facility will be completed by May. Fewer details were available about the other new challenger for the 35th Cup as September arrived. The Team France project was announced at the Paris Boat
Larry Ellison’s (left) vision for a highoctane new era of America’s Cup racing will be refined for the 35th edition, following a long review and ruleforming process in 2014. Emirates Team New Zealand (far left) are one of five challengers to Ellison’s Team Oracle USA.
Show in December 2013 and is backed by the Yacht Club de France and the French Sailing Federation. Groupama is said to be a possible commercial partner for a campaign which will be steered by Stephane Kandler, an experienced Cup team manager, and renowned French sailors Franck Cammas and Michel Desjoyeaux. “It has been 18 months since we started working seriously on this project,” said Cammas, when the French challenge was formally ratified in August. “It’s difficult but exciting. Beyond the technological and sporting aspects that are our daily lives for decades, it must gain support from the public, business leaders and convince partners.” The remaining challengers – Pradabacked Luna Rossa, Sweden’s Artemis Racing and Emirates Team New Zealand – all return after competing in San Francisco last year. New Zealand’s challenge hung in the balance for several months after its crushing defeat in 2013, but was confirmed by its sanctioning yacht club, the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, in August.
“This is the start of a long, hard journey,” said chief executive Grant Dalton, who has spent much of the last year trying to secure government and commercial support for what is effectively the national team. Artemis Racing is also back, following a tragic 34th Cup campaign. The death of British sailor Andrew Simpson in a training accident on San Francisco Bay last summer overshadowed everything that followed; understandably, it all but ended the Artemis Racing challenge for the Cup. The team is run and funded by oil trader Torbjörn Törnqvist. “Given our experience from the 34th America’s Cup, what the team went through and achieved, we have an incredibly strong culture, a belonging to the team,” said Törnqvist ahead of the team’s second Cup campaign, which will be managed by Briton Iain Percy. For Luna Rossa Challenge, this is the fifth challenge for sailing’s greatest prize. Funded and steered by Patrizio Bertelli, the Italian team’s primary source of funding will again be Prada.
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 29
EVENTS / 2
AMERICA’S CUP
Sir Ben Ainslie (right) launched a British challenge for the 35th America’s Cup midway through 2014 and is now working to secure the required budget.
Early in 2014, Prada confirmed it will contribute €50 million to fund the challenge, with its spending capped to €25 million in the period until January 2015. In 2013, Luna Rossa made it to the final of the Louis Vuitton Cup before losing to Emirates Team New Zealand. The team to beat, of course, is Oracle Team USA, which is run for Ellison by the vastly experienced Russell Coutts, one of the standout figures in America’s Cup history. At the same time Coutts is trying to create the new Cup, working to bring Ellison’s overarching vision of a high-octane, adrenaline-fuelled, commercially viable contest to life. “It’s got to change,” he said, when asked in the aftermath of the fraught 2013 Cup cycle whether he relished the long periods of negotiation and debate over rules and technicalities in between the short bursts of Cup sailing. “Right now, the legal people
30 l BLACK BOOK 2014
in these teams get way more press than what they deserve – all the arguments over the rules and so forth. It’s, in many ways, an archaic process that the America’s Cup has been putting itself through over many, many years. I think we’ve got to move towards a mechanism other sports use where they, for example, have a commissioner that has the commercial interests of the sport in line, as well as the competitive interests of the teams, and can balance that.” Coutts was hinting at something which was crystallised in June, when the protocol was released. In August, American sports industry veteran Harvey Schiller, a former president of the International Baseball Federation, was appointed as the first America’s Cup commercial commissioner. Schiller was a member of the advisory board for the 34th Cup and brings a wealth of experience to the role.
“Following the thrilling event we saw last summer, interest in the event is as high as it’s ever been,” Schiller said as he was appointed. “Our job now is to translate those opportunities into growth of the event for the benefit of all participants. As such, I’m extremely gratified to see how the teams have started working together with such a high level of cooperation over the past few months.” Schiller’s to-do list is not insubstantial, with the finalisation of the schedule and venues for the America’s Cup World Series – the regattas over the next couple of years which will form the build-up to the challenger selection series and Cup match – an early priority, before the process of securing sponsorship and broadcast contracts begins in earnest. He certainly has his work cut out over the next year as the 35th America’s Cup begins to appear on the horizon.
R/EVOLUTION
Ropeye deck loops for heavy loads. Tested on IMOCA60, Multi50, TP52, GC32, Class40 and Mini650
R/EVOLUTION TECHNOLOGY Š Ropeye is a registered trademark. All rights reserved.
www.ropeye.com
VOLVO OCEAN RACE THE BRIEFING When the 2014/15 Volvo Ocean Race, the fourth under the control of Volvo Group, begins in Alicante, the Spanish coastal city which has become the organisers’ home, on 4th October, it will mark the beginning of a new era for the round-the-world sailing event, a race considered one of the toughest in all of sport. In an attempt to cut costs and attract a larger fleet, race organisers, led by chief executive Knut Frostad, have made a gamechanging rules alteration. Whereas in previous years, teams have been required to design and build their own boats at great expense, now Volvo has taken that process in-house, developing a fleet of identical Volvo 65s, which have been built by a consortium of European boatyards. A central design has allowed components essential from a media standpoint, but perhaps not previously the priority for individual teams, to be built in from the start, rather than retrofitted as was previously the case. Dedicated camera positions, to cite but one example, will help Volvo Ocean Race meet another of its targets for 2014/15: the focus is on telling the human stories of life on board, to convey the emotion, team relationships, stresses and strains of a nine-month, 38,739 nautical mile (71,745km) voyage around the world. There will be 11 ports visited along the way, a variety of traditional sailing hotspots and commercially important locations, with the planned route similar to that of the 2011/12 race. Over the last couple of years, and facing perhaps the largest regulation change in the race’s history, the contenders for this year’s race have been assembling the necessary financial backing and sailing prowess required to compete in one of sailing’s most recognised and established events – the first edition of the Whitbread Round the World Race, as the race was once known, was staged in 1973/74. In the pages to follow, the Sailing Black Book examines the business models behind the fleet of seven who will take the start.
THE VOLVO OCEAN 65 BOAT BY THE NUMBERS
THE 2014/15 VOLVO OCEAN RACE ROUTE
36,000
man hours required to build a single boat
Start (in-port race in Alicante):
4th October 2014
12,500
weight of boat, in kilograms
Alicante – Cape Town:
11th October 2014
468
sail area (mainsail) in square metres
Cape Town – Abu Dhabi:
19th November 2014
7
months: time needed to build a single boat
Abu Dhabi – Sanya:
3rd January 2015
120
boatbuilders assigned to building the fleet
Sanya – Auckland:
8th February 2015
70
suppliers involved in the project
Auckland – Itajai:
15th March 2015
8
one-design sails allowed onboard (four more can be purchased)
Itajai – Newport:
19th April 2015
Newport – Lisbon:
17th May 2015
8
standard crew, plus one onboard reporter
Lisbon – Lorient:
7th June 2015
9
crew for mixed teams, plus one onboard reporter
Lorient – Gothenburg
17th June 2015*
11
crew for all-female teams, plus one onboard reporter
Finish (Gothenburg)
27th June 2015 *includes 24 hour pit-stop in The Hague
32 l BLACK BOOK 2014
EVENTS / 2
VOLVO OCEAN RACE
ABU DHABI OCEAN RACING The Abu Dhabi team is the only one of the six to take part in the 2011/12 Volvo Ocean Race to return for the 2014/15 edition. The target this time round is to improve on the fifth place finish achieved on its debut. “We went back and did a very thorough review after the 2011/12 race,” says Phil Allen, the team’s general manager. “We looked at the things we did well and things we didn’t do well and we were critical. We wrote a report, we were thorough with the sponsors and we’ve set ourselves up differently.” The sailing team is built up by and around British skipper Ian Walker and performance manager Neal McDonald, but the team is, as the name suggests, part of the wider national brandbuilding project underway in Abu Dhabi. “Abu Dhabi would not have done this again if they had not seen the benefits from it,” says Allen. “A lot of the benefits come from the stopover side and I always see the boat as a promotional vehicle for the stopover.” After a successful debut in the last race, Abu Dhabi is on the route again – the fleet is expected shortly before Christmas. “Getting a lot of footfall through Abu Dhabi is a key goal,” continues Allen, “and making people
aware of Abu Dhabi, where it is in the world, is obviously another key asset.” UAE sailor Adil Khalid is back aboard as a crew member. Although the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority is the main sponsor and focus, the team has been granted some commercial freedom. IWC Schaffhausen, the Swiss luxury watch brand which, like Abu Dhabi, is also a central race partner, is a returning sponsor. Etihad Airways, Abu Dhabi’s national carrier, also has logos on the boat. In the build-up to the event, Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing has been based in the Portuguese coastal town of Cascais. There the team, like the entire fleet, has been acclimatising to the new one-design Volvo 65 boat. It has been introduced in an attempt to cut design costs and attract a larger fleet, but Allen reports that personnel costs represent the biggest saving for a returning team. “If you were a brand new team turning up for the first time then, for sure, the savings are relatively bigger,” he explains. “As we are a returning team, we had a huge number of spare parts and assets from our previous campaigns. A lot of those things are superfluous to us and we’ve started with them, so we don’t see the savings
that you would have seen if you were starting from scratch.” Personnel-wise, Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing is about half as big as it once was, with the shore crew pared down to just six. As well as taking over the boat design and build, the race organisers have also created a centralised support service, designed to help reduce costs during the race. Whereas a team like Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing would once have purchased its own mast, for example, now it pays into a shared parts pool. A finite number of spare, shared components, however, requires a new tactical team approach. “We’ve tried to be very diligent in how we’ve gone about specifying what we carry versus what’s in shared services,” Allen explains, “because there’s a risk that you get to a stopover, three boats have broken the same thing and there’s only two spares. “We’ve made an effort, tried to be smart, tried to second-guess the things that could fail and that are financially justifiable for us to hold as spares ourselves.” New challenges, then, but Allen is firm about Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing’s target. “Our goal, no question, is to win the Volvo Ocean Race,” he says. “That is our mentality – we want to win the race and I think we can.”
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 33
TEAM DONGFENG Well known in sailing circles and best known as the owner and operator of the Extreme Sailing Series, OC Sport is running the Chinese entry in the 2014/15 Volvo Ocean Race. The heavy-duty vehicle division of Chinese manufacturer Dongfeng is the title partner of the team. While OC Sport’s Mark Turner suggests it may be the largest sponsorship by a Chinese company since computer firm Lenovo partnered the Beijing Olympics, the Dongfeng investment forms only part of the funding – enough to get the project off the ground and convince OC Sport it was a project worth pursuing. Additional support has now been secured, from another Chinese firm Aeolus Tyres, and the city of Shiyan where Dongfeng Commercial Vehicles is based. “We are managing the campaign right the way across – finding sponsors, managing the sponsorships, advising on the activation; getting them to understand activation which is a whole new word and new territory for them – right through to training and selecting all of the sailors, managing the boat, managing the technical side of it, managing the stopovers and pavilions,”
34 l BLACK BOOK 2014
explains Turner, speaking from his Lausanne base. “The Volvo Ocean Race is very involved in most of the campaigns in some way. They helped this one come together – China is the number one objective for the owners, Volvo Group and Volvo Cars – so we’re not on our own, but ultimately we’ve taken the risk.” The Volvo Ocean Race will form an important part of Dongfeng’s first international marketing assault. As Turner says: “They are present in some markets from a product perspective – South Africa, Brazil, the Middle East just starting – but from a trading perspective they’re not present in Europe yet. It’s planned and it will come very quickly so a key objective outside China for Dongfeng is to start that marketing process, in a very classical way. “In China,” Turner continues, “Dongfeng is a household name – it’s the second largest automobile group in China. So it’s about positioning the brand perhaps at a higher level than it’s been in the past, it’s about giving back something to China which in this case is about developing offshore sailing in China and showing they’re supporting that.” When the race stops in Sanya, the Dongfeng hospitality pavilion will be three times larger than anywhere
else, while Turner believes the “accelerated learning” of sponsoring a sailing team will yield wider benefits across the Dongfeng business. While Turner argues that the true test of the race’s new one-design class will be in the number of entries next time round, he is full of praise for the change. “From what I can see, to be competitive in this race it’s maybe as little as half the amount of money you needed in previous races,” he says. “The complexity has just been cut away for new entrants.” He adds that the Dongfeng project wouldn’t have been possible if each team had been required to design and build its own boat and that Dongfeng wouldn’t have gained any benefit from going through that process. “This kind of sponsor wouldn’t get any extra value from the complexity – if we had to try and explain to Dongfeng why we were spending €50,000 putting in a different component, that’s zero value,” Turner points out. “There is no question the one-design rule was an absolute necessity and it was a brave decision to make a big change like that – they have had to work pretty hard to get teams over the line, but I think they would have failed to have a race if they hadn’t made that move this time. That decision is one that hopefully can create a different platform going forward.”
Photo: Oyster Yachts
Vortec Marine - Simplifying Yacht Ownership SERVICE MAINTENANCE & REPAIR PROJECT MANAGEMENT DELIVERIES & LOGISTICS SAIL TRAINING FIRE TRAINING MEDICAL TRAINING Vortec Marine Ltd, founded in 2006, are a specialist luxury yacht management company, focusing on the requirements of owners with yachts from 15m upwards. Vortec offer a bespoke service of contact within the team to ensure continuity. On the larger and crew.
Q With many brands on the market do you deal with other luxury yacht manufacturers? A Yes of course. The link with Oyster demonstrates our level of quality and our position within the industry market place, therefore a luxury brand accreditation helps us stand apart and tailor our services to the correct audience.
Sailing Black Book asked Vortec Marine about how they differ from other management companies. Q Does Vortec have enough of the right experience to maintain my luxury yacht? A The senior team has over 300,000nm combined experience at sea and 19 years project management experience on more " # $ " Q What are the Vortec core values? A Honesty, integrity and a professional but personal approach. Q What makes Vortec stand out from other yacht management companies? A We take full responsibility and avoid contracting work out; retaining continuity and quality. In terms of tracking progress and staying involved, we provide an online portal where clients have both a ‘service history’ for their vessel and a way to follow their project from afar. Q I’m stuck in a remote location with a technical problem and a distressed family, are you able to help? A Of course, we are very experienced in turning logistical nightmares into plain sailing. We achieve this via our global connections and availability to travel anywhere at short notice.
Q So Vortec has all the right tools, lots of technical and managerial experience, but what about actual sailing and what level of training can you offer? A Experience is everything so we can impart huge amounts of knowledge as well as some amazing hands on opportunities;
only ‘leisure’ sail training company in the world that has such a facility. Our medical courses use the exact same equipment found in our Vortec Medical Kits, so there is no confusion when the time comes to use it! Q How can you keep luxury yacht ownership simple for me? A You ask, we undertake. We can move your vessel, maintain
small or too complex. “I have used Vortec Marine to maintain and service my new Oyster 56 since Its build in mid 2006. They have done an outstanding job and I am
Q Your Oyster credentials are impressive, why has such a prestigious brand partnered with you? A Quality, continuity and experience has built a huge amount of trust. We deliver on our commitment every time and offer the same level of customer care to the end user as the original manufacturer would offer.
T: +44 (0)1489 854 850 E: info@vortecmarine.com www.vortecmarine.com
TEAM SCA
Richard Brisius (below), founder of Atlant Ocean Racing
36 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Team SCA was the first entry to confirm its place in the 2014/15 race, with SCA, the parent of many well-known hygiene and sanitation brands, teaming up with Volvo Ocean Race specialists Atlant Ocean Racing. The headline is the allfemale crew the team has assembled but the wider aim is to promote the SCA name, the company having previously focused on foregrounding its many individual brands. Once SCA had decided to enter the race, it made contact with Atlant, the sailing management company founded and run by Richard Brisius. Atlant has won the Volvo Ocean Race, or the Whitbread as it was originally known, twice, with boats funded by EF and Ericsson. “We knew something about what it is to work with a less experienced crew and we said we were willing to do it,” recalls Brisius of when the all-female crew idea was first pitched to him. “80 per cent of their products are purchased by women across the world,” he adds, outlining the rationale for the female squad. “It’s a way of being very true to the values of SCA, which is a company that believes in women, the environment and diversity. It’s a very good commercial fit – I’ve seen a number of companies being involved with the race but this is one of the best natural fits that I’ve seen.” Team SCA was born in August 2012, but Brisius explains that while the extra time to prepare a new crew has been helpful, the advantage of being first in has been negated somewhat by the new one-design rule. “Previously,
the early bid has had the advantage of being able to spend more time on the design and development of the boat,” he says. “Here, it has almost been the contrary because we have been the guinea pig with the new boat. But that’s not our big challenge in this team, our big challenge is to, in as quick a time as possible, create excellent offshore racers from a group of people who have hardly done any offshore racing. It would be wrong to think we have a huge advantage because we started early. The relevant thing to say is the people on other teams are years ahead of us, because they started ten years ago.” Brisius is cautious about the cost savings of the new rules, but believes the fleet Volvo 65s will make for a better show. “All the teams will have the same tool,” he says, “so in theory it would mean the race is closer so you will have more shifting positions.” Running in parallel with crew preparations are the operational and logistics planning for nine months at sea, with 10 stopovers plus The Hague pit-stop thrown in for good measure. “Without the shore crew the boats wouldn’t leave the dock, almost,” notes Brisius, adding: “The logistics are a big puzzle, to move a lot of containers and items across the world in the most cost and environmentally friendly way possible, but still making sure it’s there on time when we need it.” Like every team, SCA will use a leapfrog system to make sure everything required is at each stopover, doubling up on key items such as hospitality pavilions. Although the sailing side of the entry is run by Atlant, don’t expect to hear that name too often. “We keep that super low-profile, that’s not part of the story,” Brisius explains. “We are SCA. We are totally integrated. I have learned over the years to just immerse [yourself ] in the main partner and do as good a job for them as possible. I believe that longterm we will have a woman winning this race. If that’s in one year or in four years or eight years, I don’t know, but I hope that that’s why I’m here, because I want to be part of that happening.”
EVENTS / 2
VOLVO OCEAN RACE
TEAM BRUNEL Team Brunel is named after the Amsterdam-based consultancy and project management company, but Brunel is one of six sponsors backing what is, to all intents and purposes, a Dutch entry. The project is being steered by Gideon Messink, who, along with colleagues Bouwe Bekking and Gerd-Jan Poortman, have created Sailing Holland, an organisation designed to attract funding for sailing in a difficult economic climate. “We started about two years ago,” Messink explains, “and it’s a totally different set-up to what we’ve done in the past. The normal Dutch entries in the Volvo or the Whitbread had the main sponsor owning the campaign, like Delta Lloyd, like ABN Amro, like Philips, Equity & Law, etc. But of course the financial crisis caused a problem to find sponsors, so firstly we started a foundation – a non-profit. It was possible to have more sponsors in the foundation, and the foundation’s responsibility is to take care of different kinds of sponsors.” Brunel, as the largest backer, has taken title rights. It is the company’s third appearance in the race, after
running campaigns in 1997/98 and 2005/06; Messink was aboard the Brunel Synergy entry in the former. Sailing Holland has brought together five secondary partners to support the cause – Belgian flooring firm Moduleo, training company Schouten, outdoor clothing specialist Gaastra, EY, and asset management organisation Robeco. “It’s a Dutch flag, it’s a Dutch campaign but it’s an international crew – our sponsors are international,” Messink adds. “That’s what we want. We have two Dutch people on the boat. Our shore crew is also international. It’s not that we are a full Dutch campaign, but it’s a Dutch flag and we are very happy till now with the publicity we get in Holland.” The Brunel campaign would, in all likelihood, not have been possible without the reduction of costs resulting from the switch to a one-design rule. “For getting the campaigns together, it makes it a lot easier to go to sponsors and say, ‘You buy a boat, you have your guarantee, it’s for two editions, the budgets are down,’” says Messink. “It’s not like you put the keel in the water and it’s wrong or the mast is not good – that was a very big risk for a lot
of sponsors. Now the budgets are very, very close – it was not easy, but it was easier to sell the budget to the sponsors. There are not a lot of big holes – you’re not allowed to put a big development together or change daggerboards or that kind of thing – so it’s all credit to Volvo to move to this set-up. It’s very good. The next edition, I think, will be bigger than this one where we have seven boats on the water, which I think is a very good achievement.” While the international crew familiarises itself with the boat in Lanzarote, Messink and his team in The Netherlands spent the weeks before the start putting the finishing touches to the complex logistical plan, which includes transporting people and equipment around the world. “We have four containers, two for each stopover, with a big tent in between, which will be our team base,” Messink explains. “We have a Dutch sponsor who is taking care of the containers and making sure they are delivered to Alicante and to Cape Town. From Alicante and Cape Town, Volvo – with their sponsor, Maersk – will take over until Lisbon. At Lisbon, we take over again with our sponsor. It works very well.”
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 37
TEAM ALVIMEDICA The Turkish-sponsored, American-run Team Alvimedica effort was made public in January and represents the first major international foray for Alvimedica, a medical services provider which specialises in endovascular and interventional cardiology. The company’s black and orange corporate colours will adorn the boat but the sailing part of the project is in the hands of sailors Mark Towill and Charlie Enright, who have created All-American Ocean Racing to run the campaign. Sailing veteran Bill Erlekens runs the project as chief executive. Off shore, however, campaign director Anna Bernsten has become a trusted advisor to Alvimedica’s executives as the company embarks on its first global marketing project. Bernsten previously worked on the Assa Abloy campaign of 2001/02 and ABN Amro’s 2005/06 entry and says of her new Turkish colleagues: “The company is extremely ambitious and very visionary and they have a very strong financial backing and really want to make sure their technologies are being launched – they
38 l BLACK BOOK 2014
have a long-term commitment. We looked at the brand positioning of the company – a young challenger – and we said we should have a Volvo Ocean Race team that is agile, that is a challenger. They are maybe a little bit the underdog, like the company. “Knowing that the US market is the largest in the world for medical devices,” Bernsten adds, “we said, ‘Ideally if we want to create brand awareness and build business for the future, we should try to see how we could get connections to the US.’ Finding a young American team was part of the strategy.” After introductions were made by Knut Frostad, the race’s chief executive, in Amsterdam last December, a deal was signed off. The team, which has an international crew, is based in Newport and, given Alvimedica’s area of expertise, Bernsten says there will be a particular focus on monitoring and improving the health performance of the crew – especially given the gruelling nature of the event and the shorter stopovers in this edition. Bernsten says she is not overly concerned with studying the
preparations other teams and sponsors are making. “We have different target audiences – I’m basing it on my previous experiences from previous Volvo Ocean Races,” she says. “The race is an extremely valuable tool to build relationships which last for years and you can have discussions that you never could have anywhere else with these business leaders. I just focus on making sure that our guests will have a memorable moment. Based on my experience of two previous campaigns, I think we can put something fabulous together.” As a returnee to the race, Bernsten admits she is “very impressed” with Volvo’s move to a one-design event. “The approach Volvo has taken with the human edition is close to my heart,” she adds, “because I am not a sailor myself. This is one of the greatest adventures and everything they have done with the design of the boats – the cameras integrated, proper audio transmissions – will bring us to the next level, for a much wider audience. The focus they will have will definitely reach out and make it an even more powerful tool for sponsors.”
Quality | Excellence | Integrity QXI International brings together collective industry knowledge, network and experience, plus a carefully selected group of partners, suppliers and contractors to create a unique service. Risk & Insurance Management & Consulting Logistics Support & Concierge Project Management & Agency Counsel, ADR & Mediation
“Emirates Team New Zealand at the Louis Vuitton Cup 2013” by Frank Schulenburg
ff ff ff ff
Key clients include: Volvo Ocean Race & all 2014-15 Participating VO65 Teams Extreme Sailing Series & X40 Fleet Royal Oman Police - Coast Guard
John C. Quigley, Chief Executive, QXI International Ltd Direct (UK) +44 (7768) 384545 Direct (Oman) +968 (991) 23791 Direct (UAE) +971 (50) 967 5086 Email JohnQuigley@QXII.net
Emirates Team New Zealand - AC34 Finalist Oman Sail (incl. MOD 70 ‘Musandam’ World Record Holder)
www.
QXII.net
SPANISH ENTRY (NAME TBC) Few know the Volvo Ocean Race as well as Pedro Campos. The Spaniard was in charge of Movistar’s entry in the 2005/06 race and Telefónica’s two-boat effort in 2008/09, plus another entry in 2011/12. This edition, however, may be his most challenging yet. Still without having announced its main sponsor, and therefore settled on a team name, at the time of writing, Campos was at least able to confirm a Spanish team as the sixth entry, supported by Spain’s National Sports Council and the Royal Spanish Sailing Federation, in June. The crew will be led be the experienced Iker Martínez, who was aboard Telefónica in 2011/12, but the start date of 4th October looms large. “We have been always willing to do it but because we hadn’t reached the minimum budget we waited and waited, and pushed, and in the end we were almost at the deadline and we did it,” Campos says, speaking in July. “We are still fighting to get a little bit more so we can be more competitive. In a monotype, because you can change almost nothing, there is almost more
40 l BLACK BOOK 2014
to learn internally, to know how to run the boats. Whereas looking at the other boats in the past was very important, because everybody had ideas, new sails, new ways of building the boats, now this is not going to happen, or will happen at a minimum. “One of our strengths is experience,” he adds. “We have been doing the Volvo now, four attempts, and the majority of the crew have been involved in one way or another, so this is the reason we can still want to compete – because really we have been late in terms of normal timing, because sponsorship has been very difficult to find.” In this case, the much talked-of one-design rule has come into its own. “The saving, compared with the last race, is very big, probably 30 or 40 per less,” Campos explains. “Without this big effort from Volvo, I think almost nobody – probably only one team – could have been able to be there. This was very important. The budget that goes straight to the boat is somewhere between €12 million and €13 million, and then we have some extra expenses because we have to run the team, take care of the communication, of the
guests, of the sponsorship, to activate the sponsorship – and this changes a lot from one sponsor to another. Normally we spend between 20 and 30 per cent of the whole budget taking care of the sponsors.” Campos is also keen to emphasise the sheer difficulty of the Volvo Ocean Race. “In the last edition a Spanish newspaper took a picture before the start of all the crew, and then they did another picture on the day of arrival, and the difference was incredible,” he recalls. “They were like different people; you could not recognise them. “One leg of this race is longer than the whole Tour de France, over three weeks, and there you stop at night, have a massage, eat. Here, you cannot stop – day and night, continually, competing, competing. It’s been compared with climbing, high mountains, but that is not competition, it is something to do on your own. It’s also very open: you can walk round the stopovers and get close to the boats, to the crew which doesn’t happen in Formula One or even the America’s Cup. This opportunity to see the faces of the crews makes it very attractive.”
TEAM VESTAS WIND The seventh boat in the 2014/15 Volvo Ocean Race fleet was announced on 12th August, just weeks before the scheduled start of the race in Alicante. It will also be the first Danish entry in the event’s history. Vestas Wind Systems installs wind turbines across more than 70 countries and six continents, and the company is now planning to utilise its expertise in wind technology in a race where reading and predicting the wind is vital. “The Volvo Ocean Race will take Vestas to many of our most important markets, whether it’s China, Brazil or the US or South Africa or the MENA region,” says Morten Albæk, the chief marketing officer of Vestas Wind Systems. “And, in addition, also five stops in the European region. “Both with regards to wind energy and where we have our market focus, it’s a perfect match. On top of that, the Volvo brand is also a brand which is focused on sustainability, which Vestas is also, so for those three reasons it was obvious to us that we had potential for a good collaboration.” Albæk, speaking in early August, concedes that the project has come
42 l BLACK BOOK 2014
together late, leaving little time for preparation. However, he hopes that disadvantage will be offset by the experience of skipper Chris Nicolson and shore manager Neil Cox, who Vestas has hired to lead the team. The pair steered the Camper with Emirates Team Zealand entry during the 2011/12 race and were spending August and September assembling the rest of the crew, including at least two young Danish sailors. “Hopefully down the road we can see for the first time a Danish Volvo Ocean Race skipper,” Albæk says. After an intense period of negotiation before contracts were signed, Albæk is full of praise for Volvo Ocean Race organisers. “It’s been a pleasure collaborating with an organisation that is so flexible, so knowledgeable and which has such a strong focus on telling a story which is larger than just about the sailing competition and the boats,” he says. “That’s something that really has been motivating and inspiring for everyone in the Vestas organisation. I’m very complimentary towards their attitude and expertise.” Client entertainment and experience form a sizeable part of Vestas Wind Systems’ activation plan. “As everyone knows, the more interaction you
have with your clients, the stronger the commercial relationship so in that regard the business case is pretty clear,” Albæk says. “This is a privileged opportunity for us to create intimate surroundings for our clients. “We are of course also going to apply whatever technologies that we have that can be made available and are relevant to the team’s competitiveness,” he adds. “Reading and predicting the wind is going to be key for Team Vestas Wind’s ability to be competitive, and here we have some outstanding knowledge and capabilities. We want to put them into play during the race, thereby tying the Vestas organisation and our key competencies in with the competiveness of the team.” Aside from the results on the water, Albæk reveals, the success of the project will be measured in three ways. “We will measure it on how many of our most important clients we have the possibility to meet with during the race and their satisfaction of the experience that we and the Volvo Ocean Race is giving them,” he says. “We will measure it on our order intake. And we will measure it on how our brand and reputation develops in the key markets that we visit as well as globally.”
“The hotel of your choice for all sports events” “After a hard day’s work, it is nice to come home to a hotel where you receive a warm welcome, where everything has been taken care of and you can just relax and have a drink in the cozy bar. It feels like staying with family. I loved the experience of Worldhotel Bel Air”, says Dutch sports journalist Henriette Bakker. The Volvo Ocean Race (June 19th 2015) There are only a few places where the passion for sailing is greater than in the seafaring nation of The Netherlands. After the 2008-09 regatta loop close to the Dutch shores, the Volvo Ocean Race will now make a 24-hour pit-stop in the iconic Dutch port of The Hague. The fleet will come ashore on Friday, June 19th 2015 and will start the decisive final race to Gothenburg, Sweden the next day. The Hague offers fans perfect viewing spots close to the sea.
Worldhotel Bel Air The Hague Come and stay in one of the 300 comfortable rooms of Worldhotel Bel Air. Meet your fellow sailors in the famous Embassy Jazz Bar, for drinks, cocktails and live music... After a late night, there are plenty of jogging trails available in the area, or get a breath of fresh air during a nice stroll along the North Sea beach. Worldhotel Bel Air has a long and rich Jazz history, accommodating all top musicians such as Take Five, Roy Hargrove, George Benson, Nile Rogers, Candy Dulfer, Gino Vanelli, James Morrison and many others. For artists, heads of state and other people that care for some extra comfort, the hotel has recently designed the Penthouse Suite featuring a panoramic view over the city, sea and harbour.
Officially preferred partner of national sports associations:
The Dutch national hockey association KNHB The Dutch Beach Volley World Tour FIVB The FIFA and KNVB Euro Beach Soccer League To book your next group stay or event please contact us at sales@worldhotelbelair.com or call +31 (0) 70 352 53 50. State special code “WBASAIL” and receive a surprise benefit!
Worldhotel Bel Air The Hague | Johan de Wittlaan 30 | 2517 JR The Hague | The Netherlands + 31 (0)70 352 53 54 | sales@worldhotelbelair.com www.worldhotelbelair.com
VOLVO OCEAN RACE: THEN AND NOW THE BRIEFING Angus Buchanan is a former commercial director of the Volvo Ocean Race. The race remains a valuable client of The Sports Consultancy, the company he cofounded in 2006.
Few are better placed to chart the commercial evolution of the Volvo Ocean Race than Angus Buchanan. A former sailor, a former commercial director of the race and now the man shaping the round-the-world event’s host city procurement process, via the agency he co-founded with Robert Datnow, The Sports Consultancy, Buchanan reflects on the past and looks ahead to the future.
The Volvo Ocean Race was originally The Whitbread Round The World Race but the course of its history was changed forever in 1997 when Volvo announced it had acquired the race from Whitbread, a British brewer. Although always the intention, the rebranding of the event was not immediate, with the 1997/90 race taking the rather convoluted name The Whitbread Round The World Race for the Volvo Trophy. The race was subsequently renamed in time for the 2001/02 edition, as Volvo placed its feet more firmly under the table. Since then the race has grown and evolved, through an economic boom and a global recession, culminating in the bold, but critical, decision by race organisers in 2012 to turn the Volvo Ocean Race into a one-design class for the 2014/15 edition, centralising the design and construction of the whole fleet and ending the costly process for
44 l BLACK BOOK 2014
teams of having to design and build their own yacht. Angus Buchanan has played his part in the race’s development and has, over the past decade, been one of the major players in shaping the offer to teams, sponsors and host cities. A roundthe-world sailor himself, Buchanan trained as a solicitor before becoming involved in the Volvo Ocean Race, as commercial director, in 2003. Now working across sport as co-founder of The Sports Consultancy, which is still retained by the Volvo Ocean Race, is ideally placed to reflect on how the race has evolved as a commercial proposition. Before 2003, as a sailor and professional sailing enthusiast, Buchanan observed the race from afar. “Prior to rebranding the race, Volvo had done what many sponsors do and tried to dominate or ‘own’ a sport,” he recalls. “They were very heavily involved in two sports, equestrian sport and golf. But whether or not they were led in that direction instinctively or guided in that direction by brand consultancy, they recognised they needed to move the needle on the Volvo brand. Back then, that was about the same time as the division of the two Volvo companies – when that decision was first made the Volvo brand was one brand and henceforth it was business to business and the car company. From a consumer perspective, nevertheless, Volvo had become defined by the word ‘safety’,
which is a great thing but could also be seen as conservative. They felt they needed to move the needle.” Through a mutual contact in the yachting world, Buchanan was introduced to Glenn Bourke, the thenchief executive of the race. “Given my background in the sport and my move away from the sport into law and then from law into commercial rights, it was felt they should talk to me,” Buchanan says now. “I went in as a consultant and then became commercial director and took that role in 2003. “The primary responsibility which to a large extent has always been the case with the Volvo Ocean Race is, because it’s a brand-owned event and there is an established level of investment in the event, assisting teams in securing their sponsorship. Raising further funding from sponsors [centrally] was, at the time, of a lower priority. Curiously, for a commercial director of a major event, whilst we did raise fairly significant amounts of money in brand partnerships for the event with the likes of DHL, Inmarsat and a couple of others, the priority was the teams.” During his time as commercial director, Buchanan also began the long process of drawing up a new, thorough, commercial strategy for the event. “It was really thinking about how best to keep it current, keep it moving and how to keep the momentum up,” he says, “so really deconstructing and reconstructing the event but at the same time challenging some of
EVENTS / 2
VOLVO OCEAN RACE
the preconceptions about what the Whitbread, now Volvo, should be, whilst being conscious of the fact that Volvo had only recently acquired it and wanted to be sensitive to the needs of its key stakeholders – spectators and sponsors and participants. It was quite a delicate exercise of saying ‘how can we improve this event, how can we keep it current, keep up with modern trends and make sure it’s relevant commercially to sponsors, make sure it’s relevant to broadcasters and refine the product’.” Part of that process was beginning to consider what would become a mainstay of Buchanan’s professional life: in 2014, The Sports Consultancy has become a specialist in defining and establishing the relationship between a major event and its host city. In the early 2000s, the event-host city partnership was, as Buchanan puts it, “totally unsophisticated” and “almost an afterthought”. As an example,
there were very limited contractual relationships between Volvo Ocean Race organisers and stopovers, and only a basic list of requirements provided to hosts. “It did [form part of the event development strategy] because whilst recognising and being sensitive to tradition, if tradition means that you don’t visit markets which, again with a rapidly evolving global economy, are relevant to sponsors you are going to struggle with your sponsorship proposition,” Buchanan explains. “The Volvo Ocean Race has always been corporately owned and corporately sponsored, funded by corporate sponsorship investment, so you have to ensure that it remains relevant. Consequently, we started looking at the city relationship because we knew we had to look for alternative markets and understand how we would do that. That forced us into a rethink
of the entire relationship between event and city, and in some ways that was a bit of a light bulb moment for me professionally, to begin to understand the very critical relationship between not just sponsor and event, but city and event and city as a major partner and stakeholder.” In terms of teams, meanwhile, the domination of two brands, first Whitbread and then Volvo, called for creativity and some new thinking. “Volvo wanted to involve other brands, as event partners but also to leave enough space for brands to become team sponsors. We were constantly trying to think of ways that would create space to breathe for brands to be involved in the event and also work with brands in partnership to collectively grow awareness of the event and the marketing/sponsorship impact of the event. The Pirates of the Caribbean idea was something I came
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 45
From top to bottom: Buchanan has fond memories of helping to put together the deal which saw a Pirates of the Caribbean boat appear in the 2005/06 race; the arrival of the likes of Puma, Ericsson and Telefonica in the event coincided with large budget increases; The Sports Consultancy now works with Volvo Ocean Race on its host procurement process.
46 l BLACK BOOK 2014
up with as a notional idea, so that we could bounce off the global footprint of a major movie franchise.” “It was one of those happy ideas that just caught fire and crackled up through Buena Vista International,” he recalls of his plan, which ultimately saw a Pirates of the Caribbean-branded boat race in the 2005/06 race. Prior to that, a year of negotiations took place before the idea was pitched to the movie’s director, Jerry Bruckheimer, who had the final say. “There were two reactions whenever we took it anywhere in Disney, one was ‘wow, fantastic, we have to do this’ and then the realisation of ‘this looks complicated, how are we going to do this?’ There was a little bit of a dual approach of appealing to the head and heart in the Buena Vista International world.” The Pirates of the Caribbean negotiation was where Buchanan met Robert Datnow, with whom he went on to found The Sports Consultancy shortly afterwards, in 2006. Datnow was working for Farrer & Co., the law firm instructed by Volvo Ocean Race to work through the agreement. “Robert’s great skill was very, very meticulous and careful deal-making because as you can imagine Disney and Buena Vista International are extremely large companies, with very set ways of doing things, and this was not exactly a traditional marketing platform for Disney,” Buchanan explains. “It was such an unusual deal it would be gamechanging in any sport, simply because I can’t think of too many examples where there’s been a merging of the worlds of sport and entertainment. To that extent, it was game-changing.” The Pirates of the Caribbean boat, skippered by Paul Cayard, lined up in a fleet of seven for the 2005/06 race, alongside two boats branded by Dutch bank ABN Amro and entries funded by brands such as Brunel, Ericsson and Movistar. The 2008/09 race, the first with Knut Frostad as Volvo Ocean Race chief executive, featured a fleet of eight, including two Ericsson boats,
VOLVO OCEAN RACE been a steady evolution towards better cost control, more competitive racing, more similar boats and the logical conclusion of all of that is one-design. That will take the event back, weirdly, to pre-89/90. In those days you didn’t have to build a boat to enter and it is only now, in the next event, that someone could take a second hand, existing boat and compete and race with it. I think that’s very welcome and that will be game-changing.” Since it was formed eight years ago The Sports Consultancy has expanded and diversified well beyond sailing, but it has retained Volvo Ocean Race as a client, putting together the host city procurement process which has resulted in the 11-port, 38,739 nautical mile 2014/15 event. “When you stop and think about it, host cities are one of the major beneficiaries of a major event – more tangibly so than brands because they get all of the same benefits that brands get, in terms of association and the ability to project themselves to an inward investment audience internationally, but then they have the benefits of having really substantial numbers of teams, competitors, sponsors, their guests, spectators and other travellers coming into town to spend money, to put it crudely,” Buchanan points out. “That, now, has very well recognised benefits for the city and national economy through trickle-down, amplification and benefit. It seems curious if that were the case that we weren’t spending more time as an event looking at how we create very effective optimised partnerships between city and event – yes, realising some of the value for the rights-holder for those rights to host, but also trying to better understand what it could do for the city. With an event like the Volvo Ocean Race you’d like to be in a position where you have multi-race deals with host cities and you’re not constantly changing the route. To do that you need to make sure you’re delivering on those objectives for the
city and that all comes back to the contracting stage. “A secondary element to that is taking everything I’d learnt previously as a lawyer when it comes to best practice, tendering and contracting, given the way in which public sector makes decisions and its decisionmaking processes, to provide long enough for them to conduct an analysis and to work out whether the event is something they’d like to be investing in, whilst doing that within a time-controlled process. It was learning how to get decisions made but also understanding where the value really lies for both parties. It took that quite in-depth exercise of event development and commercial strategy for the event to really unpick those relationships.” As Buchanan experienced what he calls the “dawning moment” that his experience with the Volvo Ocean Race was applicable elsewhere in the world of sport and put that theory to the test at The Sports Consultancy, so the Volvo Ocean Race has sailed on as one of the most refined, commercially aware sports properties of all. Ahead of the start of the 2014/15 race, Buchanan is already calling the onedesign rule a success. “You’re seeing reducing numbers in every other professional fleet, yet you’re seeing an uptick in the Volvo Ocean Race. I think that is no mean feat and I know they’ve worked really hard to get everyone to support and agree to that, which took major support and investment from Volvo and major support from all of the teams involved. “I think it will be very interesting to see how the product changes, too,” he adds. “It has to, by its nature, become less about the boat even though the boats are spectacular, and more about the team because they are all competing with the same piece of equipment. It’s much more about the athlete, both in closer, more competitive racing and a focus on the sailing. They can’t make excuses, they have no piece of equipment to hide behind. That will have an interesting impact.”
EVENTS / 2
two Telefonica entries and the first appearance of the Puma Ocean Racing team. It was a period of increasing professionalism and spiralling budgets, with some of the larger teams reputedly spending up to €50 million on two boats. By the 2011/12 edition, the fleet had shrunk to six, as the worldwide economy took a hit and marketing budgets were re-evaluated. Rather than reflecting on this period of expansion and post-recession contraction as the primary reason for the move to a one-design rule, however, Buchanan views what is commonly agreed to be the biggest change in the race’s history as part of a much larger evolution of the event. “Some people would say the race was in its heyday in 89/90 when there was an enormous fleet but, again, like many sports at the time it was making a transition from amateur to professional,” he recalls. “That was probably the high watermark in terms of the sheer number of entries, but probably not in terms of the quality of the racing with real imbalance in the performance of the boats and a clean sweep for Steinlager 2. It was an interesting era for the race because it was from that point through to the early 1990s when you started to see the emergence of the internet and the race was a really early adopter of that technology. Then there was a move towards bigger and bigger boats and I think the race organiser at the time, before Volvo, had seen that that was only heading one way and that was prohibitive cost. So there was a move towards professionalisation of the race and at the same time a closer focus on cost control. “Through the early and mid 1990s there was also a global recession which coincided with that need to professionalise and streamline costs, but it started to see a reduction in the number of teams. From my perspective, I think the race probably settles down at around seven to ten in terms of competitive entries. That’s a measure of its professionalisation. It’s
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 47
CLIPPER ROUND THE WORLD YACHT RACE THE BRIEFING Right: The GREAT Britain boat, part of the UK’s government-backed international marketing campaign, returns to Tower Bridge in London where the 2013/14 Clipper race began and ended.
The ninth Clipper Round the World Race concluded in July as it had started nine months earlier, with the fleet sailing down the River Thames in London. In between, crews of amateur sailors spent nearly 11 months at sea, on a 40,000 mile voyage around the world. A professional event for amateurs, Clipper Ventures, the company which organises and operates the race, has always had a commercial bent: the 2013/14 edition included boat sponsors such as Derry-Londonderry-Doire, Invest Africa, the tourist boards of Great Britain and Jamaica, whisky brand Old Pulteney and Dutch firm De Lage Landen, while a full programme of business and networking events took place in stopover cities including Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Sydney, Singapore, Qingdao, San Francisco and New York. Not for nothing has the Clipper race been described as a “floating trade fair”. The 2013/14 race also saw the debut of the new Clipper fleet, built in China. The same boats will race in the 2016/17 event, preparations for which, as Clipper Ventures chief executive William Ward explained just weeks after the last edition concluded, are already well underway.
William, what’s your top-level assessment of how the 2013/14 race went?
I’m always hyper-critical of me and Clipper - I have to watch myself sometimes because the staff do a fantastic job and work so hard, and yet I’m only ever looking for the downsides of it because that’s the only way you can improve - but it was incredible for us this time. That was our ninth round the world Clipper race, and we’ve done three singlehanders as well, so we know what to expect, but I have to say the race finish and the level of sponsors, potential sponsors, guests and atmosphere did exceed anything we’d ever expected. I think for us it was a coming of age, really. We just continue to grow. Revenues keep growing, interest keeps growing, the demand is there – unlike a lot of other yacht races which are cutting back on entries; we don’t seem to be having that problem. The tone was really set by that tremendous start at Tower Bridge in London – how much of a boost was that?
It does set the tone but to be honest we’ve been doing things like that for a long time now. It was not just
48 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Tower Bridge, it was the fact there was a boat in [London’s] Trafalgar Square beforehand. But even the race before that, when we started in Southampton, we had an aircraft carrier to lead us out with a flotilla of 500 boats. It’s one of those things: you’ve got to get your name out there and for some people it dawned on them two races ago, or a race ago. The race is almost the best kept secret because it doesn’t get on TV like a football match would, but we had more people at the race start at Liverpool and Hull than you get at the FA Cup Final. How you get that to the trade and the press is very difficult, you can only do so much with a limited budget. This race has been so successful. We had a lot of problems initially with the boat building - that was late so that put an awful lot of pressure on the crews, the staff, the sponsors, the whole thing, and us internally. We missed out on one or two sponsors because of it. But we came through that, the boats held up really well, sailed really well and everyone was really pleased with them. At the finish, there were sponsors or potential sponsors there – we had four people that said yes to quite major deals on the back of that.
You filled the fleet by letting several long-term suppliers brand boats – how important is adding value in that way to help burnish relationships with partners?
The people that we added, Henri Lloyd, PSP and Garmin, are all big names in their own right and all activated, all added to the race – they upped their stake of what they intended to do. We’ve just announced another two race deal with Henri Lloyd on the clothing side – whether that becomes boat again, I don’t know, but we tend to have fairly long term relationships. People seem to come back for more. You inevitably lose some [sponsors] because it’s such a long haul. It’s a sponsorship that lasts for a year and if somebody activates, and if they’ve got a whole team doing it, people after a couple of races may move on, but some of the sponsors have been with us for five or six races now. How important in terms of publicity was it to incorporate Sydney-Hobart into the race?
There’s two thoughts there. We’ve not entered it for this coming race. One of the problems is that date dictates our whole race and that’s difficult because we’re talking to three or four other ports at the moment and it would
EVENTS / 2
CLIPPER ROUND THE WORLD YACHT RACE
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 49
Clipper Ventures chief executive William Ward (right) attracted new entrants including Invest Africa (below) to brand boats during the 2013/14 edition.
add two or three weeks onto the trip. There’s a small commercial value in it, but press-wise we had more than we ever could have hoped for mainly because we were a big player in town before any of the other big players got to town. We were getting TV every day, nationally, and then the major press every day and we staged activities. We got Ollie Smith, the England Rugby Sevens captain, on one of the boats and he had the Australian team down sailing with him for a day – the cameras follow them about, especially if they are doing something out of their comfort zone. Every day we staged something, cook-offs, interest from schools, and because none of the big boys had turned up we gained lots of press. But it’s a difficult one for us in terms of whether it’s worthwhile. The crews loved it until they had to come back from Hobart, across the same waters that they’d sailed twice; that was a bit of a dampener for them. Could you pick out a couple of stopovers that you see as models for other host cities or ports?
50 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Two unusual ones come to mind. Firstly, Qingdao in China. We’re probably bigger in China than we are in England. More people know about us there. Some of the events are televised nationally and even the prize ceremony is televised in the local region, which is still as big as Europe. A huge amount of people in China know the brand of Clipper in China. They’ve created something out of nothing there. It was a
waterfront and they’ve built several four and five star hotels, a massive marina – it was the centre for their Olympics – and they’ve been a sponsor now for five races. They’re in for the next race and we’re in discussions right up to 2020 at the moment. They’ve done a lot out of nothing but they’ve spent I don’t know how many billions creating almost a second city of skyscrapers, so it’s a huge investment. The other end of the scale to that would be Derry-Londonderry, where they’ve got a fantastic natural harbour at the bottom of the Foyle that hadn’t been used for years. Clearly, it’s a city that has had its troubles, but the whole of the city got behind it. It was one unit. They had 238,000 in four days going through the race village. That’s incredible for a small place. Roads were jammed, the restaurants were selling out. They monitor their success by a particular car park that has never ever been full since it’s been there and it was full when Clipper was there. We had some people who flew in from another country who saw that and they have since entered into a contract negotiation.
Direct from the drivers seat of the FIA World Endurance Championship to your tablet and smartphone DON’T MISS A MOMENT OF THE EXCITEMENT
From Silverstone to Le Mans and SĂŁo Paulo, the FIA WEC and Netco Sports released an innovative 2nd screen solution including:
LIVE ON BOARD Get in the drivers seat with a live feed direct from the cockpit
LIVE TIMING Pinpoint car position as they make their way around the track with live splits in real time
...and more comprehensive racing features bringing fans closer to the action
To learn more about how Netco Sports can make your event come to life on the 2nd screen, contact us at : +33 1 44 83 06 67
contact@netcosports.com
Right: Clipper has a history of securing a mix of destinations, such as DerryLondonderry, and corporates, like Dutch finance firm De Lage Landen, as boat sponsors.
What would your message to wouldbe Clipper sponsors be?
It’s unlike any other sporting event, even other yacht races, because of its amateur nature. That puts some people off but we had 670 crew take part in this one, some doing parts of it, some doing the whole lot, and the CSR side of things – the guys at Invest Africa paid for some people from a township to come and sail. The stories have been incredible, so it’s about more than just a floating billboard. We had masses of press this time, probably double anything we’ve ever done in the past, but to me that’s only a small part of what Clipper is. It’s all about activation with your clients, your staff, CSR programmes, doing good - it’s a completely different way of partnering. Sponsorship’s almost the wrong word, really. And people don’t understand it at first and that’s the biggest problem that I have selling it, but when they see it and they see the reaction of people… I see a big growth from the financial side of things over the next four years. Looking at the Clipper race cycle, because you’re showing potential clients the race and inviting them to stopovers, there doesn’t seem to be a distinct selling period and a racing period - the selling never really stops, does it?
Everybody thinks it goes in batches and when we started, to a certain extent, it did because you can’t afford the staff – the same people putting on the race sell it, so you do one thing, put those tools down, put a different hat on and then start selling. Now it’s completely different. We’ve got 70odd full-time staff and there’s a batch of probably eight people plus some agencies that are selling and looking after sponsors – renewing contracts, going into different countries, organising events we’re putting on for potential sponsors and people who have shown an interest, at CEO and marketing director level, to go out sailing and get a feel for it.
52 l BLACK BOOK 2014
What have you been doing in the weeks since the 2013/14 Clipper race concluded, what’s the debrief process?
You do debrief, both on sponsorship and crew and things like that. Most of it, because this was our ninth race, is not rocket science. What we have found is as we’ve got bigger is with sponsors spending more money, we need to up our game on the support we give them. That’s a learning curve for Clipper. Most of these things are ongoing, though, because if you’ve got a problem with something and the race, by way of example, starts in September and you realise in November, we don’t wait until the end of the race to put it right. It’s not like having a weekly or monthly event, where you would have a big debrief. We tend to be on the move all the time because it’s something that lasts nearly a year – you tend not to wait until the end of it to go ‘we got that wrong, we must do better next time’. There’s a degree of that but it is minor tweaking as we go. It’s an ongoing learning curve and most of that is just as we’ve got bigger. We’ve got to then step up. With crew, because the race has got bigger they are almost expecting more publicity or for it to be more of something. It’s managing those expectations, making sure the crew are aware they are in a tough, round the world race and not on a holiday. When push comes to shove they are in a very, very tough environment. One of the things I was interested to see in Sydney was that before we got there, because we have amateur sailors they were not taken very seriously but when 12 70 foot yachts turn up and the professionals saw them and realised they’d just come across the Southern Ocean in 100 mph winds and all the boats stood up to it, the respect level went through the roof. The yachting journalists took a completely different view to what they were saying beforehand – very interesting.
How careful do you have to be to get the balance right between the great human stories and the fact it is a race, a competitive contest with winners and losers?
I would say we got it thereabouts right, but there is area for improvement there. As it’s got bigger and as technology moves – Twitter, Facebook, Facetime etc. – we have to adapt, so that there’s more information given to the crew in general, rather than just the skipper. It’s a curve for us. So recognising the great human stories as a fundamental part of the
EVENTS / 2
CLIPPER ROUND THE WORLD YACHT RACE
race, but pushing the competitive, sporting aspect more?
Yes, very much so. They are amateurs. It cannot be a rally around the world, that’s not of interest to us, or to a sponsor. We are competing with the Volvo Ocean Race and any other sporting event for sponsors and the real aim is to give value for money to our sponsors. What stage are you at, commercially, with the 2016/17 race?
All good. Sponsor-wise, we are about where we expected to be. We had a very good response after the race, people we were talking to getting it, coming to
the race finish, and now we have five or six either in-contract or going into contract on top of the ones we’ve already got signed. We will be stronger than ever. On the crew side, we are 70 per cent full which is above wherever we’ve been in the past [at this stage]. That’s positive. Likewise with the cities – it is a jigsaw puzzle and the stakes are a couple of million or something like that for a stopover and a boat, so there’s a lot of pressure. The crew want to be able to tell their loved ones where they want to be at certain times, so they can start thinking about booking holidays and coming out to see them. It’s something sponsors
never really think about because for some people we’re negotiating for the June 2016 stopover now. But trying to get someone to hurry up when they’ve got other events for something that’s going to happen in June 2016 is hard. It’s hard for them to get their mind round that it’s urgent now. One of the other big things in this couple of years is that we don’t have a fleet to build. The fleet is back, they go into refits but we’ve got a great team doing that so we’re not backwards and forwards to China and things like that and worrying about whether the boats will be here. We’ve got a clear run at it, really.
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 53
EXTREME SAILING SERIES THE BRIEFING Singapore’s Marina Bay provides a dramatic backdrop for the 2014 Extreme Series, the most ambitious season to date for a property based around the concept of ‘stadium sailing’.
54 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Firmly established amongst the leading annual sailing tours and buoyed by continuing support from main sponsor Land Rover, the Extreme Sailing Series enjoyed its biggest season yet in 2014. Nine teams, including entries led by Sir Ben Ainslie and Volvo Ocean Race winner Franck Cammas, made it to the start line for an eighth season which comprised eight events, or Acts. Spanning three continents, the calendar included two new venues, Sydney and the Russian city of St Petersburg, alongside more established hosts of the series’ close-to-shore ‘stadium sailing’ concept such as Singapore, Muscat, Qingdao and Cardiff on the calendar. It was at the Cardiff Act, on a UK bank holiday weekend in August, when event director Andy Tourell, who works for series owner and operator OC Sport, offered a fascinating insight into how the Extreme Sailing Series is staged and how host cities are selected.
EXTREME SAILING SERIES
The planning phase for us is a minimum of six months. I sit over the whole of the series. I then have a host venue manager for each event. We have four to do eight Acts so each host manager will be responsible for two venues, ideally one and five, two and six etc. That will allow them to have a six month planning period for each venue. Things like city permissions and licenses are the longer lead terms and
the majority of cities have a four to six month process to get those permissions in place. Obviously if we have more than six months it makes life that little bit easier but in terms of a minimum planning phase that’s what we aim for. What’s the process from there, to end up with this kind of set up?
We get the venue contracts, which are driven by the commercial team. That gets handed to the host venue manager and it’s their responsibility to deliver against that contract for stakeholders.
The first part of the process as soon as you get a contract is to get on a flight, get out to the venue and either start the relationship or build on it. Permissions and licenses are the longer lead time items – water permissions, alcohol at the event, music. Typically a host venue manager will do between three and five site visits during that six month period and the focus will change as you go through those. The first one is to engage with the city authorities, the harbour authorities etc. As you get closer, you’ll then involve the operations
EVENTS / 2
Andy, let’s take the Cardiff event as a model – at what point do you start putting together the event?
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 55
The Oman Airsponsored boat competes in the Cardiff Act of the 2014 Extreme Sailing Series, held on a UK bank holiday weekend in August.
manager who will go out and do a site visit to start looking at suppliers and the actual services that are needed, some of the more technical specifications of delivery of the event. We have about 20 or 22 full-time employees within OC Sport on the ESS. The majority of them work across all the venues, they have a responsibility to look at all of them. The host city manager will set up all the bigger picture elements, for all the different departments, and normally it’s about two months before an event when the rest of the team start focusing on that event. There’s a big mind shift for the event manager where they control everything and gather all of the information for all of the departments, then they pass it all out to the wider team. The actual build of it – building the structures, the marquee and installing all of the local services – normally begins about two weeks before. Our containers arrive typically five days before and then everybody’s on site three days before to fill out and set everything up, all of our assets – build the boat, fill the marquee with all the furniture etc. There’s four days of the event, then a one-day pack up. Pack up here begins on Monday night and by 7pm on Tuesday evening everything will be packed up and we’ll be gone. When you’re planning the series, is there a geographical swing that you go for or do you leave yourself enough time to get anywhere?
Putting the series together is a huge jigsaw puzzle. We’ve got five criteria
56 l BLACK BOOK 2014
which are important to us from a venue perspective. One is an iconic venue – this year St Petersburg and Sydney are our two new venues. Another is that it has to be commercially attractive, not only for us but also our stakeholders, hitting the target markets of all our various stakeholders, partners or teams. Stadium is the core concept of the whole series – it’s what we do and no other sailing event does to the same extent. The weather, obviously - we have to have the weather conditions to ensure the sporting credibility of the circuit. And then the public; giving the public close proximity to the boats to engage bigger audiences. Those are the five criteria and then alongside that we’ve got to make it work logistically, so GAC Pindar, our logistics partner, is tying that shipping schedule in and fine-tuning the dates to fit the eight Acts into the calendar year. Land Rover have some input, stakeholders have an input – at what point do those discussions about how to get certain events into the calendar take place?
All the key markets are identified by the partners at the outset of the partnership. Land Rover joined us in 2013 in Qingdao. Their eyes are open as to where we are currently and then our eyes our open as to what their target markets are as a business. You identify that for all the different stakeholders as the partnership begins and then every year we hold various
forums with our series partners, where we will sit around the table all together – ‘this is where we are as an event, these are the elements of the event we are going to focus on, this is where our considerations are at the moment, this is what we’re thinking for 2015’. It’s very much an open conversation; they’ll express an interest. For Land Rover, for example, Italy is quite an important market for them and whilst we’re not there with the eight Acts of the series, having identified at the beginning of the year what we’re able to do is bring in some of the other Extreme40s that exist – there are 20 in the world, 12 of which are on the circuit, eight of which we either own or are in contact with the owners – and we can put on what we call an invitational event. We’re going to have four boats in Barcolana, a regatta in Trieste, and we can do that outside of the series, which activates one of the markets that we can’t hit with the actual series this year. It’s a very open dialogue with all of the partners – the invitational with Land Rover in October is the prime one, SAP, GAC Pindar. It’s a conversation and you may get to the stage where you have two markets you want to hit but logistically you can’t hit them both. We have to make a choice between two important markets, we won’t make that decision ourselves without consulting everyone else, getting their input and making a decision that’s best for the series and partners. Does the sign-off lie with OC Sport?
Yes, at the end of the day it’s our decision but we’re very clear as to what the considerations are behind that decision. If it does mean we miss a target market for one year for the partner, then we do whilst considering how we can hit it in a different activation. Using Land Rover as an example, we got the boat to the launch of the Land Rover 550 last year. There’s lots of things we can do to reinforce their events, that takes the property into an already existing element.
Shangri-La’s Barr Al Jissah Resort & Spa, Muscat An oasis of luxury at the heart of Oman
IW I L R VE E G YR E RW ER WYVV YR I ] LI IEY JY G EW RI J LI IE J ER LERKV !E"W #EVV $ % WWEL 'IW V ( TE G RW W W J LVII Y)YV] L I W* $ +ELE $ #ER EV ER $ /YWR3 4LI JE ] IW RE R $ +ELE 74LI EW W" JIE YVIW E T EWLTE E8YE G T E]KV YR LI !E9] ' :IV ER LI GL VIR"W G Y ; < RI3 $ #ER EV 74LI 4 R" W L I ER8YI ER 4LI VIW V EW W >@ R RK :IRYIW WIV: RK From swaying palm I)8Y W I GE ER R IVRE RE GY W RIW ;/K YW RIWW trees and golden sands 4LI TE L W @> VIE IR :
EW $ :IR YVI to pristine blue water, JEG IW3 the warmth of heartfelt < RI UE I< IR IV E R IR JEG ] = V LI hospitality will always $ TL LIE VI $ XE9EEV YZ [ :I ;IR VI WGIVRI surround you. ER E XEV RE3 VE:I
IV $ /YWR 74LI ;EW I" TV : IW Y W
Y)YV YW I)TIV IRGI L W R½R ] T = V VI RJ V E R R L W YR 8YI IW RE R V EZI E VIWIV:E TV :E I IEGL ER TIVW RE WI Y IV WIV: GI3 R E ER] J LI LVII L I W E LI VIW V GE
\]^_`j >z{{____ V : W LI VIW V "W I W I E 3WLERKV E3G | YWGE 3 www.shangri-la.com/muscat { Tel.: (968) 2477 6666 }
Malta
Your Island in the Middle Sea
Credit: Kurt Arrigo
For centuries Malta enjoyed an intense affinity to the sea, in times of war and peace alike, a recognised merit attributed to its strategic location, its natural harbours and to the varied resourcefulness of its people. This historically made the island an appealing destination for seafarers, whether seeking commercial services and facilities like safe berthing, supplies, repairs and refits for vessels of various sizes and types, or partaking in a wide selection of water sport activities. Focusing on the latter aspect, a predominant water sport attraction is sailing where undoubtedly Malta is able to present the competitive world of professional yachting with a highly appealing scenario – for both competitive racing and pleasant sailing. Well located in the centre of the Mediterranean, Malta is only two days’ sailing time away from any of the principal maritime centres in the Middle Sea and just a couple of hours’ flight from most major European cities. The island is gifted with a number of active yacht/sailing clubs that keep the sails up and open throughout the whole year. Dinghy sailing is catered for by the Birzebbuga Sailing Club, the Malta Young Sailors Club and the Vikings Sailing Club. There is the Malta Cruising Club that specifically caters for cruising, rather than racing, and were club events, even their annual Malta-Sicily cruise, are family-friendly were participants are accompanied by their families and friends. The Royal Malta Yacht Club, founded in 1835, is a private yacht club rich in history and active with a healthy annual programme of competitive racing, both in local waters and offshore. This is crowned by the club’s proudest event, the Rolex Middle Sea Race, which today enjoys the interest and respect of the international elite yacht racing community.
Rolex Middlesea Race Over the years, the Rolex Middle Sea Race grew from a minimal entry of 8 starters in 1968 to global recognition, with its 34th edition in 2013 securing a record entry of 99 yachts flying the flags of 16 different nations. Held in late October, the 606-nautical mile race,
Credit: Kurt Arrigo
For Competitive Racing & Pleasant Sailing
Rolex Middlesea Race described by yachting celebrity Ted Turner as “the most beautiful race course in the world”, covers one of the most exciting courses in the world. Starting and finishing in Malta, the route includes the deep azure waters of Sicily and the Strait of Messina with its tidal currents, rounding some 13 islands on course including those of Pantelleria and Lampedusa, and even features Stromboli’s active volcano as a course mark. Indeed, it is a daring test to skippers, crews and boats, too, a race rightly acclaimed as one of the world’s classic ocean races. The Rolex Middle Sea Race forms part of the exclusive Rolex & Yachting prestigious programme, which includes events such as the Rolex Fastnet Race, the Rolex Sydney Hobart Race, the Maxi Yacht Rolex Cup and the Rolex Swan Cup. The Rolex Middle Sea Race 606-nm course record is 47 hours, 55 minutes and 3 seconds. It was established in 2007 by Rambler (USA), the 90-foot Reichel-Pugh designed maxi yacht owned by George David. Here, one cannot fail to highlight the noteworthy improvement in boats performance and technology when looking back at the first two recorded course record times; 1968 – 146 hours 9 minutes and 45 seconds by Stormvogel (Holland) owner/ skipper Cornelious Bruynzeel (aka C.B); 1976 – 86 hours 46 minutes and 33 seconds by War Baby (Bermuda) owner/skipper Warren Brown. In the 18th century a famous French admiral, Pierre André de Suffren de Saint-Tropez, spent his early career in Malta and while here received the title of ‘Bailli de Suffren’ from the Knights of St John. De Suffren was known by his sailors and his enemies – particularly the British – as ‘Admiral Satan’. To date, seven ships of the French Navy have borne the name of Suffren in his honour while his statue still dominates the quayside in Saint-Tropez. Furthermore, this historic personality is revitalised through the staging of a particular yacht race known as the Camper & Nicholsons Trophée Bailli de Suffren, first held in 2001, meant to celebrate historic and modern links between Malta and Saint Tropez. The ‘Bailli’, held at the end of June, is known not only for the beauty of the very special yachts taking part but also for the exotic
Trophee Bailli de Suffren ports marking the course. It is also the longest offshore race for Vintage and Classic yachts with CIM ratings of over 11 metres. The 592-nautical miles Camper & Nicholsons Trophée Bailli de Suffren is run over three legs: Leg 1: Saint-Tropez to Porto Rotondo, Sardinia (193nm); Leg 2: Porto Rotondo, Sardinia to Trapani, Sicily (230nm); Leg 3: Trapani, Sicily to Grand Harbour, Malta (169nm). Coordinated by the Marenostrum Racing Club of Saint-Tropez, the organising authority for the ‘Bailli’ is made up of yacht clubs in the host ports: namely the Société Nautique de Saint-Tropez, the Yacht Club Porto Rotondo and the Royal Malta Yacht Club. The overall prize is the Sword of Honour of ‘Admiral Satan’. In competitive racing Malta also hosts a particular sailing event where the protagonists are youngsters under the age of 16, sailors of the Optimist Dinghy, a one-design single-handed sailing craft, the largest junior class in the world and a recognised ISAF International Class. Launched in 2000, the Euromed Malta Championship today enjoys a record entry of 145 participants from ten countries recorded in 2013. Talking of records, the youngest ever overall winner is 11-year-old Nikita Ushkov (Russia), who won the honours in the 10th edition in 2009. Yet, the longest distance travelled to reach Malta for the Euromed - 3,999 miles - was done by seven sailors from India in 2013. A significant factor embodied in this event is that the foreign young sailing enthusiasts, in most cases accompanied by other
Euromed Young Sailors Challenge family members, fly to Malta to participate in a pleasant and challenging event while at the same time spend part of their Christmas holidays in Malta. Undoubtedly, the weather is possibly the most appealing factor which attracts young northern European sailors, and their families, to the event. “Last weekend we held our training in five degrees temperature and in gusting 20-30 knots winds,” recounts Danish Stig Blocher, who was at Euromed accompanying his 11-year-old son. “In this
regard, Malta is a paradise.” The same sentiments are shared by Sergey Semenov, who guided the Russian team to three overall victories in the past four editions. “We love coming to Malta for many reasons, but most of all for the excellent weather which makes sailing during winter time such a big thrill.” The Euromed Malta Champion-ship, held over four days in December, is organised by the Malta Young Sailors Club with the cooperation of the Malta Sports Council. Indeed, Malta offers exciting and thrilling competitive racing…. and much more. Yacht Chartering in Malta has become an established part of the sailing scene. Charterers come to Malta because of its location in the Mediterranean Sea – a perfect base for exploring further afield in Pantelleria, Lampedusa, Sicily, Tunisia, or simply to sail the delightful waters surrounding the islands with its hidden coves, magnificent coastal scenery and perfect azure blue waters. Depending upon the individual requirements, yachts can be normally chartered either (1) Bareboat charter – no skipper provided by the company – at least one crew member has to be in possession of a valid Skipper/Yachtmaster license; or (2) Skippered charter – the yacht is provided with a professional skipper by the company (at an extra cost); or (3) Fully crewed – particularly on super yachts a full crew is provided – skipper/ cook/deckhand, etc. (extra cost). For clients preferring motor boats, they can be hired under similar conditions to yachts. There is no restriction on the length of charter – a day sail, long weekends or the whole summer – the choice is yours! Fly and sail packages are also available from all major European, north African and Middle Eastern countries. Many Yacht Charter operators offer tuition and give refresher courses under the watchful eye of fully qualified instructors. RYA sailing courses are also run in Malta where these provide certificates that are known and respected worldwide and accepted by maritime authorities, charter operators and insurance companies. Furthermore, sailing for pleasure gives the opportunity to snorkel or dive all day…. with year-round average water temperature of 27°C. Talking about yachting and sailing, one still has to refer to air connectivity to and from Malta, a service of great importance to all boat owners, captains, crew and guests envisaging visiting the Maltese Islands with a boating-related intention. People with busy and rigid schedules should know that in Malta they are well served with an efficient air connectivity service. Air Malta PLC, founded in 1973, is the national airline of Malta. It operates services to 36 destinations in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. The airline’s hub and base is at the Malta International Airport. Air Malta offers an extensive array of destinations beyond its own network through the operation of share agreements with reputable partner airlines to provide more connectivity and accessibility to the Maltese Islands. Other airlines operating to and from Malta at the time of writing - www.maltairport.com/ - were Air Baltic, Air Berlin, Air France, Alitalia, Austrian Airlines, BritishAirways, easyJet, Egyptair, Emirates, JatAirways, Jet 2 Holidays, jettime, Libyan Airlines, Lufthansa, Luxair, Monarch, nowegian.com, NIKI, Ryanair, Scandinavian Airlines, Thomas Cook, Thomson, Transavia.com, Tunisair Express, Vueling, and Wizz Air. Surely Malta offers so many appealing moments for competitive racing or for purely pleasant sailing to make it - Your Island in the Middle Sea.
www.visitmalta.com
Short, sharp, punchy races and dramatic action (below)have marked out the OC Sport-operated Extreme Sailing Series over the past eight years, although the selection and organistion of venues like Singapore (right) is not the work of a moment.
60 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Once you identify a city – and it’s a series that demands a certain set up – how do you find the right venue, an area within the city that can cope with stadium sailing?
Some venues, we go to. If it’s a venue we want to get to, we’ll approach them and identify that there is the possibility of being able to race there. Then we’ll try and find our way to the right people who can make a decision. Other venues come to us. At the moment we have approximately 20 conversations with venues for 2015, 16, 17, some of which are instigated by us and some vice versa. Identifying the right place within a city, the stadium element is really key. The optimum is being in a proper stadium environment with the city around you – Singapore for example, in Marina Bay, has the central business district literally 20 metres behind the marquee. The boats will have tower blocks as a backdrop. With the water, you’ve got to have the shore side facility for it as well – you need a big open space to put the race village in. Once you’ve identified that
physically the areas exist you’ve got to go through the permissions required – some harbours have one entity in control, others have four or five who have a stake in controlling the water. From a commercial perspective, how much difference is there between each Act? Are they more or less uniform?
Each one is slightly different. We’re in Cardiff and last year we had 120,000 over the four days. That is a product of hitting the bank holiday weekend, which is a natural period for the public to come out and it’s also tied in with the Cardiff Harbour Festival – deliberately so from both our side and Cardiff council and the Welsh government. In Muscat, we know the number of spectators will be a lot lower because it’s difficult to get spectators to an event, let alone a sailing event. They all vary and it’s a balance between delivering all those five concepts but ultimately every venue will have a compromise on one or more of those. I don’t think a venue exists that would
score five out of five on all five criteria, so it’s making sure we get the right balance across those five concepts. How important an event is Cardiff, the UK event – a major market?
UK is fundamental for the series as it exists at the moment. We’re a UK-born company, with our heart on the Isle of Wight. It’s a big market for us. We’re in negotiations at the moment – this is the last of a three year deal – and we’re well down the line of renegotiating for another three or four years. Cardiff Bay: if we go back to those five criteria, it’s a stadium, the boats can race right up to the harbour world, there’s natural footfall of the public, you’re not trying to change people’s behaviour to come down here and it has commercial viability. It’s important for us and it’s important for all our stakeholders. The weather? The gusts make it exciting. Cardiff ticks all the boxes we need. People say it’s not London but it offers so much: it’s within striking distance of all the transport hubs, it’s a really easy venue to get to.
EXTREME SAILING SERIES
We have eight this year and the intention is to have eight next year. The limitation on it is the shipping schedules. Is it possible to add a ninth one? It would be, but ultimately we are a global tour and are on three continents so we’ve already got some quite big shipping legs in there. It would have to be a carefully selected venue that doesn’t add a huge shipping leg in. In terms of how tightly packed the year is, with Sydney being the last Act of 2014 and Singapore being the first Act of 2015, the gap between those two is shorter than the longest gap within the 2014 circuit. There isn’t really a down period where you could squeeze another in. It’s possible but it would ultimately need extra financial resource to fund another venue and also with the logistics. Adding venues isn’t a drive for us in terms of growing the event. In terms of boat numbers, the more boats you have the bigger the racing area has to be and we are the only event that does it, to the extent that we do it, in terms of putting these boats in ridiculously small patches of water. That makes it challenging for the sailors and we’re not going to compromise that stadium concept. For us, the optimum number of boats would be eight full series and then a ninth, which is a single entry at every venue. That single entry is the one that can grab the public to come and support their local boat and also grabs the local, regional and national media to activate the event. We have 11 boats in Cardiff and it was a conscious decision for us to go over the optimum this year. The intention is to have eight or nine boats on the start line for next year. Growing the event doesn’t mean growing boats. For us now, it’s about getting fan engagement, increasing our fanbase and increasing the media exposure of the event. We want to develop the event to bring the public down, whether that’s through music events or whether GAC Pindar bring their Team Raleigh
EVENTS / 2
How big can the series get in terms of the number of Acts?
Cycling pro team and do an activation with them. Growing it is growing the event around what is fundamentally the sporting credibility of the event and giving people information so they can follow the racing. What is it that you think that has drawn the fleet that you’ve got?
They’re not the fastest boats in the world anymore – you’ve got the America’s Cup, the AC45s – but what makes the sailing a lot more challenging is the confines of the stadium. It’s a different mindset. It’s short, sharp racing – 12 to 15 minutes long each race, typically around eight races a day. It’s quick decisions, the strategy has to be worked on incredibly quickly, the close quarter manoeuvring. It’s constantly on-the-go. It’s the speed at which those decisions have to be made which attracts the sailors. If you have a wide open racecourse on a race that lasts an hour, all of a sudden it’s not so challenging. There’s a lot of focus at the moment on foiling, obviously from the America’s Cup and it’s something that we’re always mindful of – what would be the next evolution? But for us at the moment the boats are 100 per cent the right machines for this commercial circuit and the environment that we put them in. At some point in the future there will be a natural evolution to another class of boat, but that’s a longer term, two, three, four year, mindset.
Through the growth of the series, from an event management point of view, what are some of the big lessons that you’ve learnt, the biggest developments?
I think we’re in the third phase of the life of the Extreme Sailing Series. Phase one was the birth of it back in 2007, stage two was going global, stage three was when we got Land Rover as our first main series partner. In terms of the continual evolution of it, we’re going to continue to develop the guest experience. It’s fundamental, it’s a commercial circuit, we’ve got to make sure we’re always delivering at a level that all of our partners – they’re in the world of Formula One, tennis, premium level properties. They’re telling us what they want to see and we’re talking to them about how to improve the guest experience. They let us know what is happening with some of their other properties. You’ve got to try and achieve against all the objectives of all the different stakeholders. Ultimately, it isn’t something we can do by ourselves so they family of partners that we’ve got now have very much a joint effort to grow the series and develop it. SAP can bring elements to the table, Land Rover can bring others, we bring some, GAC Pindar. It’s pooling the thought process and getting a united approach to ensure that we’re going in the right direction – and keeping our eyes open as to what’s happening in the wider world of sailing and sponsorship as well.
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 61
ALPARI WORLD MATCH RACING TOUR THE BRIEFING The Alpari World Match Racing Tour (right) comprised seven events in 2014, with executive director James Pleasance (below) looking to expand that number for 2015.
Officially sanctioned by ISAF, the Alpari World Match Racing Tour is the annual world championship of match racing. The tour operates a franchise system with a series of independently-organised regattas collected under the AWMRT umbrella. With over 200 commercial partners across the Tour, such a business model offers challenges as well as opportunities for the tour, its teams and its events. James Pleasance, executive director of the tour, is plotting expansion for 2015, taking his cue from the wider world of sport.
Since 2000, the World Match Racing Tour has drawn together the top match racing events in the world to create one of sailing’s most sought after world championship titles. Now known as the Alpari World Match Racing Tour (AWMRT), in deference to the global forex broker which became title sponsor in February 2012, the circuit is a well-established and growing part of the complex world of professional sailing, not least because it is officially sanctioned by sailing’s world governing body, ISAF. There are eight tour cards awarded each year to compete on the Tour, with skippers selected largely from their ISAF match racing world ranking. Each of
64 l BLACK BOOK 2014
the events on the annual schedule – there were seven in 2014 – has 12 team slots, with the remaining four positions assigned by the local event promoter, a system which allows for local qualifier and wildcard entries to race and reflects the most important element of the AWMRT business model. “We run the Tour principally as a franchise model,” explains James Pleasance who, since 2012, has been executive director of the tour. “Each of the Tour events are managed independently and we bring them all together under a world championship brand, whereby points are awarded from each event to the annual World Championship ranking, the highest scoring team being crowned the ISAF World Match Racing Champion at the end of the season.” The 2014 season ran from June to the end of November, beginning at Langenargen in Germany and due to conclude with November’s Monsoon Cup in Malaysia, supported by the Malaysian Ministry of Youth and Sports. In between, the tour has stopped at the Stena Match Race in the Swedish town of Marstrand, an event considered one of the jewels in the crown, Chicago and Bermuda. There were two new events, the Sopot Match Cup in Poland and the Dutch Match Cup in Lelystad, Holland. “We’re still a growing tour but in the last year or so our number of events has varied and that’s mainly
because of our business model,” Pleasance explains. “However, we are growing the Tour with new events and that is building our audience at the same time. Sopot was tremendously successful as a new event this year and introduced a whole new audience to the tour.” “There are new markets we would still add to the Tour,” Pleasance continues, “for example, the west coast of the USA, South America and the Middle East – and a return to Australian or New Zealand. That’s something we’re working on. In the past we’ve talked about 15 or 20 events, which I think we need to be
EVENTS / 2 realistic about. We’re at seven now and our goal is to be around the ten event mark, which would also be manageable around the international sailing calendar.” Not having 100 per cent control of events – the popular Korea regatta was not part of the 2014 season for governmental and funding reasons – poses as many opportunities as challenges, according to Pleasance. “The Tour represnets the world championship and it is important to maintain a consistency across all the tour events, both shoreside and on the water, and also from a visual standpoint. As much as we support
the events in every where we can, we also rely on them to maintain their own standards including raising their own sponsorship funds, particularly to fund the prize money awarded to teams at each event.” The AWMRT is currently the only global sailing series which offers prize money to teams, something which Pleasance acknowledges as “unique” in professional sailing, and to the tour. In 2014, the AWMRT total prize purse across events was US$1.5 million, including a US$500,000 Tour bonus split between the top eight tour card skippers - the world champion received US$100,000.
“Teams compete on the Tour to win the world championship, but they are also professional sailors and need to earn a living. They are also investing in themselves - the better they do, the more they earn. So there is risk but also reward, and that is why we put so much emphasis on raising the prize money across the Tour.” The knock-on effect of the prize money model to teams is that they can be limited in the amount of team branding they have at events, such as having fully branded team boats and sails. But this also has its advantages, as Pleasance explains: “The difference on the Tour is that the boats are provided
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 65
by the events and sponsored by event sponsors in order for the event to raise the funding to pay the prize money. The advantage to teams is they don’t have to fund the supply, maintenance or transport of the boats thereby reducing the cost of competing on the Tour considerably.” The model works, at least based on the fleet assembled for the 2014 AWMRT. The eight tour card holders include the likes of the Ian Williamsskippered GAC Pindar team, Bjorn Hansen’s Hansen Sailing Team, Francesco Bruni of Luna Rossa and Keith Swinton’s Team Alpari FX, the outfit sponsored by the series title sponsor. As the umbrella brand, Pleasance and the AWMRT team provide all events and teams with marketing materials and post-event sponsorship evaluation measurements,
66 l BLACK BOOK 2014
produced by Repucom. “It’s important that we support them in terms of helping to find sponsors,” Pleasance says, “because the more teams that are sponsored, the more sponsors come to events through hospitality, the more sponsors that activate partnerships through PR, media and advertising channels – the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. You’ve got the tour with its marketing arm and our own media channels; you’ve then got seven to ten events, all with their own media channels and different marketing budgets; you’ve then got all of the teams and even within the teams, the individuals who all have their own Facebook and Twitter pages.” Combined, Pleasance argues, a greater audience can be attracted and engaged, a key component of growing the property.
AWMRT licenses the rights to run the world championship of match racing from ISAF, a long-term arrangement. Unlike most ISAFsanctioned championships, however, the champion is crowned on the tour, across a full season of events, rather than during a single regatta. “It certainly does make it one of the toughest world championships to win,” says Pleasance. Through the ISAF relationship, AMWRT also has a mandate to help grow the sport of sailing and, in particular, the match racing part of it. As Pleasance explains, the organisation believes it may have hit upon a way to do that by adopting a model similar to that employed by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) in tennis. “One of our key objectives is to also help grow the sport of sailing at
a participant level, something that is often missed by major commercial sailing events. We’ve drawn a number of parallels with the way the ATP run their own tour,” Pleasance says. “They have Grand Slam events at the top, then ATP 1000, 500 and 250 tournaments – various levels, but all part of the ATP Tour itself. We’ve looked at trying to adopt a similar model in match racing because match racing is a much greater sport than just the seven events on the AWMRT. “There are a host of events around the world, which are currently graded by ISAF. We’ve identified around 20 of the lower graded match racing events to include them in the Alpari World Match Racing Tour from 2015, and which would give those events points into the annual tour championship. This will expand the Tour’s footprint
in new markets, giving opportunity for other events to work their way up to aspire to be world championship events but also opens the door for other sailors to compete and earn points on the AWMRT.” Pleasance believes such a system will create a “much more accessible pathway” for young match racers. “Although the America’s Cup has switched from monohulls to multihulls, it remains, certainly for the foreseeable future, a match racing event,” he says. “For an aspiring match racer competing at the grassroots level of match racing, we are now creating a better pathway for them to promote themselves from a local level to a national, international and world championship stage. And even to the America’s Cup.” Until the 32nd America’s Cup in Valencia, staged in 2007, the AWMRT was routinely described as the pathway to sailing’s most prestigious event, a place to gain match racing experience or, for the established Cup sailors, an opportunity to keep their hand in during the long periods between Cups. While the Cup remains a match race, though, the switch to multihulls is likely to have implications for the AWMRT, which remains, for the moment at least, a monohull championship. “The transition of the America’s Cup to foiling multihulls has certainly caused a stir in professional sailing in the
last 12 months. Teams are having to adapt to a whole new type of sailing, essentially learning to match race in fast multihulls. As a championship match racing tour, we are looking at ways to support this transition by creating some - we won’t change the whole tour multihull tour events in the future.” That will necessitate the construction of a new fleet of boats, a costly exercise but one for which AWMRT “has a business model which will apply”. Talks are ongoing on that front. “As a pathway for match racing sailors to become the next America’s Cup champion, it goes without saying the tour should really look at incorporating some kind of multihull events,” Pleasance adds. “We’re talking to try and make that a reality for 2015.” Amongst his priorities for the next 12 months, Pleasance is keen to “maintain the consistency and quality of events for the teams and continue to grow the tour’s fanbase and media exposure to attract new events and partners. A partnership with IMG, which saw the sports marketing giant become a minor shareholder in the business, has already proved fruitful in that regard by growing the television footprint of the tour to one of the biggest in the sport. “Above all, we want to maintain the Alpari World Match Racing Tour as one of most sought-after world championships to compete in.”
Alpari World Match Racing Tour events (left) are independently-run and offer prizemoney to the world’s top match-racers, who rely largely on media coverage (below) to garner exposure for sponsors.
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 67
EVENTS / 2
ALPARI WORLD MATCH RACING TOUR
Crossing continents, pushing boundaries & connecting with a global audience â&#x20AC;&#x201C; OC Sport still striving to make a difference
A key inďŹ&#x201A;uencer of change in sailing over the past decade has been the move to make it more accessible to the public and a genuine spectator sport. That is one of the biggest challenges we face across all spectrums of the sport, whether that is bringing inshore racing closer to the shore, or communicating to the public about an offshore race that takes place thousands of miles from land, and genuinely making people care about the guys on board. As this is published, we will be near the end of our eighth Extreme Sailing Seriesâ&#x201E;˘ season, although it is probably misleading to say season, as the cycle never really ends. For the teams, commercial partners and the team at OC Sport, we operate 12 months a year running a global tour that in 2014 will ďŹ nish in Sydney, Australia in December, and start again just seven weeks later in Singapore with the ďŹ rst event of 2015. The Series has pioneered a now often coined phrase â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Stadium Racing â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that brought an entirely new perspective to the world of professional sailing when we launched the Series back in 2007. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a format that works for spectators, VIPs, media and for commercial guests, and our core values remain unchanged â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Stadium Racing in iconic venues around the world in venues and markets which attract commercial sponsorship in a sustainable way.
" 2 3 & !
Mark Turner is the Founder and Executive Chairman of OC Sport, a global sports marketing and events company specialising in professional sailing and outdoor events. In July it was announced that TĂŠlĂŠgramme Group, a major French media, sports and !
Extreme Sailing Seriesâ&#x201E;˘ that have literally changed the face of inshore sailing forever; from breaking boundaries with the creation " # $ % & ' & ( ) * + ' ) --/ & 0 + (1
Eight years on, I often get asked: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nextâ&#x20AC;?? One thing we are looking to do in our host cities is to give our events a bigger entertainment wrapper, to improve public engagement and take it to another level with the help of consumer brand partners such as Land Rover, one of our current Series Main Partners. The success of this Series is based on solid economics, supporting sponsorship based business plans. There are many new markets and audiences to take the sport to â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and Extreme Sailing Series is probably the best tool weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve ever had to do that. Developments at the performance level of the sport â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and particularly the advent
of foiling â&#x20AC;&#x201C; have been hugely exciting, and of course we follow it with interest. That said, foiling by its very nature could force us to drop our Stadium format for more open water, which is in opposition to our USP. At some point â&#x20AC;&#x201C; when the time is right for partners and for the sailors â&#x20AC;&#x201C; we will evolve or change the boat, and maybe include the foiling aspect as an option for when the Stadium and conditions permit. But considering 95% of our global audience is a non-sailing one, visually the acceleration and heeling of a conventional catamaran (rather than ďŹ&#x201A;at sailing on foils) remain just as appealing in terms of getting eyeballs to follow the action on
By the time Ellen set her new world record in February 2005 for sailing solo non-stop around the world, we had connected with hundreds of thousands of people around the world. These people had no interest in sailing but were intrigued by the young girl â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;taking on the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. It had gone from being a sailing story to a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;humanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; story and we aim to do
Credit: Lloyd images
" 2 ' 5 + 6 $78 78
When the 2013 edition of the Black Book was published, I said one of our objectives would be to manage a campaign for the 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race. Twelve months on weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve more than ticked that box managing the supercomplex but fascinating Dongfeng Race Team. The team is backed by Dongfeng Commercial Vehicles, Aeolus Tyres and the City of Shiyan â&#x20AC;&#x201C; all new to the world of sports sponsorship, and certainly to sailing; and we have spent months recruiting and training Chinese sailors capable of racing in this very extreme offshore race. For most, it is difďŹ cult to imagine what these sailors will go through and thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s part of our mission â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to bring out the human element, to make people care, and to engage a Chinese audience in the race through the story of Dongfeng Race Team.
" 2 9 # ( % ' " 9
the water, so whilst the current trend is to foil everywhere, we need to make sure it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t knock us off track from a proven formula. Over the last 18 years, OC Sport has been involved in almost every element of the diverse sailing spectrum, although our roots were ďŹ rmly planted in the offshore world in 1997, when it all began, primarily to manage Ellen MacArthurâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s solo offshore campaigns. People took notice of Ellenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s solo non-stop VendĂŠe Globe and subsequent round the world record in 2005, as success for Brits in the offshore arena was practically unheard of. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re hoping British success will come more frequently in the future with the support of the Artemis Offshore Academy. Launched in 2010 it is primarily a solo performance and training academy, designed to nurture future talent. To get results in a very competitive discipline is not a quick ďŹ x and it will be a long journey for our Squad members and Graduates but we are already seeing results. During the 2013 Class Figaro season, we achieved the best result yet when Jack Bouttell became the ďŹ rst Brit to win the Rookie Division of the Solitaire du Figaro â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a 2000 mile solo race, known as the unofďŹ cial world championships of solo offshore sailing. In 2014 the Academy had eight British sailors on the Solitaire start line, making up nearly 25% of the historically French dominated ďŹ&#x201A;eet. Success in the Solitaire du Figaro class is often the ďŹ rst part of the journey to a successful VendĂŠe Globe campaign. Ultimately, we hope to pave the way for a UK sailor to not only compete but to follow in the footsteps of Ellen MacArthur and become the ďŹ rst British sailor to win a future edition of the VendĂŠe Globe. And itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s no secret that we would love to manage a new VendĂŠe Globe campaign in the future.
the same with Dongfeng Race Team. 99.9% of the Chinese nation donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know what the sport of offshore sailing is, and there is a strong commitment to a long-term sporting mission that puts the future interests of Chinese sailing at the core of Dongfeng Race Team project. For this edition we have six Chinese guys in the ďŹ nal race squad, alongside the pro Western sailors led by Charles Caudrelier. In the 2017-18 edition, the aim is to have a campaign with the majority of the sailors onboard being Chinese and for the 2020-21 edition of the race, a 100% Chinese project with a Chinese skipper and a Chinese crew. This is not about who is the best today, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s about who will become the best in the future. There is a strong momentum to create a legacy for offshore sailing so that Chinese sailors can excel in this discipline, in the same way the Chinese Olympic sailors have done. Parallel to this is the aim of demonstrating the value of international sailing sponsorship platforms for Chinese companies as a way to help them go global, as well as western companies already more used to sports sponsorship, who have objectives in the Chinese market. The next few years promise to be an exciting time, for both the development of the sport in emerging markets, for sponsors who want a strong but targetable media return and to engage with a growing global audience. Whatever happens, OC Sport is looking forward to the next 18 years! Mark Turner, Founder and 4 $" 5
www.ocsport.com
Credit: Thierry Martinez
OCEAN MASTERS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP THE BRIEFING The Ocean Masters fleet sets sail in front of New York’s iconic skyline for the first New York-Barcelona race in June 2014.
Start-ups have been something of a theme across sport in 2014. The Champions Hockey League, a new European club ice hockey tournament, faced off for the first time in August. Formula E, a brave new electric dawn for motorsport, held its first race on the streets of Beijing in September. And in sailing, a new brand was born at the start of 2014 as Ocean Masters, a new world championship series, was launched by Open Sports Management (OSM), the agency created to commercialise and internationalise IMOCA ocean racing.
OSM was founded in 2013 by British entrepreneur and long-time sailing promoter Sir Keith Mills to oversee the commercialisation of the rights to the International Monohull Open Class Association (IMOCA), which he had acquired in October 2012. The former deputy chairman of London 2012,
70 l BLACK BOOK 2014
who owns the Hugo Boss-backed Alex Thomson Racing team, provided initial investment as he took over the commercial rights to existing IMOCA World Championships and laid out plans for new events, designed to attract a more diverse group of teams – for many years, the IMOCA class
has been dominated by French sailors, French teams and French sponsors. Fast forward two years and the IMOCA 60s are now competing in the rebranded Ocean Masters World Championship, which will crown a champion every two years. All of IMOCA’s existing races, including the
EVENTS / 2
OCEAN MASTERS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
Barcelona World Race, the Transat Jacques Vabre and the legendary singlehanded Vendée Globe, will be part of the championship, along with newly created events. The first new race, a double-handed transatlantic voyage between New York and Barcelona, took place in June and featured a fleet of five. It is a bold new era for a type of sailing which has never lacked stories, romance or a sense of adventure, but has not had a centralised, commercially focused global structure. “We identified the challenge, that we are a series of events and not a one-off – we’re not the fastest but we are the most extreme,” says Peter Bayer, who was hired by Mills as chief executive of OSM in March 2013. “What the skippers do and experience on these boats is far beyond imagination for most of us and the challenge now that we have a structure, a name, a brand is to get the images and the stories from the boats
on land, onto TV and digital channels and internet.” The amiable Bayer is making something of a speciality in taking on roles which involve developing a challenging new property and convincing a perhaps sceptical market of their merits – he arrived at OSM fresh from delivering the first winter Youth Olympic Games as chief executive of Innsbruck 2012. “It’s something that people didn’t know before – will it work, is it feasible?” he says. “And it means investing a lot of time and hard work to make things a success. “What appealed to me was creating something from scratch – although it did exist in a way, but to professionalise and internationalise it – and to really build a brand for a market in a very exciting environment, which sailing definitely is. And all that under the leadership of someone like Sir Keith Mills who is a real pace setter in the world of sport.”
A total newcomer to the sailing world, Bayer admits that it took him some time to fully understand the sport’s myriad structures, classes and cycles. If the America’s Cup can be likened to Formula One, he says, making a comparison to motorsport, then the Ocean Masters is the World Rally Championship. “There are lots of classes, lots of categories – that’s the ISAF structure – but there are five pinnacle events, including the Olympics, which are really at the top of the pyramid,” he says, referring to the Cup, the Volvo Ocean Race, the Extreme Sailing Series and the newly formed Ocean Masters World Championship. The creation of a new brand was an early priority. Bayer, who is one of five full-time staff members at OSM’s offices in Switzerland, points out that “if someone’s having a baby, the first question people ask is ‘what’s the name?’”. He adds: “We did push very hard
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 71
The team behind the spectacular Ocean Masters World Championship are seeking to internationalise a traditionally Frenchdominated class.
on developing a brand and we are super-happy with what we have – these people are mastering the ocean and we felt it was really important for people to understand that and the story behind the brand.” The second-most visible sign of progress was June’s New York to Barcelona race, which began at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. “This is definitely a product with global appeal and that’s what we tried to do with our new event,” Bayer reports, “and we also wanted to complete the calendar, complete the product because we felt we needed more than one or two events per year – we need a minimum of three per year. “It was a huge success because simply by arriving in New York we captured a new audience, we had new media coming to us, new people, and we hosted guests, racing up and down the Hudson River, a charity event, and
achieved great coverage and visibility. Our boats in front of the New York skyline was breathtaking.” The event was a particularly important showcase because Bayer and his team, plus several third-party agencies, are currently engaged in finding the global title sponsor which forms a critical part of the business model. As Bayer explains, an Ocean Masters feature in the Financial Times is currently more valuable to OSM than an article in any other newspaper, given the need to reach the corporate world. “New York-Barcelona was a very targeted event, for new audiences but also specific media,” he says. “We did a couple of surveys, we spoke to a couple of big global media companies and everybody’s convinced that what we have to offer has huge potential to reach a wider audience than just the sailing world.” With the brand in place and a new
event under its belt the Ocean Masters sponsor hunt is gathering pace. “The whole venture is based on a long-term business plan,” Bayer reveals. “That has been discussed in detail with Sir Keith and the IMOCA people who are also represented on the board of OSM. We do have an initial investment from Sir Keith. That helps us to keep going without immediately finding a naming rights partner, but obviously OSM was created as a business and has to be successful within a certain timeline.” Securing a global partner will allow for further expansion, with tentative plans already in place to launch an event in Asia. The global partner search began in France, naturally enough, and has since been extended to Europe and further afield. “We have tried to be very subtle with the approach,” Bayer says. “We did not want to go too early when things were not really ready. After the brand was established
Credit: B.Stichelbaut/Sea&Co
72 l BLACK BOOK 2014
think global, but what you should never do is forget where you came from. And at the same time we try to innovate.” Contractual provisions have been made with existing teams and race organisers about how a potential sponsor clash would be solved. The 2013/14 Ocean Masters World Champion will be crowned following the Barcelona World Race, a non-stop double-hander around the world, which begins on 31st December. The next two-year cycle will include the 2015 Transat Jacques Vabre, which follows the traditional coffee route between France and Brazil; the two new events, one in 2015 and one in 2016; and concludes with the eighth edition of the Vendée Globe, the legendary singlehanded, non-stop, round-the-world race at the end of 2016. Although it is now part of the Ocean Masters World Championship, the Vendée Globe is much like the Monaco Grand Prix in that it runs, to
To maximise offshore racing’s commercial appeal (left), Open Sports Management chief executive Peter Bayer (below) intends to tell the stories and highlight the adventure of life onboard.
EVENTS / 2
and the first new event was completed successfully, that’s when we opened the throttle. Now we are approaching companies globally. It’s very positive, we have a couple companies we are already in detailed discussions with about the opportunity. There are new enquiries coming in, so it is positive and we are very encouraged by the feedback.” Aside from series title rights, the global partner will be buying a catalogue of additional rights including sponsorship of new races such as the New York-Barcelona and other proposed new events – one of which is likely to be a race from the Caribbean to Europe at the end of 2015 and the other, in 2016, could be the Transat, an event formerly known as the OSTAR (Observer Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic) from the UK to the United States. “It’s being pitched as one package,” says Bayer, “but we do have other packages which are more category rights, like official timing, official car, official technology provider and official communications partner.” Striking a balance between making a fresh start, introducing new teams and events, and retaining the components which have made offshore sailing what it is will certainly be a challenge. Bayer says OSM is working “very closely” with existing event organisers and the team sponsors, such as Hugo Boss, Safran and Edmond de Rothschild. “We inform them at quite an early stage of the next planned step in our strategy and we try to build on these existing teams,” he adds. “You should
Credit: www.seaandco.net
Credit: Th.Martinez/Sea&Co
OCEAN MASTERS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP
a certain extent, to its own commercial beat. It is part of French sporting folklore, sitting alongside the likes of the Tour de France and Le Mans 24 Hours. “It is bigger,” Bayer points out, “than a sailing event. It is a brand, it is something that people who are not sailors know about.” He continues: “It is a seriously big event and, yes, it is a jewel. It has its own rules and we are very happy to have a great relationship with them.” Looking ahead, Bayer says there has been a recent shift at OSM and where the past 12 months have been operational, the next will see a focus on the commercial process. “It is identifying revenue streams, talking to companies, presenting the property to agencies, companies and trying to get the word out that this property is available,” he says. “And alongside that goes an effort in communications. We have the Route de Rhum coming up, one of the most traditional and biggest sailing events not only in France but worldwide. And right after that the Barcelona World Race, which is our second biggest event. “It’s a global event, racing around the world, with a strong fleet at the start and with a very strong partnership with the city of Barcelona, which we are very proud of and happy with. We are talking to the city about prolonging the agreement for the next three editions. That’s our focus: securing commercial partners, getting the word out, communicating the class and building long-term plans with existing partners who are on board already.”
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 73
RIO 2016 THE BRIEFING Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro (below and right) hosted the first 2016 Olympic Games test event in August, with 326 athletes taking part.
Rio de Janeiro’s troubled sailing venue hosted its first test event at the start of August, as the city marked two years until the 2016 summer Olympic Games. After a fraught few months, in which delays in venue construction were highlighted by increasingly concerned international sports federations and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) imposed a series of special measures to accelerate progress, the local organising committee said there was a sense of “mission accomplished” at the conclusion of the first of 45 test events planned in the lead-up to the Games.
326 athletes took part in the sailing test event in Guanabara Bay, where the quality of water has been the subject of concern from competitors and sailing’s world governing body, ISAF. “We have completed many of our goals in testing the competition areas, building our understanding of the local conditions and getting to know the national officials and the Rio 2016 team,” said Alastair Fox, ISAF’s head of competitions, as the test concluded. “The first test event comes to a close with a sense of mission accomplished,” added Rodrigo Garcia, Rio 2016’s sports director. “This has been a wonderful experience and a successful event, but most importantly we have learned a lot” The sailing venue is one of a number of issues Rio 2016 organisers are facing with less than two years until the Games begin. ISAF is far from alone as an international sports federation concerned about progress. Work is now underway at the venue cluster which
74 l BLACK BOOK 2014
has caused most concern to date, Deodoro, and on the athlete’s village. 55 per cent of venues are currently ready for the Games. “We have concluded the planning phase and are now entering the operational preparation phase, when the competition structures begin to take shape and we get closer to the population,” said Carlos Nuzman, the president of Rio 2016. Brazil’s Olympic Public Authority (APO), the body created to oversee the work in partnership with the federal government, Rio state government and Rio city government, said 71 per cent of the 52 projects directly linked to the organisation and staging of the Games now have budgets signed off and construction underway. Underlining the diminishing timelines, the overall budget for construction projects rose from R$5.6 billion in January 2014 to R$6.5 billion in August. Of that figure, some
R$4.2 billion is via private funding. “Public organisations are committed to the staging of a lean and efficient Olympics,” said General Fernando Azevedo e Silva, the president of APO. “We’re sure that the Games in Rio will be well organised.” A series of wider infrastructure works, some of which were temporarily halted during June’s Fifa World Cup, are also underway, including a new metro line extension. Nuzman, meanwhile, reported that Rio 2016 had “intensified contacts” with international federations, in order to calm fears about the readiness of venues. “We will keep them continuously updated on the progress, in a joint effort with the IOC,” Nuzman insisted. “The Games will leave a huge legacy for both Rio and Brazil, that is starting to take shape. No other host city will have had such a big transformation from the Games as Rio.”
EVENTS / 2
RIO 2016
PREPARING FOR THE GAMES: AUSTRALIAN SAILING TEAM PERFORMANCE DIRECTOR PETER CONDE “Preparation starts well before the previous Olympics. If you’re starting to prepare now, you’re way too late. In terms of athletes and coaches we’re quite lucky in that we have a very similar team, in terms of management support and coaching, as we did in 2012 – that’s a happy place to be. I think the key for us is that Rio represents significant additional challenges, as it would for most countries, in that it happens to be in South America. We’re always travelling to Europe and a European Olympics is relatively easy compared to an additional continent, with all of the implications for cost, the number of athletes required to compete and train there, at home and in Europe, for us. Australia, I guess with New Zealand in particular and to some extent the US, has some particular challenges to prepare for sailing at the Olympic level, because the logistical challenges of getting to and from Europe and the costs are extreme. “For us, the sights are very firmly set on the Olympic Games and there’s a very good reason for that
– I think most countries would share that – which is that funding from central sporting bodies and government is most highly reliant on Olympic success, although they look at a tick list along the way as markers of the potential of the next Games. We really have to align our own philosophy with the philosophy of the funding bodies. “It clearly is difficult in sailing compared to sports where athletes are on TV, on screens, on a very regular basis – that doesn’t really happen with sailing. We’ve got some fantastic role models and some good connections into an interesting segment of the demographic, that’s involved in yachting and boating and sailing. It’s really a matter of trying to leverage those, but it’s always difficult and I would say we are not as good as we think we can be in that area. We’re working pretty hard on that, to develop really solid relationships with our sponsors and we’ve got some terrific sponsors in Audi, Hamilton Island, Nautica and Zhik as our top partners, and a layer of really
valuable sponsors – some really good relationships. We’re working on making sure that we deliver value for them and they recognise that value. Many of those sponsors have been with us for a long time. “The water quality at Guanabara Bay is a major concern for all of the athletes and countries and I’m sure the Brazilians are concerned about it as well. Our approach to that is very simple and that will be to work through the Australian Olympic Committee and ISAF to make sure that it’s well understood and that we have the best outcome that’s possible. It is definitely a concern, I think everything else is probably pretty manageable. “First and foremost, it’s about performance for us, and performance at the highest level. We’d love to perform as well as we did in London and that’s going to be a big challenge for us, but that’s where we start off. Our commercial targets are around retaining and expanding the support that we have to achieve those sporting targets.”
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 75
M32 CUP THE BRIEFING M32 Cups (right and below) will be rolled out on a regional basis over the next few years, following the successful debut of a Scandinavian championship in 2014.
The M32 Cup was established in 2013 but really came to life in 2014, with a Scandinavian series taking in major cities such as Gothenburg, Malmo, Copenhagen and Stockholm. That, though, is not even the half of it. They are the first of up to 30 costeffective regional series which will be rolled out around the world over the next few years, as organisers seize on what they call a “surge” of interest in the M32 catamaran to provide an affordable stepping stone from the Olympic classes to the America’s Cup.
The M32 boat, 32 feet in length, is sailed by a crew of three or four. The ‘M’ stands for Marstrom, the manufacturer of a host of racing boats since the early 1980s. The M32 Cup itself is owned by Aston Harald Group, a company owned by Håkan Svensson, who previously ran the Swedish-based Berg Propulsion company. Svensson is not only a sailing enthusiast but a major investor in the sport. He has run Volvo Ocean Race projects and, for a decade, has helped Swedish sailor Freddy Loof, a London 2012 gold medallist, fund his Olympic campaigns. It was Loof who persuaded Svensson to try the M32 and as Martin Sohtell, the commercial director of M32 Sailing Challenge says, “he tried it and thought it had some potential – it’s fun and would attract the younger sailors.” A trial year, with five boats, followed in 2013, a year which saw catamarans come to the fore in the new-look America’s Cup. In early 2014, Aston Harald acquired the M32 catamaran project – including construction and name rights – from Marstrom Composite earlier this year.
The revenue possibilities around the M32 Cup are “multiple”, Sohtell says, but first and foremost it is the construction of the M32s which provides the bulk of the finances. “We’re a boat building company,” Sohtell says, “and the Cups, for us, are a way to go to market. We realise that the boat is so refined – it’s very easy to learn but very difficult to become really good at – so it needs a market, a structure.” The growth of the M32 Cup, which exists for the moment at least primarily as a way of promoting the M32 catamarans, will be based on a regional model in order for it to “become a stepping stone for sailors from pretty much anywhere”. While Scandinavia is the first regional series, Sohtell says there will be a North American, European and Iberian series, with a UK championship already confirmed. “For the best sailors to be interested in sailing it you need to have something that can carry all the ingredients so you can attract sponsors, which means that every Cup has four key elements: exposure, hospitality, great activation
and a good PR and media base. Elsewhere, it would possibly cost €1 million minimum to run a campaign for a year; here you can do it with possibly €150,000 and you can run a regional campaign with sponsors where you could get all the bits and bobs they need – be it exposure, activation or a place to meet with their clients.” The aim is for a number of regional series - a UK championship will launch in 2015 - to act as a stepping stone for sailors, all at an affordable price. Sohtell believes the regional set-up will yield commercial benefits, with potential entrants able to approach regional companies or regional divisions of global companies rather than searching in a relatively small pool of major global firms, as required when a sailing property badges itself as international. “It actually opens up the commercial side of it all,” he says, adding that the same is true of the investment required by host venues. “The revenue driven to the event itself is a cost - we can do it for around UK£500,000. We’re talking a much more light-footed event but
EXPERT VIEWS: WHAT THE SAILORS SAY ABOUT THE M32 CUP Taylor Canfield, Skipper, USONE Sailing, match racing world champ
“The M32 gives professional sailing a new platform for great racing, as well as exposure and activation of sponsorship. With the expansion the series is standing in front of we’re excited to be part of the line up. It’s a new era for sailing and aspiring sailing teams.”
76 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Ken Read, multiple Volvo Ocean Race skipper and America’s Cup sailor; president, North Sail Group
Fredrik Loof, Olympic gold medallist, Star world champion and tactician for Artemis Racing
“If I want to keep sailing at a high level in the new racing climate, I need to replicate the high-speed experience, and after playing around on a M32 catamaran after the Puma experience I found my next boat.”
“This is the most exciting boat ever! It provides the best racing platform and I see the M32 Cup as the perfect stepping stone from the Olympic classes to the America’s Cup.”
M32 CUP
EVENTS / 2
one which caters to all the needs that the big ones have as well.” While, on a global level, the company’s focus remains building and selling boats, much time is currently being spent on ensuring that the M32 Cups are set-up and administered well. “It’s sponsorship, it is local hosts and it’s also about activation,” Sohtell says, “which could be hospitality or activation on-site.” The likes of Land Rover, Mercure hotels and Sail Racing committed to the Scandinavian series as sponsors in 2014. Media coverage is already being ramped up: videos are produced at each Cup event, while live coverage will shortly be rolled out. “Everything has gone extremely quickly, with the set-up only six months ago,” Sohtell admits. “And we’re already going into four new markets. We’re interested in discussing with all types of companies, be it on a global level or on a regional level where a specific market is a target. We’re already in discussions with some really big multi-country brands.” Sohtell agrees that the America’s Cup has helped the M32 Cup hit the water in style, but insists that “we would hopefully have come to the place we’re at now” had the Cup not become a catamaran event. The M32 Cup, however, has been conceived as a costeffective, accessible complement to other properties, rather than a rival. “I think many of the other organisations see us as a stepping stone towards their event and suddenly we’re something that adds to them. The America’s Cup has so very few sailors connected to it now, so you have a big sailing community waiting to get onboard – and this is a great way of doing it. If you’re into sailing you can get one of these teams together by yourself, get onboard one of these regional series and from there on you can start to move upwards.” With around five more series set to start in 2015 and plans for six more a year later, there is little doubt that, as Sohtell puts it, it is “full speed ahead” for the M32 catamaran and its associated Cups.
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 77
52 SUPER SERIES THE BRIEFING Formerly the Audi Med Cup, the close racing offered by the 52 Super Series (right) has seen it quickly establish itself on the annual sailing calendar.
The 52 Super Series has existed since 2012 when a group of three TP52 class owners came together to create a new series out of what was once the Audi Med Cup. The 2014 calendar was comprised of four events, May’s Rolex Capri Sailing Week, June’s Audi TP52 World Championship in Porto Cervo, the Copa del Rey Mapfre in Palma in August and the Zenith Royal Cup Marina Ibiza in September. They were supplemented by two early season events in the USA, which came under the US 52 Super Series umbrella, at Key West and Miami. There were 14 boats competing in the series this year, but Agustín Zulueta, the former America’s Cup team manager who was appointed chief executive in May 2013, has his sights set on ensuring the longer term health of the series. Zulueta underlined his credentials by securing a title sponsorship deal with Barclays for 2014.
Agustín, tell us about the 52 Super Series and its development over the last few years?
At the beginning this circuit was named the Audi Med Cup and when Audi ended its sponsorship, three of the owners – Niklas Zennström, Alberto Roemmers and Doug Devous, from the Ran, Azzurra and Quantum Boats – decided to take care of the circuit. They created a company, Super Series Eventos Desportivos. This is the company that runs the circuit. The company is a little bit different from than Audi Med Cup – the biggest goal is to create a very professional and enjoyable sailing platform, to discover two or three new places per year and, two years ago, at the beginning of the idea they were trying to engage some American boats. That’s why the series went to the United States. Next year, 2015, is going to be just a European circuit, with five events. In 2016, they are considering to go back to the United States for one or two events. So the focus is Europe?
The company is a European company, the circuit is a European circuit and the fleet is always here. There are, I would say, between four and six TP52s in the United States on the east coast, which is why we thought it was very good to connect both fleets and do something
78 l BLACK BOOK 2014
together. On top of that, next year we will have three or four American boats in our fleet in Europe. To go back to the United States in 2016 could be also like a way of saying thanks to the American teams. There were four events on the 2014 calendar, what’s the series’ hosting model?
We don’t have a specific model. We have three different types of venue, or events. The first is the one where we are invited, as we were this year for the Rolex Capri Sailing Week or the Copa Del Rey in Palma. At those events, we are invited as one of the best fleets. Then we have another kind of event, which could be Porto Cervo, which is one of the yacht clubs represented in the fleet, by the boat Aquila, the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda. We organise together with them a regatta – this year it was the world championships. Then we had another kind of regatta, which we organise by ourselves. An example of this is Ibiza, which will be the last event of 2014, and Miami. We are in charge of everything, race management, all the set up of the bases, the village, everything. These are the three types of events we have. What do you take into account when you select venues?
Our first parameter is obviously the sailing conditions. The second is the logistics and infrastructure. The third parameter is obviously the scenery, we are looking for beautiful places to sail – beautiful and exclusive places. The fourth one is the local support and obviously the cost of the regatta. Tell us about some of the key teams, key owners - what’s the turnover of teams year-to-year?
For sure you have the three owners of the circuit, who are Niklas Zennström with Ran, Alberto Roemmers and Doug Devous, with Quantum. Those are fixed boats on the fleet. Then in Europe, you have Pheonix, the new Brazilian boat owned by Eduardo de Souza Ramos. Then you have Provezza,
EVENTS / 2 a Turkish boat, and Paprec Recyclage and Gladiator, which is owned by Tony Langley from England. I would say these seven boats are the fixed boats of the fleet. When we go to the United States, we can count Interlodge, Sled, Vesper and Hooligan – those four. There are a couple more boats in Europe, two Italian boats, B2 and Hurakan. Next year we will have two or three new owners, new constructions, and at the end I would say there would be more than eight new boats. What’s the average budget for the team?
The construction of the boat represents €1.5 million and I would say to do a very good campaign you have to put in another €1 million.
How did the Barclays title sponsorship deal come about?
This is something I built up personally. I visited one of the branches we have here in San Sebastian – I have been a Barclays client since about 1987 – and I asked them how to contact with the marketing department, because I thought I had a very good tool for them as an image for their European Retail Business Banking. That was how I contacted them. I then went to London, worked with Barclays Bank marketing department and they considered us and joined us, and that’s it – that’s the story of the agreement! That’s an incredible story – you just walked into your local branch and asked?
Yes, yes.
What does the sponsorship do for the series, beyond the financial element?
For us the quantity of the money was not as important as the image. We were looking for a prestigious image and a prestigious name. To have the same sponsor as the Premier League is one of the best things to have happened to the series. To sign a contract with Barclays was a very important milestone on the way to creating one of the best monohull sailing circuits of the world. How long is the contract for?
It’s just for this year but we have already agreed all the terms and conditions for the next year. Basically, they will decide at the end of the year the renewal of the contract.
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 79
Series organisers are aiming for a fleet of at least 10 TP52 boats in 2015.
What’s your media and broadcast strategy?
What would your message be to potential sponsors?
Our strategy is, again, to create the best monohull sailing circuit in the world. We would like to position our fleet just after the two most important events, the America’s Cup and the Volvo Ocean Race. You have to also consider that for our owners the media return is not so important, so now we are trying to change a little bit our strategy for the future now we have some brands involved in the project – not only Barclays, but Zenith, the Swiss watch company. We are trying to figure out how to connect and how to improve the return. We have a very good broadcast team and we are trying to improve the awareness of the circuit through the website, so you can follow the races live with the virtual eye and also all the highlights every day with the video we produce.
I would say an association with the 52 Super Series is a very good association. The key identities of our product are internationality, exclusivity and competition. Of course, we have places for more sponsors. Our sponsorship structure is based on one title sponsor and three co-sponsors, and we only have a title sponsor and one cosponsor. We are still looking for a car company or an insurance company.
Are you still on the lookout for additional commercial partners?
80 l BLACK BOOK 2014
What’s your sense in terms of the health of the sailing industry in general, from a commercial perspective?
I would say there is a big gap between the America’s Cup, the Volvo Ocean Race and the RC44s. I would say our fleet is the only one that supports the sailing industry in that we allow teams to choose their own designer, their builder. We are not a one-design class. The other question is about economics.
It’s a bit different, the world economy and the one in Spain. We were involved in the 2007 America’s Cup with a very good team and a big budget and I think in 2007 and 2009 there were five or six Spanish TP52s in the fleet. Now, it’s completely impossible to think of someone in Spain spending €1.5 million or €2 million on a project like this. You never know in the future. I would say our fleet has very good positioning. If you look at the others and the number of boats we have, we will have between 12 and 14 boats next year so the TP52 Super Series will be one of the largest fleets and one of the places to be. What are your commercial targets for 2015?
When I started working with the 52 Super Series a year ago the first thing I did was to design and approve a strategic plan for the next three years. What I wrote one year ago about 2015 was to have some sponsors, to try to cover at least 50 per cent of the cost of the circuit and to have a minimum fleet of 10 boats. I would say we will exceed these targets. I’m really happy with that. Looking at the future, for me to have a good circuit and fleet, the most important thing is to have a good number of boats. Next year we will have a fleet built up based on eight or nine new constructions, which is great because it gives you an idea that those owners are investing money in new boats to be in the fleet at least more than two or three years. I would say our target is to increase the fleet as much as possible and to be around 13 or 14 boats in 2015.
EVENTS / 2
RC44 CHAMPIONSHIP TOUR
RC44 CHAMPIONSHIP TOUR THE BRIEFING The RC44 Championship Tour was launched in 2007 and is based around the idea of connecting the worlds of sailing and business, pairing amateur boat owners with established professional sailors. The RC44 yacht was co-designed and is named after America’s Cup legend Russell Coutts. The privately-owned monohulls are pitted against each other in multi-format match racing, with venues changing year by year – the 2015 calendar features events in Malta, Italy, Sweden, Portugal and the British Virgin Islands. Bertrand Favre, the RC44 class manager, explains more.
What’s the vision behind the RC44 Championship Tour?
The original idea was a Russell Coutts idea, to develop a one-design that could move easily around the world, so we could host events pretty much anywhere. This was the original plan. From that, we started with four teams in year one and now, seven years later, we are around 12 to 14 teams, from event to event. Where we are quite unique in the sailing industry at the moment is we have a mixture of successful businessmen and the actual top of professional sailing together.
That was the original intention and we are there at the moment. Who are some of the key personalities, the key sailors in the series?
We have around ten nationalities with, at the moment, a Russian component which is quite significant – about three or four teams. The owners come from different types of industry, we have some people involved in finance, banking, some are involved in commodity and energy trading, the building industry, pretty much
anything. In terms of top sailors, you pretty much have all the skippers that were involved in the America’s Cup before it switched to the flying mode! How have those Russian connections developed?
I think we will see the same most probably in China in the future. These people need to do some fun stuff and enjoy themselves. If you look at the history of Russians in sailing, they started with Dragons – the Russians were very much involved in Dragons and then they realised that it’s a
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 81
€500,000 or €600,000 you will spend, unless you accommodate your crew in five star hotels or fly them business. As we move the fleet around, there isn’t much option to train – we restrict quite heavily the options of putting the boats on the water before events, because of practical and logistical reasons. The owners know how much they will spend, from the beginning, and there are no bad surprises. That, I think, is why we went through the [economic] crisis ok. We did increase a little bit our figures during the worst time because some of the people who were sailing big boats quit doing that to join us.
RC44 class manager Bertrand Favre (right) oversees a series which pairs amateur boat owners with professional sailors.
You’ve reduced the number of events you hold so that it works for the competitors – what’s the business model for the events?
beautiful boat but it’s pretty much old-fashioned racing and they wanted to do the next step. I think what we offer is a good package because the way the circuit is run it’s pretty much a ready-to-go package. We move the boat around, we get the event organised, the teams just need to show up at the venues and everything is in place already. It’s very easy to jump onto the circuit, you basically need to have a sailing team, a team manager and that’s it. If you compare that to other circuits of big boats, it’s very effective – cost-effective and time-effective, and that’s what these people want because they are all running a business and they don’t have much time. That’s why we came down from six to five events per year, because of the time. For them it’s already quite a big commitment, it’s five times five days; if you take that out of your business hours, plus family time, which is important as well – you need to find equilibrium there. If you go back to the Russians, they have some time to do that and they need to do some fun and interesting sailing. Plus in Russia for half of the year the water is really strong – it’s frozen! What are we talking about in terms of budgets?
82 l BLACK BOOK 2014
An average budget would be about €500,000, maybe €550,000. That includes everything except the owner costs, so sail, travel and accommodation for the crew, wages for the crew, transportation of the RC44 all around and entry fee to the class. As always, you have differences in budgets: the smallest will be around €450,000 and the biggest around €750,000. As the organiser, how hard do you have to work to ensure the balance is right between the number of teams, the costs and the overall central business model of the series, especially given the ups and downs of the global economy?
Our biggest strength is the cost-effective aspect of our programme. As the boat is one-design, the value of the boat is not decreasing too much over time. A new boat at the moment costs €425,000, and the second-hand market, if you want to enter with a boat that is six to seven years old, at the moment you would pay €250,000 or €270,000 to get it. That is quite an achievement because if you look at any other one-design class, after three years you would sell the boat for max 20 per cent of its original value. The second point is there’s not a lot of options to spend money on top of the
It’s a tricky process to find venues. For this year, for example, we started in the British Virgin Islands (BVIs); the BVIs was clearly a wish of the owners, they wanted to go there. We had a different model there, it was their decision and we had to organise the event and they split the cost. That’s one way to do it. The other way, more in Europe, is we look for venues that are willing to invest a bit of money in hosting an event and from there we decide where we go. The first item on the wishlist is the wind. We want to be sure that we go to venues when we have good wind conditions. We don’t want to bring our fleet to a place where we will sit around in the VIP area for a week waiting for the wind to show up. 2015 CALENDAR 25th-29th March: La Valletta, Malta 17th-21st June: Porto Cervo, Italy 12th-16th August: Stockholm, Sweden 30th September-4th October: Cascais, Portugal (Worlds) 25th – 29th November: Virgin Gorda, British Virgin Islands
RC44 CHAMPIONSHIP TOUR Some people in sailing would say that the ultimate target is always live TV – you’ve taken a very different route?
It all started in Dubai ten years back – we went there three times with the RC44, there was a Louis Vuitton Cup stopover there as well. When Dubai went down there was nothing for a few years. Now, I think Abu Dhabi and Oman have a very different approach in what they’re doing. For Abu Dhabi it’s just brand positioning, while Oman Sail really wants to use sailing as a tool to develop many things within the country. It’s more interesting. For us to arrive there, it shows they have reached a level in their organisation. What we do is very B2B, in terms of hospitality, in terms of business for the venues – there’s not a lot of advertising, we’re not every week on Eurosport, but we’re on Bloomberg and have good coverage on CNN Mainsail, for example. Our media targets are different. Oman Sail did the full process: they did dinghy racing, they had the Extreme Sailing that was good for them to position their name as well, for brand positioning. Then we show up, and they can use sailing to do business. From the feedback we had from them, that was the first time they really did that during a sailing event, which was for them a bit of a target. They have several branches of development and one was to be able to generate business within an event, between Omanis themselves and between visitors and Omanis, and that happened.
Yes, we’re not targeting that at all. We’re not a commercial product. We have owners driving, so this is not the very highest level of the sport – we just need to face it. But on the other side we have a lot of pros who are there, who are doing a great job and it’s very competitive. It’s like if you take Formula One and you put behind the wheel all the CEOs of the different teams, it wouldn’t be as fast and on top of that the general public won’t have that much interest in that. We understand that.
How has that media strategy evolved?
We’re not showcasing the drama, we just want to have nice pictures, very high quality footage, we want high quality products. The way we run the project is we have some guidelines and it’s always technology, high quality and environmentally friendly and we try to show that in our videos and pictures.
What’s the hospitality set-up like?
In fact, you would be surprised to hear that the owners are not there to do business, they are there to entertain themselves, to have fun and we work hard to create friendship in between them so they can enjoy themselves, they have fun together – it’s competitive on the water but friendly on-shore. There are a few people involved in the same type of industries and they meet to have lunch or breakfast or dinner, but they don’t really actively do business during the regatta. It’s more the local event promoter who uses the platform to do that. Obviously the owners understand the game and are more than happy to have a few drinks here or there with the guests of the local organisers. It’s not very often, but sometimes an owner does an operation with 10 or 15 guests. More often, they bring friends or families. Pelle P and Beluga are two of the central series sponsors. How critical a part of the business model is sponsorship?
The way we run the series is very much cost-effective. All the event costs are supported by the venues themselves. The budgets of the class is divided into thirds: one-third is the annual fee each team is paying, one-third, maybe a bit
more, is the venue fees, and the last part is sponsorship. At the moment sponsorship is quite low. For sure, we’re looking for a brand – we’re working on sponsorship – but what we’re looking for is a brand that understands what we’re doing and that’s where it’s not very easy to find the right brand. Our product is not easy to work with, we move around every year, our events are quite small, we do high level hospitality. The feedback we have is always the same, when we do a presentation everybody is always very excited because the product is very attractive but then when you look at the figures you need to put down to activate the deal, that’s where the conversation stops. We are looking for sponsors but we want the right type of relationships.
EVENTS / 2
The final 2014 event was in Oman. What’s your wider assessment of the Gulf region’s investment and rising interest in sailing?
As you go into 2015 and beyond, what would be your message to a potential sponsor?
They will have access to an environment where they will have the opportunity to meet the top industry leaders, together with some of the best sailors and that environment will be friendly. We’re really selling that B2B environment where people can meet, chat, enjoy themselves in a nice environment. What are your longer-term targets?
I think if we can have a consistent fleet of 12 to 15 boats that would be really good. That’s our target. We have a turnover of two to three teams per season, let’s say two, as an average, so if we lose two and gain one, I’m happy. With our match racing component, it’s pretty hard for us to have more than 15 boats because then we have a lot of sitting around between races. If we went to a much bigger fleet, it would reduce a lot the type of venues we can go to because then you need a huge technical area with long docks. We would lose the flavour of going to BVIs for example – really nice places, but you cannot go there if you have a fleet of 25 boats.
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 83
#roadtorio
Š 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
STYLE 108
Hotspots 2014
120
Gallery: AWMRT and Volvo Ocean Race
HOTSPOTS 2014
108 l BLACK BOOK 2014
STYLE WHO, WHY AND WHAT BUT, MOST IMPORTANTLY, WHERE... we consider to be the world’s best sailing destinations - our hotspots, places where sea conditions are great, but only as great as the shoreside options. In recent years, tourist boards, marketing agencies and city authorities have realised the benefits
of thriving waterfronts and are now reaping the benefits of full harbours, greater footfall and increased prosperity. They are cities and regions investing in marinas, the marine industry and major events, in spectacular locations. They are, quite simply, must-visit.
STYLE / 4
In 2014, for the leisure and pleasure sailor, it’s not so much what you sail, but where you sail that matters most. Location, location, location is a familiar mantra in property circles and the same is true of sailing. Over the coming pages, the Sailing Black Book has selected a few of what
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 109
PERFECT PORTS What makes the perfect marina? Is it the weather, the city or area it is attached to, the sailing conditions, the type and size of boats you’ll share with, or the people in charge? In reality, it is probably a combination of all of the above and more. Below are the most expensive marinas in the world and overleaf, the Sailing Black Book presents its own hotspots – must-visit stopovers over the next 12 months.
1.
Marina Grande, Capri, Italy 300 berths; average cost per day €2,585
2.
Marina di Porto Cervo, Sardinia, Italy 700 berths; average cost per day €2,574
3.
Marina di Portofino, Genova, Italy 16 berths; average cost per day €2,100
4.
Porto Jose Banus, Marbella, Spain 915 berths; average cost per day €2,069
5.
Ibiza Magna, Ibiza, Spain 85 berths; average cost per day €1,643
6.
Port de Saint Tropez, Saint Tropez, France 734 berths; average cost per day €1,356
7.
Port Camille Rayon, Golfe Juan, France 833 berths; average cost per day €1,100
8.
Marina Port Vell, Barcelona, Spain 162; average cost per day €1,084
9.
ACI Marina Split, Split, Croatia 355 berths; average cost per day €1,001
10.
Yacht Haven Grande, St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands average cost per day €889
Source: TheRichest.com
110 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Peter Church [CC-BY-SA-2.0
nauticaljewelryoriginals Nautical Jewelry Originals has provided “Award Winning” Nautical Jewelry Designs for Women and Men for over 35 Years. Our exciting line of Marine jewelry had receive Unmatched Worldwide Acclaim. You can conveniently order online 24/7 via our website www.nauticaljewelry.net, Email us at info@ nauticaljewelry.net or call us at 1-800-545-8135 or (305) 271-0372 All Jewelry items are available in 18K, 14K, Yellow and White Gold, Platinum and Silver! We back up every purchase with the finest guarantee in the world … YOUR FULL PURCHASE PRICE BACK, IF NOT THRILLED.
TO NEW HORIZONS AND ADVENTURES, Captain Marty and Maria Diaz
www.nauticaljewelry.net
AARHUS
112 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Aarhus is the second-largest city in Denmark and the country’s largest and most historic port. Aarhus Yacht Harbour was built in 1933 but boasts modern facilities. The city’s sailing culture is expected to come to the fore in the next few years, with Aarhus having been confirmed as the host of the 2018 ISAF world championships, one of the sport’s most prestigious events.
STYLE / 4
STYLE
The Maltese capital Valletta is well-known to cruise passengers but is becoming an essential Mediterranean yacht stop. There are two major harbours in the city, Grand Habour and Marsamxett, but it is the picturesque Laguna Marina which offers the most bespoke package for private owners.
VALLETTA
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 113
The Formula One industry has changed. But thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s still only one way to really know whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s going on. The annual reference guide to the business of Formula One, now in its ninth year of publication
ORDER TODAY
Simply visit our online shop at www.sportspromedia.com/shop
OUT NOW
Brought to you by:
Call: +44 (0) 20 7549 3250 | Email: info@blackbook.biz | Visit: www.blackbook.biz
ABU DHABI
116 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Abu Dhabi has plenty of sailing pedigree and an ideal sailing climate for much of the year. No wonder, then, that the emirate has turning to the professional side of the sport as a way to further its international image. Just as with Formula One, which takes place around the manmade Yas Marina, hosting the Volvo Ocean Race and other major regattas ticks all the right boxes.
STYLE / 4
STYLE
Aucklandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Westhaven Marina is the largest marina in the southern hemisphere and the centre, predictably enough, of the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flourishing marine industry. A host of major events and a hospitality hub, over 2,000 boats are regularly based there, within easy access of both a thriving, modern city and the spectacular Hauraki Gulf. It also has the history: boats were arriving and departing from there well before 1900.
AUCKLAND
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 117
MONACO
118 l BLACK BOOK 2014
There are pretenders to the throne all over the world but Monaco is still Monaco, a place to see and be seen. Monte Carloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Port Hercule has capacity for some 700 boats and there are plans for its continued development, with land reclamation work one way of generating further space. The harbour and its contents have become essential ingredients in Monacoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s historic, spectacular and glamorous allure over the decades.
ALPARI WORLD MATCH RACING TOUR THE ALPARI WORLD MATCH RACING TOUR COMPRISED SEVEN EVENTS AROUND THE WORLD IN 2014, AS THE BEST MATCH RACERS ON THE PLANET DID BATTLE FROM JUNE TO NOVEMBER IN THE ISAF-SANCTIONED WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP. AWMRT executive director James Pleasance with Moet & Chandon guests in Sopot
Local hero Bjorn Hansen heads for victory in front of 100,000 spectators during the finals of Stena Match Cup Sweden
Sopot Match Cup chief Artur Mantisa with James Pleasance
120 l BLACK BOOK 2014
GAC Pindar’s Ian Williams celebrates victory in Germany
STYLE / 4
STYLE
Mixing sport with leisure: the Hennessy Yachting Banquet held at the Sheraton Hotel during the Sopot Match Race in Poland
The King Edward VII Gold Cup alongside the World Match Racing Tour Championship trophy
Taylor Canfield of the USA wins the 2013 Chicago Match Cup
It’s this close: Waka Racing’s Phil Robertson and GAC Pindar’s Ian Williams do battle
Lelystad deputy mayor Jop Fackeldey
BLACK BOOK 2014 l 121
VOR 2014/15 WHEN THE NINE-MONTH VOLVO OCEAN RACE 2014/15 GETS UNDERWAY IN OCTOBER, IT WILL BE THE END OF THE BEGINNING TWO YEARS OF BUILD-UP AND PREPARATIONS FOR THE FLEET OF SEVEN. The Team Dongfeng one-design Volvo Ocean Race boat is delivered
Augustâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Round the Island race provided an early test and essential training for the Dongfeng and SCA crews
Volvo Ocean Race chief executive Knut Frostad
122 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Volvo continue to use the race as a major activation asset
Credit: Tim Wright
35 years on the St. Maarten Heineken Regatta is an event unequaled in the Caribbean. With a steady stream of sailors from over 32 different countries attending every year, this truly international event attracts a worldwide audience to the shores of the island of St. Maarten. This international status is reflected in many of the current sponsors supporting the event such as Heineken, Fiji Water and Sunsail. The event is very much a part of the island which is shown in the large amount of local support, working very closing with the Sint Maarten Tourism Office, the Regatta is increasing visitors to the island and as such increasing exposure for all those supporting companies. With such varied sponsors the St. Maarten Heineken Regatta is experienced at creating unique and personalized sponsorship packages which can suit any budget. Moving forward the St. Maarten Heineken Regatta is committed to continued growth and improvement in many ways. Encouraging new brands to join the team as well as working hard on bringing more world class racing boats to the shores of Sint Maarten is their way of driving the event forward and increasing its international acclaim. With a strong Melges 24 class already in action and boats such as the Reichel & Pugh designed Highland Fling and the Ker 43 Ptarmigan Otra Vez, many high performance boats are choosing to sail the St. Maarten Heineken Regatta in the highly competitive Caribbean Regatta circuit. The Regatta also boast the largest Multi Hull fleet in the Caribbean and regularly attracts such high performance yachts as the Gunboats and Nils Eriksons Soma which created highly competitive and exciting racing at the 2014 event.
www.heinekenregatta.com
The American-based, Turkish-backed Team Alvimedica are newcomers to the Volvo Ocean Race for the 2014/15 edition
Life for the crew on board is tough and the stress unrelenting
Spectacular boats in spectacular locations
124 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing are considered major contenders
Scandinavian Design is the cornerstone in all Helly Hansen gear. The optimal combination of purposeful design, protection and style. This is why professional sailors, mountain guides and discerning enthusiasts choose Helly Hansen.
CONFIDENT WHEN IT MATTERS
LIZ W WA ARDLE Y Y, T E A M S C A I N T H E V O L V O O C E A N R A C E 2 0 014 14 4 –15 – –15
HELLY HANSEN CATWALK
The all-female crew of Team SCA have been marshalled by Richard Brisiusâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Atlant Ocean Racing team for their VOR debut
Another day, another presentation for race chief Frostad
On-board media equipment has been enhanced for 2014/15
The race control room, in Alicante, is state-of-the-art
126 l BLACK BOOK 2014
Team Vestas Wind were the final team to confirm their entry
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
#(' *#'! , "'(%(!1
*( + ! ' +
&( )* %+) % $ ( ) )+ ) * $ 0 "% $ * ( "%$ %(" #%$ )* %* () ) , $*) *( $) $ * )&%(* % ) " $ $ * (%+ * )*%( ) % & () , ( $ ( , (/ $ +# $ $ ,%+( ( - + $ %+*) % * ) " $ %##+$ */ $ )* () %(" #& %$) & ) %$ % * - &(%& (* ) $ "% " )&%(* * * &( ) $*) +"" $ +$ "+** ( ( $ * , * %$ %&&%(*+$ */ *(+"/ +$ '+ $ %( * ( * ( $ *% 2%-$3 * ) " $ (/ . * $ $ )* (%- $ )&%(* ( $ ) %$* * +)('+(*+ () '+)(*,+& ' ! & ', (&
/// ( '& +, *+ (&
('# . ', . '- +
-& ' ' .(-*
,#. +$#)) *+
THERE ARE WINNERS. AND THERE ARE CHAMPIONS.
Ingenieur Automatic AMG Black Series Ceramic. Ref. 3225: Winners have m a d e i t to t h e to p a t l e a s t o n c e. R e a l champions are there for ever. The case and other components in the Ingenieur Auto matic AMG Black Series are made of black zirconium oxide, a high-performance ceramic used in motor sport, among other things, for brake discs. The see-through sapphire glass back reveals one of the most robust drives ever ma nufacture d by IWC: the 8 0110 -c alibre
movement with integrated shock absorber. After all, a champion canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t afford to show any sign of weakness. I WC . E N G I N E E R E D FO R M E N .
Mechanical movement, Pellaton automatic winding, 44-hour power reserve when fully wound, Integrated shock-absorption system, Date display with crownactivated rapid advance, Central hacking seconds, Screw-in crown, Sapphire glass, flat, antireflective coating on both sides, See-through sapphire-glass back, Water-resistant 12 bar, Case height 14.5 mm, Diameter 46 mm
Watch the video about two legends teaming up: The Mercedes Silver Arrow and IWC.
IWC Schaffhausen, Switzerland. www.iwc.com
2007338_E4BL3_210x282_p_SportsPro_ZS_4c_en.indd 1
24.07.14 10:04