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Human Interest
This Article Last Updated: Jan 21st, 2011 - 13:21:20
Reprinted courtesy of Seahorse Magazine. Star sailor and editor Andrew Hurst has also provided a special subscription offer for NEW subscribers from the Star Class site, good for three months.
 | One of the most consistent crews in the modern Star Class, Xavier Rohart and Pascal Rambeau,
here training out of Marseille, have twice won the world championship - in 2003 and 2005 -
and still rarely finish outside the top three at a major regatta. There is now an increasingly
heard opinion that sailing is going too far to prostate itself at the shrine of Olympic status -
the Star is costly but the biggest names in the sport still compete in the class.
Bottom line: as usual it's all about money. |
You Make Your Choices
Like it or not, the two top events of yacht racing are in the midst of unprecedented change. Near enough to a revolution. Both the Olympics and America’s Cup are now the front line of the push to re-invent the sport, to attract new, bigger audiences and new clientele. As normal, the revolutionaries are passionate and loud, while the masses look like stunned mullets. The Olympics and America’s Cup are racing towards new, exciting but uncharted territory that definitely has a reef or two.
Russell Coutts has a vision of an America’s Cup that has appeal to a younger generation. What he called the facebook generation. What he is talking about is a younger, more tech-savvy world. The idea of having ultra-modern, fast boats, in the case of the America’s Cup – cats with wings – could help. Without question the boats we have used since 1992 are past their use-by-date; it was accepted by everyone after the 2007 Cup that there would be a change of boats.
It came down to a choice between cats and 80-foot monohulls. The thing about cats is they are very fast, easily twice as fast as the monohulls. Good and bad news. In monohulls we look at tenth-of-a-knot speed differences. The cats performance difference will be measured in knots! Will the racing be close? Best guess, no.
Another great thing about the cats, as they speed along at 20+ knots, they disturb the water very little. That is one of the reasons they are so fast. In pictures and on TV you sense the speed by the amount of water being thrown around, which in cats is very small, in fact a cat pushes very little water out of the way as it flies along. Not until you see a chase boat following along do you realise the actual speed. So it’s fast but you won’t notice it. Like watching car racing without sound. No eeeee-ahhhhhhh with the change of Doppler as the car races past. Just not the same sensation.
Lots of people like to compare the America’s Cup with Nascar racing or Formula One. The thought is if we can be more like them then we can get their size of following. They do have some slick cameras and comms to the drivers. All things easy enough to replicate in sailing. However… I am obligated to point out, that 93.3% of Nascar’s ‘target audience’ drive a car (I made that up, but you get the picture). As you speed down the motorway, almost everyone can feel, even just a little, like a race car driver. The ‘target audience’ of the next America’s Cup are not boat owners, they own iPhones and Apple computers. The ones that do own a boat, there is a 90% chance it is a monohull.
Coutts has a bit on selling the AC to the facebook generation. For my 19-year-old son (past and present facebook generation) internet games chewed up the hours like TV used to for me, and books and radio did for his Grandparents. Internet games allow the player to be an integral part of the action. Not just sitting and watching but being part of it.
As a Dad, you sometimes question, do they really understand that the real world is not like the game? You can drive your internet car into the building at 120 and then press re-set and start again… I used to threaten to kick Grant’s chair over every time he crashed just to ensure there was some, be it pitifully small, consequence. Don’t even get me started on Call of Duty III. Do I shoot him in the leg?
That is just a small slice of the competition for the attention of the younger generation.
Can it be done? Get a younger, bigger following to the America’s Cup? No one really knows. We hope so, and we are going to find out. Just one little side note: Russell’s facebook generation: really not into Prada or Louis Vuitton. Pepsi Max, Red Bull, Apple, Oakley and eBay are more like the potential sponsors...
Sailing at the Olympic Games is also going through big changes. ISAF has always faced a dilemma: should the Olympic classes represent the sport as it is, or should the Olympics represent the very pinnacle of the cutting edge. Not that it really matters as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) rules the roost on this one. They have said: either get the TV viewing numbers up or risk getting kicked out of the Olympics. When IOC says jump, you jump and ask how high on the way up. Oh, the hoops the IOC has the sailing world jumping through…
Take the increased number of Lasers for the 2012 Olympic Games for example. Still one per country, but now there will be 48 Olympic Lasers, up from the 40-boat fleet of 2008. Well, there are not 48 counties that can claim they have competitive sailors in the Laser. The trick now is to up-skill some lucky people to sail from countries you have never heard of so the ‘dance card’ can be filled up. Pretty sad when you realise that at the 2008 Olympic Regatta the sailing quality in the back quarter of the Laser fleet was miles below the standard in the tail end of the 49er and Star fleets.
Try this logic, from the most recent European championships:
• Laser Radial Women – 94 sailors representing 31 countries; (2008) Olympic entries 39
• Star – 140 entries representing 27 countries; 16 Olympic entries
• 49er – 88 entries representing 25 countries; Olympic entries 20
So, why not add to the 49er and Star fleets? Good question, the answer is simple: ISAF need to say to the IOC ‘Look at all the countries in yachting!’
What do you reckon the proportion of men to women is in sailing? At the 2016 Olympics it will be 50-50. Why? Silly question, the IOC wants sport’s to be gender-balanced. So PC.
The bottom line is sailing cannot afford to get kicked out of the Olympics. The vast majority of the ISAF’s funding, along with the RYA, Yachting New Zealand and almost every other national authority comes from being associated with the Olympic Games.
Yachting is not a sport of the masses. It is expensive and to a certain extent elitist. That is one of the reasons top end car, watch and fashion companies want to be associated with sailing. And the ‘life span’ in sailing is about as good as you’re going to find in any sport anywhere.
Yachting New Zealand uses a catchy little phrase: Yachting is for life. I am sure the author had no idea how right he/she/it (PC) was.
Picture a piece of paper with two straight lines converging at a very shallow angle, then crossing and carrying on. One line is the sailing veteran, 40 something years old, smart and savvy. The other line is the young gun, say 22 and physically at their peak, packing a ton of talent. The veteran gets pasted by the young gun eventually, but they are pretty even for a long time. Depending on the class, there are subtle differences when those lines cross and or how much they diverge. For the Starboat the lines are just off parallel; they do cross somewhere at about 30-35 years of age. The windsurfer... well Barbara Kendall sailed in five Olympics and her worst result was a 5th! The point is you can be very competitive at a world level for a lot of years in sailing. That is a very good thing. And how many sports can say that? Not many, if any…
The 2009 Finn Masters had 260 entries! I have a feeling there are no high jump, triple jump, basketball or boxing masters. Sailing truly is for life.
Here is the deal, yachting does need to stay in the Olympics or at least try. In trying we will have to prostitute our sport to an extent. What is crucial to know is where the limit is. My concern is, in our desire to sell our sport on a world stage and for TV ratings do we sell our sport out and destroy the very thing we are trying to improve? If we lose our current base of support, the Fred Flintstones and the Barney Rubbles of the world, we will truly be in for some interesting times…
There is a reasonable chance yachting will be out of the Olympics in our lifetime. The Olympics and America’s Cup are going to do what they gotta do to get TV ratings. For the rest of yacht racing it is best to have a really great plan B ready to go. It’s no time to shoot from the hip.
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Rod Davis won the Olympic gold medal (Soling) for the USA in Los Angeles in 1984; silver (Star) for New Zealand in Barcelona in 1992, and finished fifth in both Atlanta (Star) in 1996 and Sydney in 2000 (Soling).
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