Paul Cayard airs his views

The Artemis skipper on the Audi MedCup, the America's Cup and the Louis Vuitton Trophy

Paul Cayard was looking a little fried when we caught up with him at the Audi MedCup event in Marseille last week. In his role as skipper of Torbjorn Tornqvist’s Artemis team, he had been away from his San Francisco home for eight straight weeks, taking in the first two events on the Audi Med Cup, the RC44 events in Austria and Denmark and of course the Louis Vuitton Trophy in La Maddalena. In addition to this he has also been busy in his no small task as Chairman of the World Sailing Teams Association (WSTA), the amalgamation of Cup teams that organises the Louis Vuitton Trophy series.

Artemis came out of the Marseille event a disappointing 10th, after a couple of tricky days when Cayard says they lacked boat speed in the lumpy conditions off Marseille on one and made the wrong tactical choices in the tricky wind conditions on another. With the final two days of racing canned due to the Mistral, they were unable to redeem themselves.

According to Cayard he doesn’t reckon there is a much different between the speed of the TP52 fleet racing on the Audi MedCup this year – something he was monitoring during this regatta - but is enjoying the result of the rule changes introduced for this season which sees the boats now featuring a more contemporary bowsprit and twin backstay arrangement and competing with less crew.

For the Audi MedCup the Artemis set-up is somewhat unusual with owner Torbjorn Tornqvist helming the Artemis TP52 where Cayard calls tactics, while their America’s Cup helmsman, Terry Hutchinson, steers Quantum Racing. Thankfully while Artemis were off form in Marseille Hutchinson’s team won.

Artemis TP52 racing in Cascais. Photo: Rick Tomlinson

In terms of the bigger picture with Artemis, Cayard says that they are keeping the sailing team fairly consistent while they are in the process of recruiting for other key roles. “It is a start up campaign really so we have to get the whole back office sorted out – accounting, the corporate entity, the deal with the yacht club, etc.” Among the most important appointments at this stage are the designers – the most potent if of course Rolf Vrolijk and the team from Alinghi and rumour has it that Coutts has been heavily courting his old team.

The problem is that Artemis are in the same position as all the other Cup teams in not knowing crucial details about the 34th America’s Cup. In terms of a venue San Francisco would be a great choice for Cayard as this is where he lives, but the rumour mill has the choice of venue swinging back towards Europe.

“It seems like they are pretty interested in money, which you’d think might be surprising as he doesn’t really need money,” says Cayard of the defender BMW Oracle Racing and its proprietor, Larry Ellison. “If he was really passionate about San Francisco he could say ‘I’m going to make it happen in San Francisco’.”

Cayard confirms our suspicion that outside of major events such as the Olympic Games, cities in the US don’t have a culture for paying to stage major events, in sports or otherwise. “Big cities like San Francisco or New York don’t need it. San Francisco gets something like 30 million tourists and conventioneers or business people coming in already each year, so the hotels are full. It is 92% occupancy already. So they are not going to get more people jammed in their hotels and restaurants.”

Conversely in Europe there is competition between cities to host events and some countries do have a budget for this. “If there is money to be picked up off the table I think that’s what he’d rather do,” Cayard continues “So if there is a European venue or maybe even Abu Dhabi, some kind of venue that might pay 300-400 million – no US city will pay hundreds of millions...”

So if the Cup is to come to Europe then the most likely candidates are Cascais, where the 32nd America’s Cup almost went, or Valencia, where there is a fine infrastructure already set-up of course from 2007 or somewhere in Italy. With three Cup teams in Luna Rossa, Mascalzone Latino and Azzurra already up and running, holding the Cup in Italy would be great for the event we feel. Cayard agrees: “They have a really passionate public. Other than New Zealand, I think Italy on a per capita basis it is a little less interested than New Zealand, but of course the population there is 10 times bigger. So the total number of people in that country who would follow an America’s Cup is huge - 20-30 million... It would be a great place for the event. They would really be excited about it.” Cayard of course skippered Raul Gardini's Il Moro de Venezia and is a great fan of the country.

But would they get the tax breaks similar to the ones the America’s Cup event, team individuals and event sponsors benefitted from in Valencia?

Another significant change if the 34th America’s Cup is staged in Europe, is that the date could come forward by a year from 2014 to 2013, as it is believed 2014 was chosen to provide enough time for a host venue in the US (such as San Francisco) to create a suitable home for the event.

While a designers meet was held recently in Valencia where multihull and monohull proposals were presented for possible boats for the 34th America’s Cup, Cayard shares our view that while multihulls would be exciting option, it is probably a step too far for the event at this time. “I don’t know anyone who wants it,” he says. “Team New Zealand is adamantly against it and so is Prada.” And so, to our understanding, is TeamOrigin. “Maybe it’ll just be them [BMW Oracle Racing] and their buddies at Alinghi again!”

Cayard reckons that a dramatic change of boat is wrong at this stage with the America’s Cup in a recovery phase after the quagmire of the 33rd event. “I think we should focus on changing just a few things right now. If we can go to the neutral management, if we can increase the commercial value of the event by changing the format somewhat, if we can create perpetuity in the neutral format so that it survives from Cup to Cup and we don’t fall back into the situation where someone can mis-manage the event – those are big steps to focus on right now and to throw into that quite a different concept with the boat might be risking too much. I think if we can do those three things well we are definitely taking a big step forward and then with time we can analyse if we should not just change the type of boat but change the whole concept of the boat – you are not going to tack much.”

Cayard cites the example of Prada boss and long term America’s Cup supporter Patrizio Bertelli who simply won’t enter the event if it goes multihull...“whereas if you say we’ll do a TP75 or an RC75 and that is a fast boat with a bowsprit - we can all get our arms around that and I think there you will have 8-10 challengers. If you go the other way I don’t know what you are going to get. You’ll get a couple of French guys who’ll be all excited – but are they real?”

At present Cayard confirms what we have heard from TeamOrigin – that the challengers for the 34th America’s Cup are not at present having much interaction with BMW Oracle Racing, although the challengers have been asked to comment on the 32nd Protocol which is being used as the basis for that of the 34th. This document is one which BMW Oracle Racing is constantly working on and Cayard reckons that a second draft is due for publication imminently.

While BMW Oracle Racing announced the schedule for publication of the Protocol (August), the new class rule (September) and the venue by the end of the year, Cayard reckons that the deadline for entry – 31 January 2011 is tight. “For teams who don’t who have a guy who can drop 20 million Euros, you are not going to sell America’s Cup sponsorships between September and January 31st. The performance bond and the entry fees are pretty high, not to mention the fact that if you are going for a January 2012 launch date you have to start building the boat next year, which means you have to hire your design guys now which is another huge cash drain. So the cash suction is starting now and you don’t even know where the thing is happening!"

In the meantime another issue at the forefront of Cayard’s agenda is the Louis Vuitton Trophy series. The recent event in La Maddalena seemed to run at a snail’s pace and then there was a serious prang that took two of the four boats out of contention, slowing things further.

“That was a tough blow we got dealt there and then we had a couple of days of Mistral,” says Cayard. “But I think the Louis Vuitton Trophy is serving its purpose: to keep the teams going in the abyss of the uncertainty of what was going to happen and even to give them something to do now, because the defender isn’t ready to produce anything. So it was always meant to be an ‘in-between activity’ and hopefully there’ll be a transition from it to the new thing and certain elements of what we’ve started will continue on.”

If a new rule for the boat to be used for the 34th America’s Cup is to be announced in September with the new generation of boats launched ready for the 2012 season, then there remains the issue of what to do in terms of the equipment for the next Louis Vuitton Trophy regattas this year and in 2011. As Cayard puts it: “Now we have event-provided boats so it is a question of how we evolve from that to this full-blow thing - what is the middle ground? And there as WSTA we need a little bit of input from the defender as to what their plans are. It is a bit of a tough time, because we are planning Hong Kong and Sochi and all these events, but we need to know if they are going to come in the middle and say ‘wait a minute, next May we want to start doing x, y and z’ and if we have made commitments these other places it is difficult.”

Louis Vuitton’s Bruno Troublé, among others, has suggested that some boats be purpose-built for the Louis Vuitton Trophy events, a prototype of the 34th America’s Cup boat for example. However the timing won’t work and Cayard says that no one has been forthcoming with the 20 million Euros budget necessary to undertake the building of these boats. This is another reason Cayard thinks that it is more likely that the 34th America’s Cup could happen a year earlier than thought. “The purpose-built boats were going to be online in 2012, then you were going to build your team boats in 2013 and then race 2014. But we’ll just take that little episode [2012] out of it. So I think the whole thing might shift a year earlier.”

Photo: Paul Todd

Even if the 34th America’s Cup doesn’t take place in San Francisco, Cayard still reckons that the Louis Vuitton Trophy – or whatever the series is to be called if LV don’t continue their sponsorship beyond 2011 – will still be used to cull the weaker challengers, particularly if they number more than eight.

“For sure they are going to create some sort of mechanism to make it count for something, because that is what will keep the defender honest and the top teams honest when they race the defender – because otherwise people will throw races. There is going to be sail cards at stake or some commodity that is valuable to both sides. So that is the way to guarantee the defender has good racing.”

It seems likely that the points scored in the events will be ramped up for example by a co-efficient as the events get close to the Cup itself.

Cayard also believes that the challenger selection series prior to the 34th America’s Cup may also be honed down, possibly shedding the round robins (in recent multi-challenger Cups there have been two sets of round robins). This we personally feel would be a shame as one of the most enjoyable parts of the challenger selection series was occasionally seeing big teams fall to the smaller ones and also, more importantly, it provided a more appetising sponsorship sell for the smaller teams. If there is no guarantee that they will get to race in the Cup venue, smaller teams won't have much of a package to tout to potential corporate backers? Russell Coutts has been of the view that the event should just be for the elite.

Cayard reckons: “You go quarter finals with eight challengers, semi-finals and finals and Cup - so you have four events, they are each going to take a week to 10 days and there will be a week in between. So it is a two month deal.” Certainly reducing the duration of the event would be welcome. “I don’t know that the round robin adds a lot. Russ [Coutts] is talking about doing a fleet race before.”

As to the vision of neutral management of the America's Cup and the WSTA’s role in this, Cayard believes his organisation will have a role in appointing and recruiting the executive that will run the race management side of the 34th America’s Cup. “Everything to do with running the game I think will be neutral and I think the group of teams currently in the WSTA will have a voice in who runs that and what the structure of what the board is there. I think things that are commercially initially will stay with the defender, like television. But it will be the same thing as ACM- there will be a net surplus distribution out of that and that arm will fund the cost of running the races and umpires and the logistics if we have to start shipping boats around.”