Mark Chisnell’s Diary

The OneWorld Challenge navigator reports on the Auckland action

This is the first match racing I've done for a long while and it's been a big learning curve. Match racing IACC boats is like nothing else you'll ever do particularly when the breeze gets up. They may not be as fast as multihulls and they certainly aren't up to blast reaching through the Southern Ocean, but they are a hell of a vehicle for one-on-one.
The power involved in the huge sail area, matched by the massive bulb and righting moment means that all sixteen crew are fully engaged in keeping the thing sailing fast and smooth. And when the handling and performance are pushed to the limit, as they often are in match racing, the whole experience is a pretty intoxicating mix of technology, adrenaline and team work.

But my time on the other side of the media fence makes me very conscious of how hard it is to communicate this excitement to the spectator. At one of our video debriefs Craig Monk was sitting beside me and commented that a spinnaker drop looked pretty dull. And he wasn't wrong, but both of us could remember how much of an effort that stately looking leeward mark rounding was for the crew.

It's an issue we all face in justifying the huge budgets that are being spent on the Cup campaigns this time round. How to get across the stomach churning, chest heaving, muscle-burning excitement of racing these boats to those not actually involved?

It can be done, Virtual Spectator, on-board cameras and microphones, along with other innovations, all did a pretty good job of making the racing accessible last time. But the TV rights to the next event are still hanging, untaken at the time of writing (much as they were in early 1999). And the melt-down in the dot com world means that no one will be chucking venture capital at running a Cup website for the up-coming event - let alone the two sites we saw in 2000.

The America's Cup is a great event badly in need of a global media strategy to communicate some of the daily excitement that’s going on out on the Hauraki Gulf, with five teams sailing and another two on the way. In the meantime I guess the back room dealings, gear failures and court cases will continue to dominate!