The SPA experiment

Andy Rice weighs up the pros and cons of some interesting innovations at the Dutch Olympic regatta

As well as proving a triumph for British sailing, the SPA Olympic Regatta can arguably claim to be one of the success stories of the small boat racing circuit. Many Olympic sailors say SPA is the best of the European tour because it is so well organised. It is also the most media friendly, with the organisers introducing a number of innovations that should be adopted on a wider basis.

Then again, some sailors get frustrated with all the change, and couldn't care about the concessions made to making SPA a more media-friendly event. Well, love it or hate it, one man is clearly responsible for SPA's groundbreaking formula - event director Henri van der Aat (right). The Dutch Olympic team coach in the 1980s, he moved to ISAF to become events director and the events coordinator for the sailing at the Barcelona Olympics.

These days, he runs a communications group called Trefpunt Sports and Leisure Marketing, which as well as its sailing interests has involvements in professional cycling and football, including advising sponsors Heineken and Amstel on the Champion's League.

He believes sailing has huge commercial potential but doesn't allow itself to progress. "I think the sport has so much to offer but it doesn't do it, it stays in the old, conservative way. We used to experiment quite a bit in the races but we got criticism for that because people use these events as part of their Olympic trials. They don't like change, and in any case, the sailing world is so conservative that no one seems to like any experimenting in the sport. That frustrates me a lot. In my opinion you have to change things from the top down, because if you don't introduce change at these types of event, then the small events will never change."

Past SPA regattas have seen a lot of tinkering with the race format itself, with all-or-nothing final day's racing and big points hanging on the last heat. That never goes down too well with the sailors - except for the one that benefits from it - of course. So van der Aat has resorted to less controversial but arguably more effective innovations.

This year the Ynglings raced with GPS locators attached to them, so that you could see a graphic representation of the racing from on shore, in a Virtual Spectator style format that will be familiar to those who have been following the racing on the Volvo Ocean Race website. Linked into some live camera footage, it makes it possible to follow the racing without having to get remotely near the water.

The other innovation for SPA 2002 was to introduce some evening racing in small one-man keelboats called Mini Js. The best sailor of the day from each Olympic class came along in the evening to race it out for €1,000 prize money each evening. £600 for a night's work gets the sailors turning up and adds some real spice to the racing. Van der Aat would still rather tinker with the real racing, you get the impression, but for him this was the next best thing. "The good thing is, you can see the difference between a Mistral sailor and a Finn sailor. We had a lot of spectators and the competitors themselves stayed and looked."

Even the little Mini J keelboats were designed specifically for this type of close quarters, spectator-led racing. "The boat is balanced so that if you make a mistake, you're out. It's very difficult to sail. You can't hide in this racing, because if you do something wrong you broach."

The evening racing was certainly a great focal point for the regatta, but there were still gripes about the proper racing. The 49ers had only two days racing from a five-day regatta, due in no small part to the heavy winds that have been propelling the Volvo fleet at breakneck speeds up the English Channel. But with more flexibility in the racing schedule the 49ers could have got on the water and completed a proper series.

Having just one race scheduled on the final day rankled in particular. But van der Aat is a stickler for keeping to the original schedule of racing. "What we think is the organisers should not influence the results at all. We do not want to reschedule. Let's say there was meant to be three races on one day, and I only sailed two, then I can either sail it the following day or just drop it. So in the beginning we said just one race on the final day for the schedule. There's no sponsor's issue here, no commercial issue, that's just the way we organised it."

Van der Aat is used to criticism, but as far as he is concerned sailing needs to make some compromises in order to have more commercial appeal. It is a tough debate, as the sailors will always lose in the short term, but perhaps innovators like van der Aat will succeed in finding a winning commercial formula for small boat racing provided they are allowed to continue experimenting.