When the news is that there's no news ...

Ed Gorman reports on Kingfisher's tactical "news management" over the broken daggerboard

Ellen MacArthur and the Kingfisher syndicate played an interesting game with the media over the release of information concerning the damage to Kingfisher's daggerboard and rudder.

Following the precedent set just after Cape Horn when MacArthur and her shore manager Mark Turner suddenly became very coy about saying whether or not she had mended her broken gennaker, they again imposed what in effect was a "news blackout" on the daggerboard and rudder damage.

This correspondent was fully aware that there was a major problem on Kingfisher throughout Thursday (February 1st) because Turner indicated as much from his mountain base on the Swiss-French border at Chamonix. He said there would be a big story on Friday (February 2nd) but no details would be released before then.

Everyone else in the Kingfisher operation was subject to this "three-line whip" and calls to the syndicate base on the Isle of Wight and to the project's design coordinator, Merfyn Owen, revealed nothing more than vague confirmation that something "major" was going on.

Owen said at that stage that the problem was "difficult and serious" and required a great deal of hard work spread over 36 hours to solve. On the Isle of Wight, Dana Bena, one of Turner's assistants, said she had spoken to Ellen and never heard her sound so exhausted.

The reason given by Turner for this exercise in news management was twofold. First that Ellen herself wanted to describe what had happened after she had had some time to recover from her considerable exertions and second, that the syndicate did not want to disclose at that stage information which might be of tactical use to race leader Michel Desjoyeaux.

News blackouts can be difficult to impose in many walks of life but when the subject is a yacht, 2,500 miles from a race finish and being sailed by only one person, the management and preservation of an order like this, is relatively easy. One might consider this to be a fairly risky strategy, given the reliance of any commercial sponsor on an up-to-date and accurate flow of information to the media. But it is a measure of the support MacArthur enjoys that she can get away with this.

The episode underlines yet again, and in a variety of ways, that Kingfisher and MacArthur are giving it their all, including the odd bit of gamesmanship, in these last crucial days of a race she could yet win.

The prospects for Ellen from here, with one daggerboard now out of action, are only marginally worse than before. Owen reckons the loss of performance on port tack upwind will be small. "It will reduce the VMG by about .6 or .7 of a knot," he said. "The boat will still go well to windward."