Who is Pindar?

James Boyd talks to Andrew Pindar and looks at the story behind the company that champions women's offshore racing

Alphagraphics

This summer while Emma has been in Scandinavia learning to sail 60ft trimarans fast on the Oops! Cup, Pindar was looking for something to fill the gap. This is how their sponsorship of Helena Darvelid's all-female crew in the EDS Atlantic Challenge happened. "It really came about when we were umming and aahing about whether we would get involved with the EDS," Andrew Pindar explains.

Pindar was particularly drawn to how The Challenge Business had set up the EDS Atlantic Challenge. "It was the way Chay Blyth goes about promoting things," he explains. "It fitted nicely, because we are an international business - we are operating in 24 countries around the world. We thought we'd get an international crew together to emphasise the global nature of our business."

Blyth has been very canny in his planning of the EDS Atlantic Challenge. The course visits several major commercial centres such as Hamburg and Boston primarily to make it attractive to sponsors. For Andrew Pindar the US side of the event was important, because they own a 70% chunk of the US-based company Alphagraphics, which is the world's leading "rapid response printer" mainly handling business-to-business work.

Whether the sponsorship of Darvelid and her team will continue remains to be seen, but they have great plans for Richards and it is likely Pindar will also have some involvement with Tracy Edwards' grand scheme to get a boat together for another attempt on the Jules Verne Trophy. This project will be one that reunites Richards and Merron, and many of Darvelid's team with the woman who got this all going - Tracy Edwards.