Team Philips - good or bad for British sailing?

Analysis and opinion by Ed Gorman

The troubled story of Pete Goss and his revolutionary 120 ft wave-piercer is still the number one topic of discussion in the British sailing world, dividing opinion between those who admire Goss and those who perhaps wish he'd never "dared to dream" about The Race in the first place.

It is a complex issue and there are many in sailing who can see both sides of the argument. Yet what about the interests of the sport as a whole? Is the sport better off for the Team Philips experience or has it suffered under the deluge of publicity given to a boat which has stumbled from one setback to another and then an abandonment in the mid-Atlantic?

One could argue that this has been great for sailing. The sport has made the front pages and, as Philips executives have candidly admitted, their relatively cheap sponsorship has produced an extraordinary return in television and radio time and column inches in the written media. No matter that it has been bad news - it has been news and it has been about sailing.
There is something old fashioned about this. The association of sailing with heroic failure, with "gifted amateurs" succeeding (or not succeeding) against the odds, scrabbling money together to get projects off the ground, with taking part but not winning and with sailing as an adventure and not a sport.

Much of the Feedback published on madforsailing and elsewhere in recent days has lauded Goss for all these gritty qualities. But one suspects there are many other silent witnesses who don't buy this. To them Team Philips seems almost a desperate gamble, one which has grabbed centre stage and then projected a highly misleading impression of the current state of the sport in Britain.

This is because Team Philips is the exception not the rule. We could fairly be said to be in a golden age of yacht racing in Britain just now, with a historic performance in the Sydney Olympics still reverberating through the sport and among the general public, with a crop of real talent in the offshore single-handed scene and with a strong pedigree in small keelboats which could yet find expression in a return to the America's Cup.

In Britain, the pursuit of professional excellence in the sport is well-advanced. The Royal Yachting Association and its coaching staff led by John Derbyshire have demonstrated how to approach the Olympic Games (not just to sailing, but to many other sports as well), while individuals like Mark Turner and Ellen MacArthur for Kingfisher and Ado Stead in the Admiral's Cup and the Tour Voile, have set new standards in how ambitious projects should be conceived and executed. Sailing has become not just about taking part but winning as well, and at the very highest level.

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