Team Philips - good or bad for British sailing?

Analysis and opinion by Ed Gorman

Set against these benchmarks, Team Philips has struggled in many areas. So preoccupied have we become with Goss' roller-coaster ride in recent months, that we have forgotten that the central aim of the project was to win The Race. With a crew from amateur backgrounds rather than the grand prix professional ranks, this was always going to be a tall order. The funding for the project was never of the magnitude required to support the ambition of the design, and the decision to build a craft which made at least three huge leaps in one go without proper small-scale testing was always going to be a gamble.
One can argue with many other aspects of the way the campaign was run and about how Goss has responded to the various setbacks, right up to the point that he found himself in a massive storm in the mid-Atlantic. Taking it all together, one has had the impression for some time that he and a number of the people around him have been out of their depth.

The comparison with Kingfisher is instructive. Goss and MacArthur were both dreaming the impossible four years ago. Since then Goss has run into bigger and bigger trouble while MacArthur has not only realised her ambition of racing round the world, she is doing so as a serious competitor with winning chances and with a major single-handed trophy already in her cabinet, in the form of the Europe 1 New Man Star single-handed transatlantic race.

Whereas Goss has been lured into a hugely ambitious design by the "no holds barred" character of The Race, MacArthur and Turner commissioned a relatively modest design within an established class. While Goss has struggled throughout to find the money to support his venture, MacArthur and Turner hooked a sponsor and enough capital to fully fund the project from the beginning. Whereas Goss, who has never won a major professional race, has singularly stuck with crew and support team largely from his peer group in the "BT Global Challenge/gifted amateurs school", MacArthur has been trained by and surrounded herself with some of the very best sailors in the world and has now learned how to beat them.

This all points up the underlying philosophical difference between the two, which is that while MacArthur aspired to become a top professional sportswoman, Goss has been travelling the uncertain road of the adventurer. He could just as easily, for example, have deployed his considerable talents for motivating people, for "daring to dream" and for engaging the general public, on a round-the-world ballooning project or some sort of Polar expedition. It is perhaps unfortunate that his trials and tribulations have been expressed through the sport of sailing.

Some say that criticising Goss is typical of the British disease - an expression of the national appetite for kicking people when they are down or jumping on anyone who has the audacity to try something different. I say British sailing is better than Team Philips and it is a pity that Goss' difficulties are tending to steal the show, obscuring much better elements of our sport where professionalism and competitiveness are to the fore.