Victory Challenge version 2

We speak to Magnus Holmberg about Sweden's reincarnated AC campaign

Producing some of the world's top match racing sailors it is only just that Scandinavia should be present in our sport's greatest match racing event. In Auckland in 2003 Victory Challenge survived the death of their patron, Swedish telecoms and TV billionaire Jan Stenbeck to finish a most creditable fifth in the Louis Vuitton challenger selection series. This time Victory Challenge are back once again with backing from the Stenbeck group of companies led by Stenbeck's 26 year old son, Hugo.

This time around there has been a management reshuffle within the team, Jesper Bank having crossed the border to Germany, to head United Internet Team Germany. Also gone is project manager Mats Johansson. This time the big job is going to Magnus Holmberg who will be in charge of Victory Challenge's 'sporting' side, will be helming and skippering. However the design team is once again being led by Mani Frers while Sam Murch is running the shore side of the team's operations.

"Me, Mani Frers and Sam are the same," says Magnus Holmberg. "And that means even though we are in a hurry it is pretty easy because we know what needs to be done and we can go ahead and do that - we know each other and we can communicate quite well. And the sailing team will include a lot of the same people as last time. That is an advantage in terms of being able to get up to speed reasonably quickly even though we haven’t sailed a Cup boat in two years."

The afterguard on the boat will once again see Johan Barne as navigator, with the addition of Swedish match racer, Mattias Rahm and Argentinian Olympic Tornado bronze medallist, Santiago Lange.



While Victory Challenge v.1 was almost entirely a Scandinavia affair, this time, says Holmberg, they will be looking to bring in more talent from overseas. "A difficult issue last time was over the ruling that you had to live in the country two years ahead of the Cup and so on, but without that rule now we will still have a Swedish and Scandinavian base to the crew, but we are now not putting any restrictions on nationality. This time I want to keep the base of the core group, but get others who can add knowledge and experience." For example Australian Anthony Merrington is signed up as pitman.

As a result Holmberg says he is no hurry to find crew. "You can look at it two ways. You can panic and start recruiting like crazy and then you are going to make mistakes. If you do that you will recruit people you will regret for two years. There will be fall outs from the teams. There will be Volvo Ocean Race sailors who will get back. I am sure there will be opportunities."

The problem facing most of the America's Cup challengers is how to deal with the 'big 3' namely BMW Oracle Racing, Luna Rossa and Emirates Team New Zealand. The final place in the semi-finals of the challenger selection series will be one of the most hotly contested.

"From my personal view - you have to be realistic, but also set a high goal," says Holmberg. "Last time we were there to learn as much as possible and we finished fifth with probably the smallest budget and no one with experience of the America’s Cup. That was as far as we could go last time against the big four teams. If we had continued straight after like the big teams had done and continued with the design maybe we would be in a position to say we could win it. In this position now, we are realistically looking to get into the semi-finals and then anything could happen. It is not only up to us but it is what the big teams are doing. We know from history that big teams with big budgets and lots of well known and respected sailors have blown apart. For sure there might be opportunities. At this instance we are just going to work as hard as we can to work as hard as we can to make it into the semi-finals."

At present the Victory Challenge squad is large enough to fill one boat on which they will test sails and spars and Holmberg says that due to commitment sailing in the Acts, it is unlikely they will recruit enough to crew both boats until the autumn. "I don’t see any point in rushing things and having to employ a lot of people in a short period of time. I am very cautious to keep the same sort of attitudes and values we had last time which carries us quite far. We were really a good group of people. If you start recruiting like crazy you are not going to improve the atmosphere. I will not employ anyone who I think won’t fit within the team regardless of their calibre, because I think that was our strong point last time.

While Mani Frers once again leads the design side of the campaign Holmberg says that this time they plan to get a little more radical. "This time we will be aiming at being more aggressive on the design side. I think we took the right route last time with the limited experience we had of the America’s Cup. We played things a bit conservatively. But I think we are ready to step that up and try to really work on the progression of sails and the mast and all that and work harder on the design side. We have a lot of ideas and thoughts on how we are going to go about that."

Personally Holmberg doesn't have the same design skills as say Russell Coutts, and admits this is an aspect of his knowledge he would like to develop further. However a Masters degree in engineering does give him the working knowledge combined with a profound sailing ability to get technical with the designers and to understand their ideas. "Actually a lot of the guys on the boat are academics and engineers in their field. So we have to educate people and bring in more people and some more sailors with design experience on the team."

For the Acts, Victory Challenge will be racing Örn (SWE-63), while their second boat confusingly named Orm (SWE-72) is also being version-5ed and shipped to Valencia, where they will have their permanent base.

Holmberg says he is not allowed to discuss Victory Challenge's budget nor make a comparison with last time. Funding for the campaign has come from the Stenbeck group of companies in particular Tele 2 and Modern Times Group (MTG) and Metro is expected to come on board too. However Hugo Stenbeck is leading the drive to bring other sponsors on board. With such influential media entities backing the campaign this represents an attractive proposition.

"Tele 2 has 26 million subscribers all over Europe, MTG is a satellite television company that is all over Europe and Eastern Europe with something like 16 million subscribers. And Metro is the second biggest newspaper group in the world after the Japanese.
So there is a lot of content for other sponsors. In that sense it puts us in a very strong position to find other sponsors," says Holmberg.

At present the America's Cup is not as well known in Sweden as the Volvo Ocean Race/Whitbread where some of Sweden's most famous yachtsmen such as Roger Nilson, Gunner Krantz and Magnus Olssen have been sailing repeatedly since the mid-1980s. However Holmberg believes that this gives them an opportunity to present the America's Cup as something exciting and new. In this respect their cause will done no harm by the America's Cup Act VI and VII being held in Malmo in last August/early September.

Unlike Stockholm and Gothenberg, Malmo offers the opportunity of racing in deep water close to the shore. It also is comparible with Valencia in being the country's third largest city.

"It is fantastic - hats off to the city council for taking this on," says Holmberg. "It is a big event and I don't think there are a lot of cities of that size with a 300,000 population that would dare to take on an event like that. It costs a lot of money and a lot of energy and infrastructure. It is one of those cities where they are trying to develop the waterfront and the old harbour where they used to build ships. Now it is apartments and like a lot of cities they are trying to profile it towards the water. Gothenburg has always had a lot of big sporting events and conferences. And Stockhom is the capital and Malmo has been left behind a bit. So now is their chance to catch up and get into the big league. The city is not that big but the area is and with the bridge, Copenhagen is only 20 minutes drive away and in the region there are 2-3 million within a couple of hour’s drive away."

Meanwhile with all his Cup commitments, Holmberg's participation in the Swedish Match Tour has had to take a back seat. At present he is only down to compete in Marstrand in early July at the Swedish Match Cup, an event he helped found.

Victory Challenge - a good outside bet as we gamblers say.