iShares Cup - the future of inshore racing

We look at the Extreme 40 racing and what lies ahead

This article follows on from our report on Alinghi's win in the 2008 iShares Cup yesterday

The iShares Cup is organised by OC Events while the boats and sales from builder Marstrom up in Sweden are handled by Herbert Dercksen and Daniel Koene’s organisation Tornado Sport.

Having picked up the pieces of the Extreme 40 circuit at the last minute last year, OC boss Mark Turner says that for the 2008 season they have focussing more on creating events that sailors want to compete in, uping the ante on the media side, building on the corporate entertainment program they had already got working well in 2007 and improving public interaction at each event.

In terms of media an independent auditor reckons the iShares Cup is on track to get 3 million Euros worth of media coverage, including a six part television series in the process of being broadcast.

One of the principle remits of the circuit is to allow the public to view the racing from ashore without having to get afloat. With the exception of the Cowes event, they managed this and Mark Turner is particularly pleased with the penultimate event in Kiel: “I can’t think of any time in sailing that I have seen spectators on a Sunday eight to 10 deep for a kilometre along the shore, just cheering boats going around the marks and the sailors hull flying to pose for the public. Ed Baird said he’d never sailed before that many people in his career.”



Getting the racing as close as possible to spectators was no better demonstrated than at this weekend's final event of the iShares Cup in Amsterdam is perhaps the classic iShares Cup venue in that both ends of the race course can be easily seen from any point along the shore. But the fear is that racing on such small courses effectively turns the racing into a joke.

“It is a difficult line to tread between maintaining sporting credibility that attracts as high a level as we could ever hope for, yet at the same time be entertaining and be a bit of a show,” admits Turner. “But we are always going to try and push that line, more and more towards making it more entertaining, but at the same time trying not to go too far from the sporting credibility so that we still can keep the top guys.” Fortunately the nimble Extreme 40s allow racing to take place even in the most light conditions when most classes wouldn’t consider getting afloat and a look across the six iShares Cup events this year shows that 79 races were held while in the confines of Amsterdam's building-surrounded IJ Haven 18 were successfully completed over just three days.



But while showing the racing up-front and dirty for spectator the event that everyone will remember this year will be Cowes when squalls and nasty wind against tide conditions caused most of the fleet to capsize. Racing was held off Calshot away from the Cowes Week crowds. However in 25 years of covering yacht racing we have not seen an event so drama-filled.

“In an ideal world you have that sailing we had in Cowes next to the public,” says Turner, ever the optimist. “You do need venues where the boats can stretch their legs a bit. Hyeres was pretty spectacular as well, but we do need to deliver at every event a product that is entertaining to the public. So I think we will struggle in the future to sail in places where you can’t see it from land and the experience is only reserved for those that have got a place on a boat. Cowes was great in terms of content, but we had pretty similar stuff in Hyeres and in Kiel if we’d have had 10 knots more wind it would have been the same.” Despite being in more open water the Cowes event could equally have been held in 5 knot winds.

Another issue is over the corporate guests. The iShares Cup is very impressive in terms how it exploits a unique facet of our sport - guests and media are allowed out on the boats in the morning while a ‘fifth man’ slot is available on all the boats for the actual races each afternoon. When the racing is crash and burn there is obviously the real risk of corporate guests going swimming or worse getting injured and one can imagine the potential liability issues. But Turner says they have been diligent in ensuring that when conditions are hairy the fifth person slots on board are not filled.

“It is a sport that has got some danger in it and in some ways that is some of the appeal. The fifth man is of key value - of putting people in the car. If you want to different between sailing and other sports, you don’t want to lose that. It is a mechanical sport and there are going to be crashes and we have to be careful to keep that line in the right place and just make sure that the guests know what they are getting in to.”

The only downside of the fifth man slot is that does look odd in the on-board TV footage from a supposedly grand prix racing event seeing one person on board doing nothing while the rest of the crew are a blur of activity.

The future

In the immediate future the 2008 iShares Cup may be done and dusted but several of the Extreme 40s are heading for Alicante for some exhibition racing during the week prior to the start of the Volvo Ocean Race. Six or seven boats are expected to be competing including Holmatro, Volvo Ocean Race, a Tommy Hilfiger/Delta Lloyd boat and a boat from Alicante. They are also due to be joined by the boat (previously Alinghi's second boat) now owned by Frenchman Eric Maris, skipper of the Farr 40 Twins and another boat with a new sponsor. During the Volvo Ocean Race the Extreme 40s will be competing during the Singapore, Boston and Stockholm stopovers.

For next year Tornado Sport’s Herbert Dercksen says that no changes to the boats are planned but they may look at fitting a floatation device to the masthead of all the boats to prevent them inverting fully in the event of a capsize. This would not be of the flying saucer type seen on some 1960s cruising catamarans, but a floating bladder fitted inside the masthead with an auto-inflate mechanism similar to that found on lifejackets .

With 17 Extreme 40s afloat at present, an 18th boat is currently under construction at Marstrom with more anticipated. The price of one is currently 380,000 Euros, including everything - trailers, containers, tool kit, fenders, etc. While few secondhand boats are available, any new players coming into the class are expected to buy new and it seems likely that some of the French former ORMA teams may finally be about to join in the fun. At present 14 nationalities are involved among the crew but the organisers are also hoping for boats from more nations, in particular Italy and Spain and Scandinavia. Two German teams and two other US team are also seriously interested as is one Irishman (Damian Foxall).

According to Mark Turner OC Events have a three year plan for the development of the circuit. While the European circuit is becoming well developed they are looking to set up similar circuit in the Middle East and Australasia by the end of 2010. “The reason for splitting into three series is that we know it is pretty tough to find 10 teams that would in their entirety be able to do the entire years with the same sponsors and the same sailors. What is special today is that we had ten teams that did all the events and although we had a couple of wild cards, fundamentally we have got a series and that is the important part (not the individual events) from a competitive point of view."

To this end a number of demonstration events for the Extreme 40s are to be staged around the world over the next months with four boats sailing in Dubai and Muscat, Oman at the end of November/beginning of December, in Sydney at the end of February 2009 and in San Francisco in mid to end of April 2009. For the iShares Cup 2009 Turner says they plan to increase the number of events to six with one extra event in another European country, as yet undecided. As to the UK event, they are looking at the possibility of moving the event from Cowes to London, although Turner says there are a number of other options too.

On a general note Turner points out that while in 2008 OC Events have run the Barcelona World Race and the Artemis Transat, in 2009 their only major event is the iShares Cup, so they will be able to focus on this much more. He says they want to try and improve the quality of the event further. While they would be hard pressed to get more Olympic or America’s Cup sailors into their ranks, he would like to see some better brands backing boats. “We have some good ones now, but we need to keep evolving that and encouraging some bigger consumer brands in now that we have a bigger media and spectator foot print. We want the best teams with great sponsors that are making use of it and are communicating it and sharing stories."

But is holding the iShares Cup in venues where the public can easily get to see it better than venues where the racing is perhaps better with a more open course and there is the possibility of more spectacle such as the incredible wind against tide event in Cowes this year. While this may have not been great for spectators the dramatic capsize images ended up plastered all over the TV, national newspapers and magazine front covers.

Tommy Hilfiger skipper, American multihull racing legend Randy Smyth who has previously competed in the Formula 40 and ProSail circuits that had more or less similar ambitions to iShares Cup back in the 1980s, believes the iShares Cup should go a stage further. Instead of the events being autonomous, they should piggyback on bigger non-sailing events that take place at the waters edge. “When people do see it, they do get excited about it, but the trick is to get people to see it. There are so many waterside events like music, art, cinema, airplane races and that’s where these events should go to. Don’t expect 200,000 people to come and see us because they don’t know about us. But we could go in the face of a crowd, as a good secondary show and enhance an existing festival or upgrade their program and totally upgrade the public viewing of our sport.”



Smyth also reckons that like the Aussie 18ft skiffs, the Extreme 40s should have different rig options to ensure they offer spectacular sailing in all wind conditions. In Amsterdam for example on the Sunday the boats were rarely hull flying and were usually fairly dead on the water. Smyth continues: “So if you want to sail in Cowes in 25 knots you put your small rig on or if you want to sail in 8 knots in Amsterdam you put the big rig on. You might not need two whole rigs, but we could have a masthead long pole with a plug on genniker and also have smaller sails when we show up in Cowes so we can race competitively without the carnival act it was this year. The carnival act is good up to the point of injuring people." Smyth points out that when you have boats out in conditions where they are uncontrollable even by Olympic medallists and America's Cup teams it is not good for the sport as it makes the sailors look amateur.

What is certain is that the iShares Cup does represent the future of inshore racing as a commercial entity. However while the circuit this year has gained credibility from having Cup teams in the form of Alinghi and Team Origin competing this season - both having upped the game - whether or not they will be back next year depends upon the outcome of the Cup dispute. OC must continue to promote the event to the sailing fraternity as a competitive racing event as well as one of yacht racing's top spectacles. That the iShares Cup is valid yacht racing is best demonstrated by Alinghi's clear domination of this year's circuit and even if some individual races were a lottery that an impressive 79 races were held across six events this season demonstrates that the overall results were definitely not.

What else could be done to make iShares Cup events more media/spectator friendly? Email us here