Sport or circus?

We speak to Mark Turner about his progess turning the iShares Cup into the top commercial inshore sailing event

The iShares Cup raises a great number of key philosophical questions about the commercial exploitation of our sport, particularly when it comes to inshore racing.

While the concept for the Extreme 40s was originally conjured up by leading cat sailors Herbie Dercksen and Mitch Booth, spearheading it today is OC boss Mark Turner. As the present arrangement stands, Dercksen’s company TornadoSport handles the supply of boats and their shore support during regatta, if for example damage occurs, while OC Events runs pretty much everything else - choosing the venues, laying on racing, handling the marketing, communications, corporate hospitality, etc.

Typically inshore yacht races take place because there is a demand by sailors or skippers or owners to go racing and for yacht clubs to host events. Sponsorship and the commercial side are to a large extent deemed necessary evils to assist with paying for events. The iShares Cup effectively turns that model on its head with the simple remit of attempting to find the best ways for an inshore sailing event to entertain and thrill spectators ashore, in order to exploit the event commercially. In short it is racing made for spectators first, sailors second.

How to create such non-sailing-public-friendly events is not an especially new conundrum for inshore events. Over the last two or three decades we have seen the made-for-television Ultra 30s in the UK, the pro-era of the 18ft skiffs in Sydney, the Ultimate 30s and ProSail in the States, more recently the Volvo Champions Race in Germany and various others. But compared to these the iShares Cup looks set to have more longevity as OC are into it for the long haul and it simply ticks more boxes than its predecessors.

So what is the formula?

It is sailed in multihulls, specifically catamarans, which while they may have dropped out of the Olympics temporarily (we hope) appear to have come of age in the rest of our sport from the huge numbers competing at the F18 Worlds, to the offshore exploits of Ellen, Francis Joyon, Thomas Coville and most recently Groupama III and Banque Populaire, as well as of course what was the biggest event in our sport – the America’s Cup. Aside from perhaps the foiling Moths, multihulls are the most visually interesting boats for a non-sailing audience to watch. Better still, they are more than capable of capsize or blowing themselves apart in big conditions, while also being exciting in even the lightest breeze. The iShares Cup’s Extreme 40s typically fly a hull in just 6-7 knots and this hull flying is another crucial benefit of the cat.

“In Venice when the first boat flew a hull, the public all started clapping spontaneously without any commentator saying anything and that is a core value of this,” says Turner. “Quite often, I look at how people watch it - are they looking at their kids or the floor? And they are stood there watching it, waiting for the hull to come out. No matter how many times you see it, even if you are a good sailor - you watch a boat when a big gust hits, it accelerates and it is ‘oh my God!’ I’m pretty bored of most sailing, I’ve been around it far too long without doing it myself and it still scares the hell out of me. And that is great - it works for the public, the media, the images and the boat does fit the bill. There may be a better tool down the line, we are not wedded to the Extreme 40 by any means, but right now there is nothing that ticks the box better.”

As to the Extreme 40 itself - catamarans are simpler and cheaper than trimarans and 40ft is about the right size – large enough to make a visual impact, fast enough to make for a hair-raising ride, but not so large and unwieldy that they can’t get around an ultra-short race course with some vague finesse.

Also different to normal regattas are the courses. Generally across yachting from the America’s Cup to dinghies there is a trend for shorter courses, but with the iShares Cup racing this reaches a whole new level. To give some idea - the aim is for spectators to be able to clearly see both ends of the race track, the start line, the weather mark with the finish line directly off the hospitality area. As a result typically iShares Cup races are only around 14 minutes long which is why as many as 20 races could be sailed over the three days of each event.

No windward-leewards?

With most professional inshore racing the priority is to set up perfect courses with a weather mark genuinely upwind and a start line perpendicular to it and often it is necessary to move the race area further out to sea to achieve this particularly when the wind is offshore. Not so, with the iShares Cup where the priority is to keep the race area as close to land as feasibly possible, regardless of wind direction or the fickleness of the breeze. Thus in Amsterdam for example the racing is within the cramped confines of the docks with concrete quayside clearly demarking the race area, while at Cowes Week this year racing was held in a confined area directly off Egypt Point with boats occasionally tacking right in at the shore to stay out of the current.

Thus courses are not always windward-leeward. “We are trying to make a stadium and that stadium has constraints,” explains Turner. “We have been very lucky. In two and a half years of it most races have had proper windward legs, not that the public give a monkey’s because the simplest thing for the public and the coolest thing to watch is a reach-reach. But there are limits to what we can do and every venue has its constraints. In Venice – no one has ever done a race where did it.” There the race area was a stone’s throw from the famous St Mark’s Square.

For those coming on to the circuit from the America’s Cup – as Alinghi did last year and BMW Oracle Racing at the start of this season – or from the Olympics, these courses are not always well-received but at the end of the day, as Turner points out, it is less for them than the spectators. In any case regardless of whether starts are upwind, downwind or reaching – the good guys always seem to win. “Downwind starts for example – the Alinghi guys thought it was a fight like any other, but the penalty you pay when you get it wrong is much harder. But the guys who get it right are in the lead and it is just a different discipline. In these boats you gain and lose positions so quickly with one mistake that the 1 or 5% bias on the line isn’t determinant. Starts are very important and you have to do the best you can, but ultimately there are many other opportunities for position changes.”

Personally Turner says he would like to look at different race formats too – speed trials, figure of eights, one against ones, etc. “It is a difficult balance. The key is that it is entertainment, it is like a TV program – if people get bored they will switch to another channel. That is all we are trying to do. Our aim is 14 minutes per race, simple enough so that you can tell who is in the lead, that the public can watch without needing to have someone or technology telling them who is winning and what is going on, which sailing finds it very hard to do very often.”

It is in fact much more important is to get races underway in quick succession.

Striking a balance

The problem, as Turner acknowledges, is that there is a fine line between the iShares Cup being a proper competitive sporting event with a level playing field, and conversely the racing being a circus, with courses far too short, the wind too fluky, the risk of collision or damage too high. Obviously with more and more top teams getting involved and the level of competition being raised from year to year, this is increasingly becoming an issue.

“Ensuring that there is sporting credibility and a very high level of sailing, balanced very firmly with turning sailing into an entertainment package, is a balance that is really hard to strike. We get plenty of pressure from the sailors wanting longer, bigger courses and equally plenty of pressure when we look at how it is working for our venues and making sure that cities and regions want the event.”

But Turner adds: “We are using sailing as a tool to create an entertainment package. We are not doing sailing for sailing’s sake. And if we cross the line and we forget the sporting bit, we will still be able to get the best sailors in the world, but it will cost us a lot more money, because we’ll be paying them to come and at the moment we don’t have a financial model that allows us to do that. It has been great having the Cup teams in, but ultimately they have only come to practice and that doesn’t really fit the model. It has been good from a media perspective and it is great for the sailing, but it has never been core to the commercial reasoning. They have been nice extras.”

Perhaps the ultimate acid test is do we care who’s winning or is the iShares Cup just a selection of the most dramatic moments, 30 second long video clips that will ultimately end up on YouTube? We get the impression that Turner is erring towards the latter. “What we have learned on the media side is that it is not the result of each race that really matters, it is the clips, it is having different accesses to different media. Just in terms of growing the media footprint, it is about having celebrities sailing on the boats, extreme days when it is windy. Images of Venice went everywhere because you don’t normally see that kind of imagery and we need to push on that more than worry about following the event at the time in terms of who has won which event.”

While Turner’s view is certainly right, we would argue that for the iShares Cup to ensure its longevity, it is still vital to make it work as a sport, so that spectators learn about the teams, have their favourites (“that nice Loick Peyron,” etc) and are interested in the outcome of each race, with the associated punch-ups on the dockside between rival fans. To do so, the circuit needs to push its Lewis Hamiltons.

Another important aspect of the Extreme 40 racing that other circuits haven’t embraced to the same degree and which mostly significantly is unique to sailing, is the right of the class to put a fifth man on to the boats - during racing. A typical day for a team during an iShares Cup regatta will start off with some corporate guests going out for a jolly in the morning, but come racing proper a VIP, a corporate guest, a member of the media, a star – whoever – can taste Extreme 40 racing in person as the fifth man on board.

At Cowes Week alone, the list of VIP guests who sailed on board during races included Duran Duran front man Simon le Bon, adventure/TV personality Ben Fogle and the CEO of Brawn F1, Nick Fry. “The ishares Cup is just like F1 on the water – the performance, the balance of the boat is just phenomenal, the expertise of the crew, the razzmatazz about it is just phenomenal and is not dissimilar to F1,” Fry commented after racing on board Ecover.

However aside from the irregularity of the courses at times, it seems that the fifth man spot is one of the biggest bones of contention in the class, showing up the marked difference between teams willing to ‘play the game’ and those that purely wanting to win at any cost, even if it is to the detriment to the ‘iShares experience’.

“Fifth man guests – is absolutely fundamental to this, but there are some teams that don’t think that’s important,” states Turner. “It is their right to think that, but it is difficult to manage, because that isn’t going away. We aren’t going to change the commercial model. Until this year we didn’t have to worry about what kind of fifth man people were put on board, apart from Alinghi last year which we had to get sorted out pretty early on.” At the first regatta at Lugano last year Alinghi’s fifth man was their coach, Peter Evans. Turner continues: “Unfortunately this year we’ve had to increase the rules to stop people trying to select the weight of the fifth man they want and putting pro sailors on board and pretending that they are not. It is natural – the competitive level has gone up, people want to win, there is a lot at stake. We didn’t have a rule in place. This year we have had to evolve the rule, just to try and stop that. We can’t weigh VIPs and put weight belts on them - that is not going to happen.”

Read part two of this article tomorrow....