iShares Cup for 2010

Telefonica Black skipper and Beijing Tornado Gold medallist Fernando Echavarri discusses his future

Readers of thedailysail will recognise that we try to divide content up between ‘offshore’, ‘inshore’ and ‘dinghy’, so when it comes to Fernando Echavarri we have some major deliberating to do. On the one hand this weekend he was competing aboard an Extreme 40 in his first iShares Cup regatta down in Almeria in the south of his native Spain (he lives in Santander in the north), but this summer he completed the Volvo Ocean Race as skipper of Telefonica Black while shortly before the start of the Volvo he returned from Beijing with a gold medal in the Tornado to add to his two World Championship titles in the former Olympic catamaran. El problemo.

A multihull nut, Echavarri was enthusing about the Extreme 40s as we sat down on the first floor terrace of the VIP lounge at the iShares Cup overlooking the Almeria race course on one side and the sizable area for spectators on the other, complete with bars, the stage for the rock concert that took place on Saturday night and the orchestra on Sunday night, etc.

“It is really good,” said Echavarri of the event where he ended up an uncharacteristic second last, due to inexperience in the Extreme 40 and not helped by a broken bowsprit on the second day of racing. “We’re just thinking that we would like to have one probably for next year. We have been a bit unlucky here, but I think we can be there for next year. We have to work this winter to identify the funding and get the sponsors to make a proper campaign. It will be difficult because of the [economic] crisis, but I think it is a good project to sell to sponsors.”



While 37 year old Echavarri has spent 10 years campaigning Tornados with his long term crew Anton Paz, he hasn’t previously raced many other multihulls apart from Hobies and most recently in the Clairefontaine Trophy champion of champions race. In fact the Extreme 40 is almost a half way house between the very differing disciplines of Olympic Tornado racing and the Volvo Ocean Race, the two hulled experience of the highest level coming from the former and running a large crew in the latter.

“You need to work a lot with the boat and with the crew to be fast and to know how to manoeuvre, because everything is really close and training makes a big difference,” he says of his fledgling iShares Cup experience. “Here we did okay in some races, but with more training we will be much better. A lot of it is about starting and to start well you need to have complete control of the boat, its acceleration, slowing down or going backwards - we don’t have that and the others do. And also, for sure, with the manoeuvres - tacking, gybing - and the set-up of the boat. Always, if you work as a team with a proper campaign you can do well. If you come with just two days training it is difficult to be at the top against people who have been racing these boats for two or three years.”

As to the Extreme 40s themselves, he loves them. “It is really important - with just 10 or 12 knots you have a show. And that is not normal in sailing competitions. Like TP52s or GP42s, with them to make a show you need 20 knots and no one will look at it because it is always offshore. So this is the way to make sailing more accessible.”

Racing on the iShares Cup’s very-very-close-to-shore race tracks – within the harbour in Almeria (or around a dock in Amsterdam) for example – is great for spectators but quite often means that it is impossible to set unbiased windward-leeward courses and often the breeze in these venues can redefine the term ‘fickle’. Most crews on the iShares Cup appreciate that this is the price you pay for making sailing a genuine spectator sport. In Almeria for example several of the braver crews were hull flying so close to the dockside that spectators could at times literally reach out and touch the hull. One wonders briefly about the health and safety consequences of this, but in the moments when there was enough wind for the cats to get their hulls airborne there were genuine gasps of excitement and rapturous applause from the assembled crowd.

Echavarri doesn’t have a problem with the courses, although he acknowledges that if it were to go the other way, ie too much wind, it could become quite dangerous. “In my opinion I would also make some different things during these three days, like one morning having a long distance race or even night sailing. That would be fantastic – before or after the concert in the evening. There are many ideas to play with because you have some much potential to sell this.”



On to the Volvo Ocean Race and this last race was Echavarri’s second experience of the round the world race, having sailed from Rio with movistar in 2005-6 race until they were forced to abandon ship mid-Atlantic. This time around Echavarri of course skippered Telefonica Black with a largely Spanish crew.

“It was a really nice race. We visited new places - India and China, etc. In the end perhaps it was a bit long - too many stopovers, a lot of work for the shore teams, people got really tired.”

At a personal level he found it tough making the leap to skipper. He was involved in the campaign from the outset but had the distraction shortly before the start of the Beijing Olympics. “I was involved with the project from the beginning, but I didn’t spend the time you need to prepare one of these projects properly. To come back from the Olympics was really good because we took the gold medal, but then at the beginning it was tough to work with different people that we recruited over time, especially because we had quite a lot of problems with the boat. When you have good results everything is fine, but on the first leg we broke, in China we had to retire, so it was quite frustrating for all the crew. In the end we won the last leg, which was the one where there were good conditions for us, but then we were leading for several of the last legs, but we always had problems and it was really frustrating.”

On Friday the new rule for the VO70 was published along with the Notice of Race, including many of the measures race CEO Knut Frostad has included in an attempt to curb escalating costs next time around. However Echavarri still doesn’t think this is enough and he expects teams will still sink a lot of money into design and R&D for the 2011-12 race. “I think they should go for something different. There was a proposal to do it in 90ft one design catamarans," he hints at what he would have preferred. "But it is hard to say. I think the Volvo could be in one designs, radical boats or whatever you want to do, fast boats, but at the same time make it more of a show.”

Next time around to lower costs he says they will look to bring the sailing crew home in stopovers as this will be cheaper than carting families around the world. Then there are less sails and less sail design, no two boat testing, etc. “That will give the teams with less money more opportunities. So they are working on it, but still it is going to be expense.”

As to whether or not Telefonica will return for a third campaign, Echavarri says he hopes they will as they achieved their marketing objectives this time around.



For Echavarri, he has now done some diverse racing at the highest level, but when pressed he admits his passion remains the Olympics. “To be honest the Games are the Games. Even the Volvo Ocean Race as a skipper I still didn’t feel what I felt in Beijing taking the Gold medal. It was just amazing. With the Olympic Games you can see why people get crazy about it.”

The problem for him of course is that there is now no Tornado in the 2012 Games. He is adamant that he wants to compete again and at present is weighing up the options over the class he will move into. He reckons he will be ready to announce this in around one month's time. The most likely move would be into the 49er, however Spain already has strong representation there in the form of past world champions Iker Martinez and Xabi Fernandez, who were also team mates of his during the Volvo.

“You have to look at everything, not just the class, it is also the challenge. Sometimes it is good to have a big challenge in your life, to try to go to a new class, completely different from the Tornado. To do that in three years time is a huge challenge but if you do it well there can be more satisfaction.”

Echavarri of course hopes that the powers that be see sense and that a catamaran is re-instated to the Games for 2016 in Rio. “Everybody, not just in ISAF, but the whole sailing world knows that what happened with the Tornado class was just crazy. There has to be a catamaran in the Olympics if it is a Tornado or an Extreme 40. We have the America’s Cup in multihulls. We have all the records in multihulls. We have the Extreme 40s. The multihull community is one of the biggest ones in the world. Around the world there are multihulls – everywhere you go.”

So if it was reinstated would his weapon of choice still be the Tornado? There are other more popular and more modern boats such as F18s available today. Echavarri says he would prefer to stick with the Tornado. “The Tornado is by far the boat best developed to be an Olympic class. It is one boat where even if ISAF say the Tornado is expensive, it is in my opinion one of the cheapest classes. After two or three years I was changing boats but [when I sold them] I always got about 70% of the price I paid two or three years before. So you can have one or two boats for one Olympic campaign and then you just change the sails because the masts will last over the four years.

“The only part of the Tornado which can be expensive is the sail development. But if you cut that and made one design sails, it is easy. It would be cheaper than a 49er. If I wanted to do a Star campaign I would have to pay more than three times the price of a new Tornado. So the Tornado is a good concept, the performance is the best you can imagine. It is a power machine which has been prepared for years and years…”

They also are good one designs. “Laser for example is at the Olympic Games and the sailors are just praying for years before that they get a good boat for the Games because they know that there will be differences between the boats. With Tornados that doesn’t happen. We made the Olympic Games with all new gear but you can take any boat and it will be as fast as the others and that is one of the most important things.”

Echavarri reckons the 2016 Tornado could even be made fully in carbon fibre and still be cheaper than the pre-preg S-glass boats that have been built to date.

So going forward Echavarri sees the next few years for him being the Olympics, ready for Weymouth in 2012, another Volvo campaign if money can be found and in between a stint in Extreme 40, in an attempt to win the increasingly competitive iShares Cup.