Ramping up the World Match Racing Tour

Director Craig Mitchell on the future of his circuit

Friday April 9th 2010, Author: James Boyd, Location: none selected

With its new Far Eastern owners, and a more secure financial footing, the World Match Racing Tour is in the process of ramping itself up, but the question remains – where will it end up? For its perpetual stumbling block is that by rights the World Match Racing Tour should be the premier circuit for this arm of the sport, but of course that position is securely held by the America’s Cup. In past years this has left the Tour being the event some Cup teams squeeze in when their programs allow or as the worthy platform to elevate new match racing stars such as the likes of Ian Williams, Torvar Mirsky and Adam Minoprio and before them Jesper Radich and Jes Gram Hansen. Can it ever be more than this?

In recent months the security of the Tour has not been helped by ISAF, who granted it supposedly exclusive rights to hold match racing events outside of the America’s Cup, failing to crack down on the Louis Vuitton Trophy events - something that the Tour’s acting President Peter Gilmour, when we spoke to him in December, said could well result in litigation.

According to Craig Mitchell, Director of the World Match Racing Tour, this is presently in a holding pattern as the sailing world waits for BMW Oracle Racing and Challenger of Record Mascalzone Latino Audi Team to decide upon the format for the 34th America’s Cup. If the Louis Vuitton Trophy events become the equivalent of the Acts (before the 32nd AC) and therefore part of the America’s Cup – as seems likely, BMW Oracle being one of the founding stakeholders in the LV events - then the Tour no longer have a case.

“We are still putting pressure on for ISAF to do the right thing, but we’ll see how it unfolds in the next couple of months,” says Mitchell. “The big disappointment this year is that the La Maddalena event clashes with Match Race Germany – that has been in the calendar for three years and they have come in and completely ignored that.” As a result the four or so tour regulars, tied to Cup teams will not be present.

“It is infuriating more than anything else,” continues Mitchell. “We spend a lot of time trying to coordinate with the Farr 40s, the RC 44s, the Melges 32s - the classes which are paying the money, but it doesn’t always work. There are always going to be clashes, just because there is so much sailing going on, but you need to minimise the clashes, work out how best to get through it both from a sailing and a media point of view so that everyone gets their week in the sun.”

As to the changes under the new Malay-Hong Kong ownership, the World Match Racing Tour’s permanent staff have now increased from just Mitchell and Yvonne Reid in the Lymington office to five more in the Tour office in Kuala Lumpar. The new staff include a Communications Manager, someone looking after new events and chasing sponsorship, a finance department, while in the UK they have a brand manager in Ivan Tuen. The team has gone from two to ten, including Tour principals, Patrick Lim and acting President Peter Gilmour.

They are in the process of recruiting a permanent President and a Commercial Director – appointments which should happen in the next two or three months.

“It has turned into quite a sizable team pretty quickly - which is good, because it means there is more capacity to do things,” says Mitchell. They have a new PR company in Fast Track, and the TV role has been split with program production being handled by Red Handed, who created the Monsoon Cup coverage last year, and Boulder Creek managing the distribution.

“We are trying to see if we can get Virtual Eye involved. Mark Chisnell is running the live blog and we have Facebook and Twitter and the social media to try and up the ante and connect with the fans,” says Mitchell.

This year they will be broadcasting live TV from the Monsoon Cup (as they did last year) but also from the events in Korea and Vietnam. “We are pushing hard to get one or two European events up to the same level as well, although there’s nothing concrete there may be something soon,” says Mitchell.

New for 2010 is the Vietnam Match Cup. This has presented a few issues as at present there is no national authority for sailing in that country. The venue is Nha Trang in the south of the country where the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club’s Hong Kong-Vietnam race concludes.
“I wouldn’t say it is a marina – it is an area where fishing boats and some pleasure boats are,” says Mitchell of this latest Tour venue. “It is very under developed and a beautiful place. It is one of the nicest beaches in Vietnam.”

So isn’t the World Match Racing Tour in danger of becoming the Far East Match Tour? “There is a bit of a danger of that, but Patrick and Peter’s vision is to build it in all area,” says Mitchell. “At the moment it is a European tour, but we are talking to people in the Middle East. There are guys in the US – the Congressional Cup is keen to step up. We are keen to work with them - they have a good solid event that could be great again. They just need to bring the funding in. The guys at Chicago Match Race centre, they are doing a good job with their Grade 2 and 3 events. They have just taken on a commercial manager. One of their events is a qualifier this year for the Danish Open. If you talk to 15 different organisations and you can convert say two or three a year and keep the conversion process going, then the Tour will build.”

Patrick Lim and Peter Gilmour’s version of World Match Race Tour nirvana, says Mitchell, is for it annually to comprise 20 events each with US$500,000 prize money. In the Far East they are approaching this with Monsoon Cup still having the biggest prize purse amounting to around US$450,000, while the new Vietnam event has a similar amount up for grabs.

So will all this change top match racer’s perception of the Tour and will we start seeing some of the Cup skippers regularly returning? “I am still a believer that the America’s Cup is a design contest, then you start match racing when your boats are the same speed. So by the time of the real critical matches you are going to have to have your match racing skills honed and the Tour is a great place to hone your skills. Yes, the boats are smaller, but the manoeuvres are pretty much the same. What you see on the Tour is what you see in the America’s Cup, albeit on a bigger, slightly slower scale. On a Tour event you are getting in a lot of racing and other teams racing as well that you are going to go up against, so you can look at their new moves, look at their psychology - how do they handle it when they are down and almost out, do they come back fighting? How do they handle the pressure? I think it is very relevant to the teams to check in.”

A new regular on the Tour this year is Francesco Bruni, who’s Azzurra team won the Louis Vuitton Trophy in Nice last autumn and more recently the Congressional Cup in California. For Azzurra, the Tour forms part of their America’s Cup training program. Making a return this year is French match race veteran Bertrand Pace of the Aleph Sailing Team, another potential AC challenger.

Getting an invite to match racing events, particularly the big league ones on the Tour, is a perennial problem for those wishing to get ahead in the sport. The Tour has introduce a Tour card system whereby the leading teams get a guaranteed a spot at events. However for 2010 this has been modified, so there are now nine tour cards rather than eight and these cards guarantee entry to six events rather than the complete Tour.

“Invites have always been a problem with match racing, so we are just trying to work out new ways to get people involved, but obviously there is a limit,” says Mitchell. In practice this means that the Tour card holders get to race at all Tour events this year, bar one. However they can get invites to additional events as ‘wild cards’ - if they can convince the promoters that they are a good person to come along.

So the line-up for Tour events comprises Tour card holders and wild cards entries usually belonging to the event promoter who can use it to entice in some local hero or someone bringing added value to their event, although the Tour is provided with some additional wild cards at Match Race Germany and the Bermuda Gold Cup. “We are talking to some skippers who only want to do two or three events,” says Mitchell. “Dean Barker is keen to do a couple of events when he can and Magnus Holmberg too. There is a whole list of people.”

Obviously the number of additions depends on the number of spots available and this varies between events and the number of boats available. Most events have a field of 12, but some have 16 with biggest field being the Bermuda Gold Cup with 24. “That is something they are keen to do,” says of the Bermuda event. “They love to see the underdogs come and shine. We like it because anyone who is in with a shout for the Tour championship or who gets into the top six, they automatically forwarded into the Monsoon Cup. So people can grab their last points there that might get them to the Monsoon Cup.”

Some Tour events have qualifiers beforehand to allow the event organiser to fill the remain spots and we have always felt the Tour should be aiming to have men’s, women’s and youth qualifiers, the top placers feeding into each Tour event. “It would be great to have 24 teams at each event but logistically and practically 12 or 16 is probably the number at the moment,” says Mitchell, who prefers the idea of a Women’s Match Racing Tour, a more formalised and heavily promoted version of what WIMRA run at present.

Of course women’s match racing has had a giant shot in the arm through it being adopted as a discipline for the 2012 Olympics. However teams in this are already accommodated at Olympic classes events and prefer to only race in the chosen weapon, the Elliott 6m, or in the similar 3-4 person boats used for the Women’s Match Racing Europeans and Worlds.

“I think it is great for the women’s game - it is really what it needed to boost it and make it bigger, because national authorities will put money into it and into their training programs and hopefully it will all develop,” says Mitchell of the Olympic development. “It is also helping the race officials program, because match racing needs its umpires and we need to keep encouraging race officials, because as the match racing game moves on, so the umpires must move on with it. We need to find ways of bringing on new umpires on and making sure the current umpires are up to speed and well compensated because that is all part of the game.”

As to the youth side, the Tour already runs an equivalent in the Far East, where it is used to develop that each country’s budding sailing talent. This has been growing for example in Malaysia, where the winner of the qualifier gets a berth at the Monsoon Cup.

Meanwhile Mitchell in the throws of running the first Tour event this year in Europe, Match Race France in Marseile, where today he hopes to conclude the round robins before getting into the business end of the regatta over the weekend.

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