Radical reform?

We speak to ORMA President Gilles Cambournac about the proposed developments to save the 60ft multihull class

Tuesday's look at the trials and tribulations of the ORMA 60 class followed a press conference in Paris on Sunday where the ORMA class and Benjamin Rothschild, owner of the two Gitana trimarans, introduced the new concept for the class along with a new name - the MultiCup.

Often French classes are volatile and factionalised so it is a tribute to the individuals involved that they have not only been able to get around a table, but since doing this have found they have much common ground.

To give some background to the ORMA class - the end of the 1980s saw the demise of the 'class one' maxi-multihulls, at the time 75ft in length (in the mid-1980s the maximum length had been 85ft) as exemplied by Serge Madec's all-conquering Jet Services V, which went on to become Commodore Explorer, and in the hands of Bruno Peyron became the first boat to gain the Jules Verne Trophy for sailing around the world non-stop in less than 80 days back in 1993. With the demise of the big multihulls due to escalating costs at a time when the French economy was less than buoyant, so the new grand prix multihull class became the 60 footers. This followed the impressive performance in the mid-1980s of two British 60ft trimarans, Tony Bullimore's Nigel Irens-designed Apricot and Mike Whipp's Adrian Thompson-designed Paragon, these two boats the forebears of today's crop of trimarans.

To rationalise the class ORMA was created in 1991-2 by Philippe Facque, formerly the skipper of the maxi-catamaran Royale, winner of the Quebec-St Malo in 1984. The Royale brand of cigarettes and its owner SEITA (now part of the giant Franco-Spanish Altadis Group) have been tied to the class by association ever since. Aside from being race organiser, Facque also understood the importance of getting good television images of the trimarans racing and so set up Royale Productions. Acieving this included the creation of a purpose-built wave piercing catamaran camera motorboat with an on board production suite from which live broadcasts could be made on the fly, provided the producer had an iron stomach.

President of ORMA for the last year has been Gilles Cambournac, former Managing Director of SEITA who took up the role after retiring from a lengthy and esteemed career within France's tobacco and spirits trade. Through his association with Royale Cambournac has an intimate knowledge of the ORMA class, its strengths and weaknesses. The strength of the class is certainly the 60ft trimarans themselves and the sailors who race them. The weakness of the class has been perhaps the ORMA committee itself which have been slow to respond to change and some argue have been lacking imagination in how to develop the world's most exciting sail boat class.

It was for this last reason that Baron Benjamin de Rothschild, owner of the two Gitana trimarans and an avid fan of the class, through frustration began to carry out his own survey within the 60ft trimaran community to find out what should be done. After working in parallel for some months, it was only within the last weeks that the two factions, ORMA and Rothschild, sat down and rapidly came to the conclusion that they were fighting the same cause.

Cambournac describes their meeting: "We all expected Benjamin Rothschild to be a millionaire, like so many people in sailing - a nice playfield, enjoying what they like, with the idea of having a sort of private or semi-private circuit between rich people, which was absolutely the opposite to the idea we had from the beginning which was ‘how can we bring these fantastic images to the public?’ But in fact that was exactly what he had in mind too and we realised we had absolutely the same ideas, so we decided to push ahead together.

"He came to the conclusion that there was no more appropriate or less bad solution than the one we proposed and that is why we reached this agreement. It was like ‘how come we have not met before?’ It shouldn’t be ORMA on one side and other sponsors and skippers on the other side represented by Benjamin Rothschild."

One of the principle points of agreement was separating out what Cambournac refers to as the 'Franco-French' races, the offshore shorthanded events such as the Route du Rhum and Transat Jacques Vabre from the main championship. While many view the short-handed offshore events as being the backbone of the class Cambournac has some well-thought out reasons for removing them.

"The main reason - and one which has existed for years - is our intention to try and make this circuit a little more international or less French and you can’t bring Anglo-Saxons or Italian or German people, etc to a sport which is dominated by one formula which is singlehanded or doublehanded races," he says. "They are not interested in that at all. If we are only looking at crewed racing then it allows people coming from New Zealand or the UK to realise they could have their own team."

By doing this he doesn't mean to show disrespect to the organisers of the shorthanded offshore events and presumably many of the boat sponsors will want to benefit from the massive exposure (compared to the Grand Prix) generated from the Route du Rhum and the other shorthanded transatlantic races. "We are going to organise our championship so that there is time enough for them to do that," says Cambournac. "We are not going to create a race exactly at the same time as the Quebec-St Malo or the OSTAR or the Jacques Vabre."

Another point of agreement between ORMA and Rothschild is that they want to make the new MultiCup a pinnacle in competitive sailing. Cambournac believes that the singlehanded or doublehanded offshore events are at odds with this. "One way or the other we have to separate what is sailing and what is adventure. The Route du Rhum is not a sailing competition, it is a fantastic adventure so the race part is not the most interesting one. Especially now it is more about being good at meteo, and being good at running a boat because if you go too fast you capsize. The word ‘race’ for that is not appropriate, it should be ‘transatlantic adventure’ which is by the way a race. We would like to establish races whatever they are, but they are first and foremost races between skippers and crews. So we are going to start this next season."

The minutae of how they are going to achieve their objectives at present are under discussion - as Cambournac puts it, the skeleton is in place, but it needs to be filled up with muscles and nerves. What has been announced is that they plan to set up separate bodies, one, more of an executive, will run the circuit including any amendments to the class rules, the equipment limitations, the format of the races of the championship - how many, where, etc, the other comprising the main sponsors. "They will run the financial flow, because at the end of the day it is their money they have invested in the circuit collectively in their own way, assuming that it works with what has been set up by ORMA." Further details will be revealed at the end of January.

Cambournac provides a little more insight into the sponsors' side of this arrangement: "People entering, a new sponsor for example, will have to buy shares of this second company with the agreement to sell them back when they leave, but what we would like is to have those people really involved in things. In a way it is symbolic, because it won’t cost a mountain of money, but the fact is that there will be a Chairman and a body at least having some governance of the funds which will go through because at the end of the day all those guys - they don’t do it for their own pleasure, most of them work for big companies who do it for communication purposes. It is not about running a boat. Some of those guys don’t even know that a boat can’t go straight into the wind."

Another objective of the new ORMA-Rothschild union is to make the trimaran racing a good spectator sport. With a four year plan in the pipeline - and better still an international sponsor, which Rothschild is bringing to the table (hence, some argue ORMA's enthusiasm to work with him) - Cambournac hopes to establish some regular events in their new calendar where TV companies and the general public know that they will have an opportunity to see 60ft trimaran racing at the highest level.

"I am one of the people who is doubting, that the America’s Cup will be a great success," says Cambournac. "The fact is the America’s Cup has always been watched with a six hour time difference in Europe so it will be the first time people have access live regularly during daytime and then we will see if people are interested because the spectacle in itself [of America's Cup racing] is not very interesting. In the first five minutes 90% of the job is done and it is so complicated - it is very difficult to explain why those guys are circling and circling and circling and not crossing the line. With multihulls even in 5 knots of wind you can get good pictures."

If the 60ft trimarans are the most visually exciting racin boats, then it is up to the new organisation to ensure that the format of racing lives up to this too. However the ideas we have heard and which Cambournac says about the 'new look Grand Prix format', sound very similar to the 'old look Grand Prix format' except including greater participation by the public, local dignitaries, press etc in a short race series within a series.

In line with their plans to internationalise the class, they are also planning to stage only two grand prix of the five each year within France. A significant problem with doing this is that many of the primary sponsors within the class only have interests in France. Groupama and Sodebo for example do have business outside of France while two other significant sponsors within the class, Geant and Banque Populaire do not.

"We addressed that before our announcement," says Cambournac. "We talked with them and said 'we want to evolve this circuit in a certain way - either you follow or you don’t follow us'. We won’t organise it in totally unknown cities outside of France. We will give them the opportunity to do advertising or to take people to those places. You could go to Cowes, which is quite well known in France, or Puerto Cervo and Cascais, or maybe you go to Morocco or Tunisia which are countries with environments well known in France. So we will try to build on that but at the end of the day if sponsors are not interested in European development then they will have to choose another sport. Even then it will be very hard for them to find such a cheap sport... So we have to do that and we are going to do that, because even if we lose, we were going to lose anyway. So it is true it is a gamble."

Another issue the class have to address is its marketing. While most people, non-sailors included, are gob-smacked when they first see a 60ft trimaran race, sailors - including most of the great French sailing legends such as Tabarly, Colas, Jeantot, the Peyrons, the Pajots, Poupon, Arthaud - have been racing large multihulls in France for 35 years now and perhaps because of this lengthy period of time, combined with the failure of ORMA to reinvent itself, the French media have become almost jaded by the sport.

Cambournac says they will also look at finding way of rectifying this. "I think one of the ideas is we are going to spend some of this budget is to try and get some new connections with the media and to expose them to the thing and say ‘look, it is still a very cheap sport’, if you are fed up with golf, tennis and all those thing - maybe you can try it."

Part of what must be doen between now and the end of January is working out on amendments to the class rules in light of the disastrous Transat Jacques Vabre just gone and the equally carnage-ridden 2002 Route du Rhum before. Cambournac says this is now in the hands of a technical committee led by Michel Desjoyeaux. Once this committee have established their findings they will be endorsed by one of the big maritime standards organisations such as Bureau Veritas.

Contrary to the opinion we dug up and published in Tuesday's article calling for the boats to sail depowered in offshore events, Cambournac says they intend for each team to decide upon the configuration of their boat for the first race of the season - it is intended to kick off each year with a 2-3,000 miler - but they must then stay in this configuration for the remainder of the year. "Either they make the choice to have a lake-type boat or they make something a bit more suitable for big races, but they will have to make the choice and once they have made that choice it is finished. This includes the Route du Rhum and the Jacques Vabre so we are going to work with Pen Duick to fix the rules which will say that the class have accepted the Jacques Vabre and the Route du Rhum, but the boats attending these races have got to be in line with the rules so you don’t change your mainsail for example."

Over the last five years we have seen the development of the Nokia Oops Cup in Sweden sailed by 60ft trimarans that are effectively no longer competitive in France. In theory this should be perceived as a prime example of 'internationalising 60ft trimaran racing' but Cambournac has his reservations about this. "What they are doing is so different to what we want to do. The Oops Cup is a kind of a semi-private circuit, even if it is dedicated to the public, but not run on the same ideals that we have. For us it is more than sailing in the Fastnet and Giraglia and all those classic races - that is not what we are aiming at. A lot of people say you should have one design boats and I say, no that is not what we are looking for. Our idea is not principally to make the skippers happy. It is to make the guy who is interested in football or rugby on a Sunday image, to look at those images and continue to be interested in it."

We press Cambournac on why he thinks the Oops Cup has different ideals. "They forget what is a sport. All the French skippers who went there said it was quite boring in terms of the racing. They said that the circuit is not really organised towards competition, it was more having a sort of big family game including everyone and it was fun."

While the movement in the ORMA may not be to everyone's liking, at least now there is some movement. Most importantly the class at the end of January will be announcing their new, large international sponsor and this can only bode well considering that they had to run the show on a shoestring without an overall sponsor for the last two seasons. The principle item ORMA need to improve is sponsors' return on investment as once the circuit starts to make good financial sense for corporate marketing departments, then in theory at least there is no reason why we should see the end of this amazing class.