New giant for the Volvo Ocean Race

We speak to Ken Read about his new round the world race campaign

A signpost that a sport is in the ascent is when a giant international brand chooses to back it. This was the case recently when multinational sportswear company Puma announced they would be mounting an entry in the Volvo Ocean Race led by Ken Read.

As well as being Vice-President for North Sails Group, Read has been one of the most prolific helmsman and skippers in the US and has been involved with three America's Cup programs, most recently steering Dennis Conner's Stars & Stripes in Auckland.

So why is Read all of a sudden going offshore? "I was tired after the last Cup," he admits. "It didn’t go perfectly and I guess at the end of the day it just wasn’t a whole lot of fun. I kind of saw in the Volvo experience it was pretty easy to get the fun back into the thing. I have a young daughter and we weren’t prepared to move to Europe for years and do an America’s Cup stint that way, so this just makes sense. The other aspect is that there are only so many windward-leewards you can do before it gets a little tiring and I’ve been doing a lot of windward-leeward race courses for the last 25-30 years, so it is time for a bit of a change within the profession. "

This move has been a while in coming for Read. He was originally signed up to sail several legs on Chessie Racing, George Collins' US entry in the 1997-8 Whitbread race but this coincided with Read's mother dying and so these plans were put on hold. His biggest Volvo Ocean Race experience came last year when he sailed the final four legs of the race on Neal McDonald's Ericsson.

"The Ericsson opportunity was a great one," he recalls. "It was like the finishing touches to what I had thought - that this would be a blast. And sure enough it is not just the sailing part of it but the whole concept, the whole program, the management and the company that these things create. It is just a great challenge and I felt I was up to it, I was ready for it."

While Read is best known for his inshore racing success, he has also competed in many 'distance races' (as they are known in the US) including Bermuda Races, the Transpac on the Ed Dubois designed maxi Genuine Risk, numerous Admiral's Cups and Fastnets, the most fun one he remembers being on board Gianni Agnelli's all-black maxi Stealth around the time of the America's Cup Jubilee in 2001. "So there's been plenty of big boat offshore experience. I am not naïve to think I have the most amount of Volvo offshore experience, but hopefully I am smart enough to know where to bring in experts to help out in that type of situation..."

This will be the first time Read has run such a major program, but says that he has plenty of managerial experience thanks to his role at North Sails. "Part of my management job at North Sails feels like one big racing program, that’s what I do every day anyway."

Read was certainly fortunate in how he got the Puma sponsorship. He says he wasn't pounding on boardroom doors. "It just came from a conversation over a couple of glasses of wine one night. Pounding on boardroom doors was the last thing I was planning on doing - I couldn’t think of something that would be less fun to do. I bet if you ask 98% of people who have gotten some sort of sponsorship, an initial door has to be opened up through a friend or an acquaintance that gets you to the right spot."

But while Read was provided with an initial introduction after this it was over to him. "I had to make sailing work for them - that was the big decision. This wasn’t a ‘here’s the keys to the boardroom, welcome to Puma’. It was a ‘here’s a phone number of a person to start with and you have go and win it on sailing’s merits, on this race’s merits, as a real marketing tool for a major corporation'."

Read's task was made a little easier in that Puma had more or less decided that they wanted to get involved with sailing. "Puma consider themselves as a sports lifestyle company, where they really grab on to major sports and utilise the fashion and the technical nature of the clothing that these sports utilise as ways to market and promote and create their brand. And sailing was next on the list for them and it was just really fortunate timing and a great experience for all of us," says Read. "It was a lot of work, I wouldn’t say it was a hard sell, because once they understood what the Volvo race was all about they became believers in that race quite quickly."

At present it is unclear whether the Puma Volvo Open 70 will be a US or a German entry - Puma's global headquarters are in Herzogenaurach, northwest of Nuremberg. Or possibly it might be a French entry... In the last 24 hours it has been announced that Puma are to be acquired in a 'friendly takeover' by the giant French group Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, who's portfolio of luxury fashion good companies includes Gucci, Stella McCartney and Yves Saint Laurent.

As a sports sponsor Puma already has a formidable record including the Ferrari F1 team and the Italian World Cup winning football team. They are also heavily involved in Motocross, tennis, golf and a wide array of other sports. So why sailing? "They have had this categorised growth plan over the years now and in this part of the growth plan sailing was going to be a key sport in which they took this sports lifestyle concept to the next level and sailing was in the sports lifestyle card," says Read. "What a perfect way to go global with a line of products and a brand? What a way to absorb an entire sport in one shot? The Volvo is perfect for that."

Read reckons it is most likely to be a US entry as while Puma is headquartered in Germany they have a major subsiduary in nearly Boston and the team will be run out of Read's base in Newport, RI, until the new boat is shipped to Alicante prior to the start. "In the meantime we get to work out of the area I live in and am familiar with and utilise all the assets around here and I get to have my friends involved and people who I have great respect for and get to call the shots. So it is a bit of a dream come true."

A designer has been chosen, but this will announced along with the core of the team at the beginning of May. Interestingly with Ericsson expected to field a two boat team, as are movistar in the next Volvo Ocean Race, Read hesitates when we ask him to confirm that Puma will be a one boat campaign. "That is not set in stone. But at this point it is." Among the personnel Pirates of the Caribbean shore manager Kimo Worthington is believed to have already been signed up to work with Read.

As to the design of the new boats Read certainly reckons that their look will change given the smaller Southern Ocean element on the new course, with a large part of the race course remaining in the Tropics. However he says the most profound effect of the new course is in its attracting large players like Puma. "I’m not sure that Ericsson or Puma or others would have been as interested without this new route, so I would say thank goodness for the new route, because I’m pretty sure it would have been a much harder sell to Puma without the Middle East/China factor. And it is going to make the race really cool. The bottom line is that this is something that sailing hasn’t seen before, this is going to be wild," he says.

In the meantime they have also acquired ABN AMRO Two which has already been liveried up in the Puma colours and left Europe this week bound for Newport, RI. The new boat is to be called Puma Avanti and the paintjob shows portholes down the topsides also ressembling the eyelets in a sports shoe.

Read says that they will be doing plenty of training on Puma Avanti, but most of his team's racing this year will be on the former Alfa Romeo (the 93ft water ballasted Reichel Pugh design), now renamed Ramblerafter she was acquired by George David, previously known owner of the heavily campaigned IMS boat Idler. The boat is currently undergoing a refit in Newport. The program for Rambler will include some short distance races before competing in the HSH Nordbank blue race 2007. This is the successor to the DaimlerChrysler North Atlantic Challenge held in 2003 and sets sail in June from Newport, RI, across the Atlantic around the top of Scotland to Hamburg. The boat will then compete in the Rolex Fastnet Race.

Puma joining the Volvo Ocean Race is a great thumbs up for CEO Glenn Bourke and his vision of taking the fully crewed round the world race to new markets. We hope that Puma's involvement with our sport is a profitable one and we look forward to seeing how such a major player in sports sponsorship takes to our world.