Americas Cup - and Alinghi drops out

[Chris 249]

PS And 12m AC hardly drove the boom in dinghy racing or offshore racing which preceded them in the AC, but let's stick with current era

Nothing I ever wrote was remotely along the lines of “the 12m AC drove the boom in dinghy racing or offshore racing” so it’s hard to discuss a claim I never made.

I don’t think the 12 Metres in the Cup drove the boom in dinghy racing or offshore racing. The thing is that the sport as a whole boomed when one of the marquee events was in a fairly “mainstream” type of boat which used the same sort of techniques, sails, deck gear and rigging as a typical club or regatta racing boat. The fact that the Cup was in a fairly “mainstream” class was an example of the fact that to a very large extent, in those days sailing was marketing itself towards being accessible to new sailors and the sort of boat the typical middle-class person could sail each weekend.

These days much of sailing is marketing itself through promotion of extreme types like SGP and Cup boats and the foilers of styles that make up half of the Olympic fleet and about 5% or less or the “mainstream” weekend/regatta fleets. It’s a very different situation and it’s clearly not working, just as it didn’t work when the head of World Sailing decided that “extreme” skiffs were the future of dinghies and when the windsurfing industry decided abandon the simple and cheap style that had created the world’s fastest-growing sport and market “extreme” windsurfing. Promoting the “extreme” end of a sport rather than the accessible end is a recipe for failure but for some reason, a strong and vocal part of our sport has now been doing it and failing for several decades. Meanwhile RS, J/Boats, Windsurfer LT, wingfoiling and other areas that promote modern and accessible craft for the typical person are doing quite well.

Given that the big maxi fleets show that there are plenty of people still interested in throwing big cash into sailing, the lack of interest in the Cup seems to show that it’s going down the wrong path with the current emphasis on extreme performance.

By the way, I run a club and was given association Life Membership No 2 for my volunteer work in running what is now probably the world’s fastest-growing and third top-selling class, so I have first hand experience in the way that promoting accessible sailing can succeed. That experience indicates that we who are actually managing to get people on the water in large numbers actually have our job made harder by those who insist on promoting sailing as an extreme sport despite the fact that the approach has been failing for decades.

 

[dunedin]

How is SailGP Developing Beyond the America's Cup?

 

[dunedin]

…….

These days much of sailing is marketing itself through promotion of extreme types like SGP and Cup boats and the foilers of styles that make up half of the Olympic fleet and about 5% or less or the “mainstream” weekend/regatta fleets. It’s a very different situation and it’s clearly not working, just as it didn’t work when the head of World Sailing decided that “extreme” skiffs were the future of dinghies …

….

You are clearly worked up about something, but I think you are looking in the wrong directions.

As noted, the Americas Cup and its (more successful?) spin-off SailGP are not the marketing arms of World Sailing.
They are independent and private (as in ownership) events, with their own goals and objectives - which are commercial and ego related, not participation.
World Sailing doesn’t set the rules, or the classes sailed for either.

On the other hand the Olympics sailing is managed through World Sailing - and its member country organisations. And as an active volunteer, you could seek to get yourself elected to help shape the drirection of sail racing.

I don’t know where you get the statement that “the head of World Sailing decided that extreme skiffs were the future of dinghies”?
Skiffs have been an active part of the dinghy sailing scene for a quarter of a century, longer down in Australia.
But if you look at the Olympic dinghy events, the World Sailing pinnacle, they have just 2 skiff classes (M & F). The others are the traditional Laser / ICLA from the 1970s (M & F), the 470 from the 1960s (mixed) plus a modern cat (mixed). So hardly dominated by skiffs, although the latter do seem to be very active in the UK regattas.

 

[dunedin]

PS Whilst we are in nostalgia mode, who else saw the 12m AC racing back in the days of the New York Yacht Club and Newport RI?
I was there in 1980 during the defender selection and challenger elimination racing. Unfortunately I just missed Lionhearted sailing, as they were eliminated early. And Tom Turner’s crew simply abandoned their boat in the dock, with sails dumped on the deck when they got beaten by Dennis Connor.
Newport was very much a rich person’s place - and not just the massive “cottages” - and dominated by NYYC blazers and confidence.
A student visitor was unwelcome. No accommodation available anywhere. Ended up waiting till dark then nipping onto motor boat ashore in the yard and sleeping in the cockpit, Had to time it well as lots of security.

Actual racing was very dull to the point of irrelevant - out at sea so invisible, no TV screens etc. Again only the rich on their launches could see anything.

 

[Birdseye]

There are some sports which are far better for participators than spectators and yacht racing is one of them. Even as a life long sailor I find watching someone else sail as fascinating as paint drying. When the J class came to Falmouth I watched them and it was a bit better than normal simply because they harked back to another era. When the 40ft cats came to Cardiff it was really boring.

I would have thought that the issue with the AC is the format, the lack of a standard design fixed for a few years at a time. The result is that many teams are financed by billionaires, used to getting their own way if necessary by using lawyers. Throwing money at their entry. Win at any cost. Who wants a format so full of argument and controversy.

 

[Egret]

Looking at it another way virtually any club will have a few Lasers/ILCA's sailing if you look at their webcam - and they are also the top level Olympic singlehander, out of the box, so it can be done on low budget, and inspire and encourage right down to the lowest level - Still going after 50 years and you will be sailing exactly the same boat as the olympians. 50 year old boat can still keep up with a new sail - and quite exciting to watch with close camera work. I have just seen 120 youngsters racing Optimists, incredibly good, in quite severe conditions - all aspiring olympians probably - they all have a chance to move up to the Lasers without involving excessive, if any cost with all the club boats and schemes there are - true tests of pure skill - or just sail for fun.

AC75's and similar will never be accessible to the majority, although might inspire wing foiling which is quite accessible.

 

[flaming]

On the front page of my paper’s site today, for example, lots of journos are using much older data to back up claims about economics, politics and , and they are also dealing with a world that has changed. Websites for my other sports contain plenty of references to the past. So it’s hard to see why evidence that can be useful should be discarded.

To look just at the present, the maxi scene seems to be doing well while the Cup entries are not looking good, which indicates that plenty of people are happy to spend lots of money on racing yachts - just not Cup boats.

But again we're back to the same point about the difference between the maxi owner, enjoying the sport and being on the boat (mostly) vs the recent cup entrants who have little to no sailing background.

As I said before, even at its most expensive, the big boat scene is still essentially an amateur sport. Yes there are lots of people making money on the circuit, but the people writing the cheques are not doing so with any hope of a return.
The cup is trying, has been trying since the IACC days, to break out from that and become an actual professional sporting event, where the teams are backed by corporate entities expecting a return on their investment in terms of marketing and PR. It's clearly failed, but I think we agree on that point...

The point about the world changing, and this being different from other sports, possibly needs expanding.

When you talk about most sport - Football, rugby, tennis, golf, cricket etc. You get a lot of people looking back at the history and talking about stats of players etc. Cricket is especially keen on this. However, this is pretty valid as the basic game hasn't changed much. But even in that, you will hear a lot of caveats on some of the data. "Uncovered pitches" being practically a meme when talking about the difference in test match run scoring between modern players and those playing in decades past.
You also have the situation in those sports that by and large the same competitions have been going for a long time with only very minor tweaks to the rules. The football pitch is the same size as it always was, same as the tennis court, rugby pitch, basketball court etc etc.... And that's allowed professional teams (in the team sports) to evolve and to be financially stable, in some cases more than stable, over decades of competition.

Sailing, and the cup in particular, is in a different place entirely. The rules are so completely different from years past, and liable to be changed any time the winners think it was a bit too close last time round. And put simply, the budgets for corporate sponsorship are nothing like what they were. So where does it go from here?
And at that point, I honestly think trying to take lessons from the cups history is less valid than trying to look at what other events, and other sports, have done. When I first started following the cup I mainly did so by buying copies of yachting world. I don't think I saw any actual video of boats sailing. And if I did it was a highlights package.

That's not how the world works any more. The rise of social media etc has created a completely different challenge for events to get themselves in front of viewers, especially new viewers. And attention spans are notoriously low. And 2 things seem clear. You aren't going to do that without drama. And you aren't going to do that in displacement monos.
Which is what I mean about working out what the cup is for. Who is it for? And does it still actually have a role to play?

If it's to promote the sport, then it needs to grab people. But it's match racing, so it faces an uphill challenge... Nothing in the last cup compares to the drama of 10 F50s at speed in breeze.
But if it's for the purists, then what is it doing in these boats?

My answer - It shouldn't have anything to do with "promoting the sport". It should be the holy grail for the sailors, but honestly it should be slightly inaccessible for non sailors. If I was in charge I'd start from a budget cap. And from that would flow all the decisions about boats, format, location etc. All with the aim of getting the best sailors there.
What the boat ended up being would be entirely driven by what was viable under the budget cap.

 

[flaming]

I don’t think the 12 Metres in the Cup drove the boom in dinghy racing or offshore racing. The thing is that the sport as a whole boomed when one of the marquee events was in a fairly “mainstream” type of boat which used the same sort of techniques, sails, deck gear and rigging as a typical club or regatta racing boat. The fact that the Cup was in a fairly “mainstream” class was an example of the fact that to a very large extent, in those days sailing was marketing itself towards being accessible to new sailors and the sort of boat the typical middle-class person could sail each weekend.

I think that's a coincidence, in that it also happens to be the time that GRP took over from wood as the main boatbuilding material whilst the boomers came of age and significant numbers of them had cash to spend on hobbies.

The cup could have been in hovercraft and I think the same things would have been seen in the rest of the sailing world.

 

[Lightwave395]

PS Whilst we are in nostalgia mode, who else saw the 12m AC racing back in the days of the New York Yacht Club and Newport RI?
I was there in 1980 during the defender selection and challenger elimination racing. Unfortunately I just missed Lionhearted sailing, as they were eliminated early. And Tom Turner’s crew simply abandoned their boat in the dock, with sails dumped on the deck when they got beaten by Dennis Connor.
Newport was very much a rich person’s place - and not just the massive “cottages” - and dominated by NYYC blazers and confidence.
A student visitor was unwelcome. No accommodation available anywhere. Ended up waiting till dark then nipping onto motor boat ashore in the yard and sleeping in the cockpit, Had to time it well as lots of security.

Actual racing was very dull to the point of irrelevant - out at sea so invisible, no TV screens etc. Again only the rich on their launches could see anything.

I was lucky enough to see the 1987 AC in Freemantle close up, for which I must give thanks to a certain Mr Bob Fisher who took pity on this far from home Brit and got me onto a press boat for a proper race chase around the course. I was there as I'd had a business trip to Sydney which (sort of) coincided with the AC and try as I might (sort of) I couldn't find a flight home after that wasn't via Perth...
Absolutely spectacular but I concede I'd have seen little or nothing from the shore...

 

[Mark-1]

There are some sports which are far better for participators than spectators and yacht racing is one of them.

This in spades.

 

[dunedin]

There are some sports which are far better for participators than spectators and yacht racing is one of them. Even as a life long sailor I find watching someone else sail as fascinating as paint drying. ….

One could say watching others play cricket can also be as dull as watching paint dry!

But just like T20 can be less dull and attract some new audiences, so certain fast format races in “stadium” locations can be quite fun for spectators. Watching fast cats racing in the compact rocky waters of Marstrand in the sunshine was definitely a fun day.
And the Olympic Medal Races plus Sail GP try to work on that form of short race / close to shore format.

 

[bedouin]

There are some sports which are far better for participators than spectators and yacht racing is one of them.

But with "modern" tech they can televise pretty well.

Back in 2003 the company I worked for (that had an active sailing club) sponsored one of the competitors. That was the first time I had come across "Virtual Spectator" and it transformed the viewing experience

 

[Chris 249]

You are clearly worked up about something, but I think you are looking in the wrong directions.

As noted, the Americas Cup and its (more successful?) spin-off SailGP are not the marketing arms of World Sailing.
They are independent and private (as in ownership) events, with their own goals and objectives - which are commercial and ego related, not participation.
World Sailing doesn’t set the rules, or the classes sailed for either.

Nothing I ever wrote, implied or inferred that the Cup and SGP are the marketing arm of WS (which actually does provide some rules for the Cup rules under a contract). The point is that those running the Cup, SGP and WS are arguably all harming the image of sailing as a sport for the general public by excessively promoting extreme and inaccessible high performance types as the face of the sport.

I don’t know where you get the statement that “the head of World Sailing decided that extreme skiffs were the future of dinghies”?

I got from reality, in this case a quote in Seahorse magazine from Paul Henderson when he was running WS. Henderson was largely responsible for getting the skiff types into the Olympics and he said that and similar announcements (ie that a skiff was “what the young sailors are looking for” in Seahorse mag, May 1991). He also said that he believed that, just as the FD’s Olympic selection had spurred the creation of a host of other spinnaker-and-trapeze dinghies (Korsar, 420, 470, UK Javelin, 490, Ponant, and many many more) the Olympic skiff would spur many new skiff classes and become the dominant style of dinghy.

It was a completely wrong call. Apart from a brief spurt in the UK 20 years ago, skiffs remain very much a minority interest. Moat young sailors are NOT looking for skiffs. Only about 5% of International class dinghy sales go to skiffs. Skiffs make up only 5% of dinghies at UK nationals and even lower proportions in most other countries. The head of WS and others should never have picked up this weird and completely wrong idea about the desires of those they control and supposedly represent.

PS - When it came to getting the background and details of the 49er’s Olympic selection I also spoke to Julian and Frank Bethwaite, Phil Morrison and Peter Johnstone (who each created other Olympic candidates), Mike Jackson, who ran the selection trials at Garda, and others. I don’t BS, I research.

Skiffs have been an active part of the dinghy sailing scene for a quarter of a century, longer down in Australia.
But if you look at the Olympic dinghy events, the World Sailing pinnacle, they have just 2 skiff classes (M & F). The others are the traditional Laser / ICLA from the 1970s (M & F), the 470 from the 1960s (mixed) plus a modern cat (mixed). So hardly dominated by skiffs, although the latter do seem to be very active in the UK regattas.

I’m Sydney born and bred, son of a skiff champ. Skiffs are only popular in Australia in one corner of the country where there’s ideal conditions including gambling and liquor laws allow them to be subsidised. In the rest of Australia skiffs are a minority interest just as everywhere else. WS and those who promoted skiffs never seemed to notice that even after 125 years, skiffs weren’t popular in most of Australia.

As noted, about 5% of dinghy sailors are on skiffs so the fact that they get 40% of the dinghy medals at WS’s major events (Youth Worlds and Olympics) can very easily be seen as ridiculous favouritism of a type that goes against the interests of the majority of the sailors who WS control, and it came about because of the delusion that promoting “extreme” classes will help the sport. Clearly that hasn’t happened. Sailing is declining and even young, committed sailors normally don’t get into the classes that are often promoted as the future of the spot. Why can’t we acknowledge that fact and say that the sport would do much better if it fairly promoted the style of sailing that is actually popular - cheaper, more accessible craft.