Keep your mates close.
That’s the advice of most people who have made a career out of the sport of sailing. Despite a move towards a more professional industry over recent years, becoming a top, paid, sailor is about networking with the right people and luck – with a fair bit of talent.
Before we go on – a distinction needs to be made between Olympic sailing and ‘everything else’. There are some national sailing associations that do a good job of identifying talent and creating the “ladders” for those sailors to climb to be successful. But most sailors won’t make the Olympics – or they might make the Olympics for one cycle – then what? There are also a couple of programs like the Artemis Offshore Academy that make things a little more structured.
Making money from racing sailboats is one chapter in a new book by Sue Pelling – ‘Sail for a Living.‘ The book covers a range of opportunities in sailing, including charter, support services, even working on superyachts, but how racing sailors manage their careers is something we have been thinking about for a while - and we are not the only ones.
Many sailors have taken the first step – accepting that in order to succeed, being good at sailing is not enough – you als0 need to be good at business: marketing yourself, raising sponsorship, making the right commercial choices.
Mike Golding says in ‘Sail for a Living’ :
Without question, the possibilities of making a living from sailing are increasing as the sport develops a wider appeal to sponsors… The sport is quite cliquey in the UK however, which is bad – a legacy of the past – so you still need to know the right people to get the right opportunities.
Ian Williams has been frustrated by the changing nature of sailing. Like many sailors who have the America’s Cup as an end-game, he has invested time in learning how to match-race. Williams has had the rules changed on him twice – he invested time in becoming a good Soling sailor, only to have that class dropped for the Olympics. He is now building his expertise in multi-hulls in order to match his skill-set with the new rules of the America’s Cup.
Yacht Racing is still on a journey from amateurism and Corinthian values to a commercial, professional sport, but it is yet to create processes that exist in ‘real’ professional sports – very few (not one?) sailors have professional management that represent them commercially. There is little or no scouting for new talent by teams because teams don’t have the longevity of a football franchise. Instead, sailors have to teach themselves the business of yacht racing.
Steve White says in the book:
I now realise that learning how to run a business and marketing are very important. For me, being a former motor mechanic and learning all about business was by far the biggest learning curve; much bigger than the sailing.
Many athletes struggle with the different roles that becoming a professional requires. An athlete’s primary goal is to win, but recent changes to the sport of yacht racing require sailors to become media personalities.
Nigel King says in Sail for a Living:
It’s more about being an entertainer! There are so many out there who are not necessarily the best sailors in the world, but what they do is they make sure they deliver to their employers. We’re basically in the entertainnment business; if the owners are not entertained, they they won’t pay the bills.
Pete Cumming agrees that networking and marketing are two skills that sailors need to have mastered to get paid:
Pro sailing is 50 per cent trying to find work, and 50 per cent sailing. The sailing business is a small world and a good reputation is key. You have to be both sailor and sports agent to work hard to create the breaks with the big teams.
Sailing isn’t professional enough yet for sports professionals to be interested. Salaries aren’t big enough for sailors to be able to employ professional management or agents and personal sponsorship opportunities are also limited.
The crazy dotted line career paths make it very hard for sailors to plan for the future, something that the current America’s Cup holders say they are going to fix, but it’s not a high priority.
America’s Cup teams are still largely old boys networks that can reward long term relationships over talent, so being in the right place at the right time and ‘having lots of mates‘ is still the best way to succeed.
