Part Two of Knut Frostad’s presentation to the World Yacht Racing Forum concentrated on the future of the sport of sailing – how participation, sponsorship and technology would all change the game. The other part of the presentation can be read here…
How to Get more Kids Sailing.
One very important thing is for us to look after the recruitment of the sport and we have a massive challenge. We are losing a huge generation of sailors after the teenage level. After the age of 15,16 or 17 a huge number stop sailing.
[cleeng_content id="374763160" description="99 cents or 10,000 hours. Become an expert for less than a dollar. We do the hard work so you don't have to." price="0.99" referral="0.10"] There are a number of reasons for it, but if you compare sailing to footbal or other sports, one challenge we have to take upon ourselves is to connect kids with the stars.
The distance between the stars sailing and the children who are out there learning how to race is way too big.
The other thing that I spoke about the first time I went to this conference in Monaco is that children do not like to sit in a little box called an optimist alone. They really don’t like it. Very few children like to sit and drift around on the water alone, miles behind and end up losing a yacht race as their first experience of sailing.
Most children like to be with other children. And we have plenty of boats. Its one thing we have in our sport, we have an enormous amount of different dinghies and and boats and we can put children together.
We did an experiment with the Volvo Ocean Race sailing school where we put children together. Boat is big enough to put eight of them together, with a more experienced optimist sailor skippering. We have so far taken 8,500 children sailing over the last two stop overs and a lot of them had a fantastic experience.
We asked the afterwards why – and the main reason is that they did it with their friends.
Sailing is such a social sport and it is so the opposite, when you force small kids to be alone in little boats.
Finding the Money for Sailing
Another thing for the future. I know there has been a lot of talk about the economy and sponsorship. Price Waterhouse Coopers put their sports report out a few days ago, which shows that we will see growth in the next 5 years in all the main revenue streams in sports. The only unfortunate thing is that of the 4 revenue streams – sailing is excluded from 3 of them.
We are excluded from merchandising, not because we can’t but because no-one in sailing is really doing merchandising on a big scale. We are excluded from media rights because we are not a big enough sport to get media rights. We are excluded from ticketing or gate revenues, because we are not a big enough sport yet to charge people to watch our sport.
So what is left is sponsorship.
But the sponsorship market is still pretty big – perhaps 4 to 5 billion dollars by 2015 and growing at 5% a year. Whether we believe these numbers or not, the good news is that there is going to be some money out there. There are sponsors out there. The bad news is that it is going to be incredibly hard to find it.
Here is what I have seen – working with 10 countries around the world. We have seen a massive shift from one part of the world to another. And this shift is going to stay. And sailing has to adapt to that – whether we like it or not.
Its going to be a lot harder to get money. We have to be better at it in general. The world is going to be different in terms of where we have to do our sailing and where we have to sell it.
New Technology
New technology is a fantastic asset for sailing. It doesnt put us front page in the news, but cameras are getting better. Communication is getting better and it changes sailing.
When I did my first round the world race, in 1993, it was the first time we had satellite communication. It was Inmarsat A and and that had a speed of 9.6 kilo bits which means it took about an hour to send a still picture. There was a massive protest from the sailors.
We didn’t want the satellite system and neither did we want the cameras on deck. They were heavy… So in the end, my predecessor in this job said ok – I’ll let you choose between a 220kg piece of lead or the satellite equipment and the cameras and guess what? Half the boats chose the lead. That’s how we looked after our sponsors in the old days.
The boat that won had no cameras, but things have changed. Now we have almost 500 kilo bits of speed with the boats directly so we can do HD television and if Inmarsat get everything right in the next 3 years, we will have 5 megabits for the next Volvo Ocean Race – that’s 10 times faster than we have today and that means we could almost go 100% live in the race. That’s going to change sailing.
I think HD television has changed sailing, because the sport works incredibly well in HD.
3D may change sailing. There is so much contrast and so many colors. We are not newsworthy enough yet to just sell the story – so we need the quality too. If you were the only person to film a goal in a football match with your iPhone, all the stations would take it, but sailing is not like that. If you caught something that happened in the Volvo Ocean Race with an iPhone, they wouldn’t take it.
If we produce exceptionally high quality, sometimes the broadcasters will take it, just because it looks stunning. And sometimes a newspaper or magazine will take a photo because it looks so good.
Some of the new things coming are interesting too. We have livestream which allows you to get the raw content off the boats without delay or edit. Over 16,000 fans have signed up to that and love it.
And finally. One of the biggest assets that sailing has are the sailors. I have recruited people from other sports and they are blown away about how they can use the sailors. How well spoken they are. How willing they are to attend.
We had a reception in Alicante the night before the start for all our core customers, and we have a new sponsor – DHL. Most of DHL’s Sponsorship recently has been F1. And it is very hard for F1 guests to get much of a connection with the stars of Formula One. The DHL guests couldn’t believe that the night before the start, two of the skippers in the race were willing to spend 10 minutes each, at 9 o’clock at night. The value of that is incredible.[/cleeng_content]
