One of the highlights of the World Yacht Racing Forum is listening to people like Knut Frostad, who is not an armchair critic, but the CEO of an event that has to succeed commercially. In a presentation to delegates on day 2 of WYRF, Frostad suggested that sailing needed to get back to basics – but that doesn’t mean it needs to be basic.
There are some great lessons that can be applied from local sailing club level to the sport’s top events.
Knut Frostad at the World Yacht Racing Forum
“A lot of things happened to us on Leg One and sometimes it is good that things happen. Can you imagine running a sailing race around the world where nothing happens – it would be a very hard sell.
I’m not a huge fan of masts breaking – at all, but clearly, drama does help us and sailing has always been a dramatic sport. Apart from equipment breaking, which is not the best of dramatic stories, drama is one of the things we have in the sport and we should keep it – we are not trying to make sailing an indoor sport.
This is the Today Show in America, which is one of the US’s biggest TV shows with about 6 million viewers of this news clip (PUMA dismasting and playing golf on a remote Atlantic Island). So because of something else, people learn about the race.
You can argue that selling sailing because of this, is not what sailing is, but we have to use it. It’s one of our greatest opportunities to use stories that are not just about who is winning and who is losing and the nautical miles or the technology – it is these dramatic stories.
I think in sailing, we need to stop making excuses for why we are not successful. I don’t know how many times at these conferences and other places we hear – ‘sailing is too complicated and too hard to understand.’ To me that is the world’s biggest excuse.
Because which sport is not complicated? Apart from Tug-o-war or something extremely basic. If you don’t know cricket, then you wouldn’t understand it, watching it for 5 minutes. American football, NBA – any of these sports – if you don’t know the rules, if you don’t really know the game, then you wouldn’t understand it.
So our challenge is not that sailing is difficult – it is that we are not known.
So if you add the fact that we are not known, to being sometimes a complicated sport, it becomes difficult, but I honestly don’t believe that sailing is complicated. Sometimes we have some rules that are outdated and sometimes there are jury hearings that might be hard to explain, but that is not the big picture of the sport. The big picture of the sport is not jury rooms.
Unpredictability is a big part of our sport. Journalists that come to visit the Volvo Ocean Race ask – How am I going to cover your sport? What am I going to write? Well that’s the beauty of it. Unpredictability is one of the beauties of our sport. I like to think that unpredictability is one of the assets of our sport because so much of our lives is predictable. We plan our days from second to second with our iPads and computers with calendars left, right and center to fill our days perfectly from start to finish and we are missing unpredictability from our lives.
Some people deal with unpredictability better than others. We had a pro-am race in Cape Town and one guy was really stressed – blackberry in one hand and iphone in the other saying – “When am I going to be back on the dock?” and I said “I have no idea.” He looked at me very strangely – he came back after having the time of his life and asked to stay for another pro-am race. And I spoke to him afterwards about this – once in his whole week – letting the blackberry go and letting his watch go and just relaxing into sailing.
It’s a special kind of magic.
There is a lot of talk about technology and complication, but here is a graph that I stole from Peter Blake. He said – if you are going to do this race and you are going to be a skipper, remember this:
When you start doing something in your life, you start on the left side, and in the beginning, you are good at the basics. If you are starting a new job, then you turn up on time, because that might be all you can do at first. Then you get more sophisticated. In sailing it is the same – the first time you do a big race, you prepare really well, you make sure you have food on board, the boat is organised – nothing is going to break and by the time you have done a few of these races, you become extremely sophisticated and you forget some of the basics.
I had a fantastic learning experience, the first time I skippered a boat in the Whitbred in 97, and we had the world’s most advanced friction research program. We knew all about the surface of the keels and the rudders and then we forgot five days worth of food on the dock in Southampton.
As sailing event organisers, we can be guilty of similar mistakes. When I hear advise from people who want to tell me about Facebook and this and that and how I have to do x y z, but we are missing out on basics.
What Peter Blakes said was that the team that won the race were not the most sophisticated, but they were always the best at the basics. So we need to do things right.
Here is an example. I was always curious as to why I couldn’t get the big news agencies to cover our event. so if you go to Reuters or APP or any of the big news agencies in the world and you look at what sports they are pushing up through their news channel – and the news agencies are extremely important.
We can value our sport on Facebook and we can value it on a whole lot of different things, but just go to one of the big news agencies and just look at their output, and look at sailing as a proportion of their output. We are non-existent.
So I went to Thomson Reuters in London because they didn’t cover our race. I met with the global sports editor and I asked him – why are you not writing about the Volvo Ocean Race? The first thing he said was “what race?”… and then he said I’ll give you the potential reasons why we might not be covering it:
The first is that none of my staff know anything about it. Second – you are not telling me anything about it, but feel free- you can have half an hour this afternoon with all my staff. Third – most likely what you are sending us is crap, or the majority of it is crap and really not interesting – so if there is an interesting thing, then it is still crap because you go into the crap spam filter. You probably live quite happily there along with many other sports – you keep pushing long press releases every day about things that are not interesting from an editorial point of view.
Does that mean that sailing is not interesting? No. We did a presentation in the afternoon and they came back and they said – you have a ton of fantastic stories, but you are just not doing it right. Your emails are too long – we don’t like more than two paragraphs for our news releases. 2 paragraphs – that’s how we drive the majority of our stories.
Today that guy is the Communications Director of the Volvo Ocean Race.
My biggest learning? Do not think that sailing doesn’t have a story. We have plenty of stories. We just need to do things the right way. Look at all the press push coming out of sailing. I am sure most of you are receiving endless news releases every day, but many of them don’t capture the drama and we need to get better at that.
