"There’s lot of things to do and lots of things to improve. We are able to take this format wherever we want to."
the final five minutes, after four or five days of racing, but the best guys have won. Recently we have had an interesting debate with ISAF over the importance of the start and the boundaries changing the way you look for windshifts. They had a very strong opinion that you could not race in a short course format in this way and be fair and it be right. Everyone can have a different opinion on that. Whether it’s upwind or downwind or reaching starts, you use a different set skills: time on distance and lots and lots of different judgment calls. That’s the beauty of sailing: you have all these different variables that you are taking in and processing. Different types of sailing have all those variables but they just have them weighted differently according to their format. At the end of the day that sporting side has to be right - we would not be here in the way we are with Extreme Sailing Series if at the core the sporting integrity was not intact. Even if you are sponsor that comes into this with business objectives, you are still there because of sport. You've chosen to back a sport and if it was all just pure show it simply wouldn’t work. Plus, you need to have the sporting integrity and the emotion of backing a team; it’s what drives fans and drives clients to be excited by the experience. We keep looking for ways to innovate and break out of traditional rules. We are looking at penalties at the moment: how we could change that aspect to make it easier to understand and more exciting rather then being the domain of the rule book geek. There’s lot of things to do and lots of things to improve. We are able to take this format wherever we want to. SRM: What have you learned from the other sports that OC Sport is involved in? Mark Turner: OC sport now is now is basically sailing, running and cycling. Running at the moment confined to marathons and running type festivals and cycling is confined at the moment to amateur races that cross mountains. There are things that are common between the three areas and things that are very different. The business model in running and cycling is very different in that the entry fees get you quite a way in your operational costs and then the sponsorship side is is what helps with your communication and media side. Whereas, almost everything in sailing has to start with hefty sponsorship in the beginning, which makes it a difficult thing to get going. So we can’t really apply the mass participation side of the equation back into the the kinds of things we do in sailing today. However, we benefit from being in other sports in that we are in contact with lots more brands and in lots of different cities. We might be talking to people in cycling and realise that the sailing product could work better for them or maybe the other way around. Likewise, with host venues with host cities: we have relationships with several hundred venues across the world now. SRM: Tell us about how the OC Sport team is structured? Mark Turner: Within our team we have a lot of fresh experience in the business which helps us question how we do might do things in different ways. That is very valuable to us. We are still a small company and we are trying to keep the dynamic aspect of that and be able to move quickly. We are working in over 12 or 14 countries this year across all of our events.
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