"It's a fascinating and challenging time for the sport with a
squeeze in most of our traditional markets on funding. But that is a good thing in that it makes us all think hard about what works and what could work in the future."
really in place there at the beginning. The ambition was big, but unfortunately what was communicated was way bigger than what was the reality. A lot of the difficulty for them ever since has been that to manage expectations back down to a realistic level. At the end of the day, 90 per cent of the return for any stakeholder involved in America's Cup in all its history has come down to the final three weeks of the event – the Louis Vuitton final and the America's Cup final. So yes, it was amazing in Valencia, probably the best version of the event if you want to view it as an overall sports business property, but I don’t think even if you repeated the same format, you would have the same results. Not in terms of the number of boats or anything else. So it's easy to compare and everyone has their own take on the Cup when they win it and they do it their own way. It will all change again when someone else wins and each Cup will have different amount commercial interest and value and will score better in some areas than in others. It's hard to predict where it will go and what will happen - you can't plan for the future as the winner basically controls it - and that's very unique in sport. But it's history and its tradition, the wealth involved and the very nature of the challenge itself does create a bit of magic dust. No matter what you do with the Cup you have this bucket of magic dust that you can spread around that gives it some scale and emotion and plenty of media content. Without discussing whether the boats or the format are right, I am absolutely convinced that the final few weeks of the Cup will be viewed by most people as cool, amazing and historic. We can make lots of judgments about different decisions that should have been made, or could have been made, and choices that were made along the way, but I don’t think that anyone has done it perfectly at any stage. So I wouldn’t ever attack anyone who is trying to organize these things, because knowing how difficult it is to organize an event I know it's easy from the outside to be critical. But the decisions you make early on in the event are important and your positioning early on can set things in motion that you cant change easily. I’m sure there are things that could have been changed in hindsight on the Cup, but I’m also sure that for most people who get touched by it in August and September there will be some very cool images and some very interesting racing - and one way or another there will be a worthy winner in the context of that event at the end of it. SRM: One of the issues is that the America's Cup teams are very much focused on winning the Cup rather than providing the entertainment you mentioned earlier? Mark Turner: That commercial aspect of the Cup has always been difficult. Ultimately I don’t think that there can ever be an America's Cup that is a commercial property in the sense that it is all paid for by sponsors - I just don’t think that’s possible. The only difference between each America's Cup is how thick the layer of sponsorship is that sits on top - that core set of funding that is either coming from private investors or private owners ultimately. I think there are some worthy, interesting things that have been tried and are working. There is some great stuff in the TV product that has been created there but whether the rest of us can afford it, only time can tell. But whether there is any trickle down or not, there have been some good
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