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taxes – not a bad return on a $50m investment from a government that constantly trumpets a mantra of growth, growth, growth. While the Auckland mayor and business leaders rued a ‘golden opportunity’ lost, the Stuff website headlined the views of one of its columnists in less restrained terms, bellowing that the ‘Govern- ment’s lazy, lame-o, suckful, depressing and visionless decision is a $1.9bn epic fail.’
Grant Dalton has been too long in the game – and is all too aware of MBIE’s negative attitude – to have left all his eggs in the Auckland basket. He has no doubt been in constant discussion with other potential venues. With Valencia dealt out of the reckoning by last year’s devastating floods, Naples, Italy and Athens, Greece have been floated as possible candidates.
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Meanwhile, Auckland is not left entirely bereft of sailing interest with the announcement that the next Ocean Race will stop over in March 2027. Since the second Whitbread Race in 1977-78 Auckland has hosted this race in its various iterations 11 times and is frequently voted the sailors’ favourite. Auckland was slated as a stopover in the delayed 2023 edition, but the organisers dropped the city from the schedule following Covid. Instead, the fleet had to sail a marathon Southern Ocean leg from Cape Town to Itajaí. ‘We’re excited to be bringing The Ocean Race back to its spiritual home in Auckland, a city that embodies the spirit of human endeav- our and resilience that defines this competition,’ said Richard Brisius, chairman of The Ocean Race. It was no coincidence that days later Conrad Colman, fresh off his second Vendée Globe, came to Auckland on a media blitz to launch Aotearoa Ocean Racing, which aims to compete under a Kiwi flag for his third VG mission. Colman grew up in a sailing family in Auckland, learned to sail Optimists on the Waitemata Harbour and admired the Whitbread Round the World race crews, with Kiwi teams prominent among them, sweeping into Auckland. Then the family moved to the US (his father was American). There, as a young man, his passions took him about as far from the sea as you can get. He made a living building titanium mountain bikes in Colorado and competing as a semi-pro on the mountain bike circuit. The sea recaptured his imagination when he chanced to see a documentary on the Vendée Globe. He vowed he would compete in the event one day and has now twice fulfilled that pledge.
A quintessential Kiwi battler, Colman served his apprenticeship in Mini Transat, Figaro and Class40 races, including a convincing win in the doubled-handed 2011 Global Ocean Race. Racing with four co-skippers, he won four of the five legs. In the closing stages of the second leg he also pulled off a dramatic ocean rescue of co-skipper Sam Goodchild, who fell overboard just before nightfall in a significant seaway.
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Graduating to the Vendée Globe scene, he won admiration and respect for his shoestring campaigns and never-say-die attitude. He completed the 2016 race under jury rig, being dismasted in the Atlantic more than 800nm from the finish line, arriving half-starved having run out of provisions. In the just-completed Vendée he laboured for thousands of hours to refit a 2007-generation Imoca 60 – ‘I poured in a lot of love, sweat, tears and carbon fibre to make it as reliable as possible’ – took on huge debts and only just made it to the startline with a last-minute sponsorship extension. At the finish he was fourth of the non-foilers, just 13 minutes behind Jean Le Cam, ‘one of the legends of the Vendée Globe, doing the race for the sixth time with a brand new daggerboard boat that cost 10 times more than mine’.
To demonstrate how close that was, Colman analysed the 100m sprint at the Paris Olympics, where the entire field crossed the line within a 0.05% margin, the closest finish of all time. By comparison, after 85 days and 28,000 miles, the margin between Colman and Le Cam was an even more infinitesimal 0.01%. ‘I have finished every one of my major ocean races,’ he says , ‘and I have proved in two Vendée Globes that I can outsail my boat.’ Hoping to attract enough support for a new Imoca 60, he wants to build on his experience in the Imoca class to ‘create a fusion between the French short-handed ocean racing expertise I have developed and the fully crewed racing developed on this harbour. ‘That is why we are launching Aotearoa Ocean Racing to have another crack at The Ocean Race. Our ambition is to build on the
© Robin Christol
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