Paul Cayard
Solving the puzzle
SailGP finished its third season in my hometown, San Francisco, on 6-7 May. The conditions were perfect, and the 10 teams put on a great show. The Australians were on form winning three of the five fleet races plus the grand finale, worth US$1million. In winning the grand final the Aussies completed a three-peat. Hard to have
a better weekend than that! And to make that story sweeter for me, my son-in-law Kinley Fowler races on the Aussie boat so the win is special to our family. Professional sailing as we know it today started in 1989 with the
relaxing of the advertising restrictions on boats racing under the IYRU rules. The 1992 America’s Cup, in San Diego, was the first time teams had enough money to pay sailors full time for three years. We had a few sponsors before then, but without billionaires subsidising the budget we would not have had the teams we had then nor the teams that followed over the last 30 years. SailGP has picked up on and tries to maximise key marketing
values of nationality, tight competition, high speed, short-duration races, close to shore for easy viewing, easy to understand TV graphics, public grandstands… And of course high-end hospitality. They have also addressed one of the key weaknesses of the
America’s Cup, continuity of contact with fans, by having an event each month, and they are now moving to two events a month. SailGP took the design contest out of the cost of competition by making the boats one-design. And finally, all data off all boats is available to all teams. So teams can go to school on the Aussies and learn what their settings are in any condition. Obviously the sailors (still!) make the difference because winning comes down to execution. SailGP is the best commercial ‘product’ our sport has ever seen. Yet I don’t think it is a slam dunk that it survives on its own
36 SEAHORSE
commercially. A critical objective with this product is not only to capture the eyeballs of the likely suspects – all of us who are already interested in sailing – but to reach out and broaden the fan base to non-sailors. In my opinion, this is critical to the success of SailGP and where the speed, graphics and high-end hospitality come in. Commercially speaking, the Achilles’ heel of sailing has always
been that our equipment costs too much. SailGP is an extremely expensive product to produce. Formula One car racing is also very expensive to produce, certainly much more expensive than SailGP; and they have a very viable business. The difference is the following… and that difference is one of many orders of magnitude. So growing the audience is key to SailGP’s future. In watching
the Formula One reality show Drive to Survive, one can see how this product serves to widen the audience for the races themselves. I think sailing has every bit as interesting a backstory as car racing, so maybe a reality show featuring the personalities and their lives ashore is part of the SailGP strategy. While Larry Ellison has put up the seed money to get this all up
and running, sponsors are beginning to join the circuit, sponsor venues and even buy teams. There are huge capital costs in the boats and the infrastructure to support the circuit. I think selling venues is a viable business as there are plenty of cities around the world who want to be put on the map and can’t afford a Formula One event or a major league football team. I think the circuit will be able to attract sponsorships because
event sponsors get exposure at every event on every boat. Sponsors love that kind of deal as their risk is mitigated because exposure is all but guaranteed. If the event sponsors are starting to pay for some of the infrastructure costs the final piece of the puzzle is the teams and finding team owners and thus offloading the financial responsibility of running the teams.
VAN DER BORCH
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