Volvo Ocean Race 10 days to go – Frostad on cultural change (Part I)
by Rob Kothe & Jedda Murphy on 28 Sep 2014
Team SCA and Alvimedica ahead of the Volvo Ocean Race start. Rick Tomlinson/Volvo Ocean Race
http://www.volvooceanrace.com
Over the last year we have interviewed Knut Frostad, the CEO of the Volvo Ocean Race four times, at times the stress has shown but yesterday just eleven days before the start of the 2014-2015 Race, he was like a different person, when we met with him again, at Volvo Ocean race headquarters portside in Alicante.
In the distance across the port the Volvo Ocean Race boats including the Mapfre badged Spanish boat were still on the hard.
Upstairs overlooking the work area and the Race Control centre we talked to the very upbeat Frostad.
‘We have seven teams, a diverse group. I am super happy. You can always wish for more. You can wish for all kinds of things but I am very realistic about this and doing a Volvo Ocean Race project as the way we want it to be is no small task. It is never cheap. It is a big project. We are extremely happy, really happy and I think anyone who is out in the market right now for sponsorship whether it is the America’s Cup or Volvo Ocean Race or any other thing knows that this is a huge challenge. That is a good status to be in. I am super happy.
‘We are in good shape organisationally with. 11 days to go. It’s a complex project but we are on track. We are pretty good here in Alicante. Obviously we have one project for each of the cities as well. Each of the cities have their own planning program that we are running. Always some cities are ahead like Auckland. They are always normally best in class. Auckland and Gothenburg, those guys are super organised. Everything is planned for well in advance. Some of that Latin cultures don’t like to be that organised that early.
‘They would rather do things last minute and the same in China but in general we are in good shape.
‘The biggest concern I had was the whole shared services we are doing with the boats where they are sharing their maintenance programs.
‘That’s the first time it has been done as far as I know in sailing, that you actually share spare parts, toolings, people, resources across the whole fleet. The race used to be about everything but that. It used to be about secrecy, privacy, never sharing, and exclusivity.
‘That was what the race was about and now it is the complete opposite and the first test we have had here now in the last ten days because that is the first big service program with all the boats together. It has been fantastic. I have loved it.
‘I have walked every day past the boats and seeing how the guy who does the propellers service does one boat and then moves to the next boat and then the next boat. He makes sure they are all the same.
‘They all learn from whatever can be adjusted and calibrated and improved and it changes the mentality of the sport. I preach this a lot because I think this is the biggest game changer in sailing that we are producing.
‘The one design has been done before in other classes in smaller boats and obviously it is complex to do one design in a bigger boat than a small boat. The big change is that we are making teams understand the value of sharing and the ridiculousness of not sharing. Yes of course you may be that you can make sure that the competitor doesn’t know something you know of the boat and then he can potentially be a bit slower.
‘The advantage you get is that if someone discovers a problem with the thing, the boat, the sail or a mast you know now that everyone has this joint interest in letting everyone know. Then you know that everyone is helping.
‘In fact instead of having one team improving one boat you have seven teams improving seven boats and the advantage of that is fantastic.
‘I see the work lists that we have on the boats there is six to eight items on each boat. It used to be 200 at this stage.
‘They had their last refit before the start because everything is customised and optimised and changed and changed new things. They had this huge work list and the work list is so tiny because they have already done most of the things they wanted to optimise.
One Design – the Game Changer- this race is not about the boats, it’s about the sailors.
‘Sailing for me, I love the sport more than probably most people and I also hate the sport because sailing is so ridiculously old fashioned and it came from a place that it was a rich man’s sport.
‘It’s not secret. It was for the wealthy. It was for the yacht clubs.
‘It wasn’t for everyone in the street, it was pretty much a wealthy person sport. Other sports have been that too, golf. Lots of sports have been that but they have managed to transform themselves.
‘A challenge we have. Tennis rackets cost £50 and a boat still costs more and more every year and they get bigger and bigger and more complex and they are worth less and less as well as they keep changing so after each year they are worth nothing.
‘At least back in the 60s when people had race boats they were very expensive. Back in the wooden classic race boat time. They used them for 20 years.
Now they are valuable for one season then you can throw them away and they cost more. If sailing doesn’t get rid of that it will never grow.
‘We can take that very personally to change that because the audience we speak to, even though we obviously want to reach the core sailing audience, but our biggest ambition is to grow that audience.
‘Not necessarily to grow the audience because we think everyone will start loving sailing and start to sail but we want to grow the audience that are following this event. Some people will follow it because they love sailing and some people will follow it because they love the adventure but most people hate the elitism and the money talk.
‘Most people do. Even the sailing world. We have to get rid of it because we can’t grow our sport and our interest to a wider audience unless we focus on the people and the things that are relevant for most people. If they hear to do this sport you need $10 million they go like wow I don’t even want to watch it. I am not even interested.
‘You have to make it relevant so that people see that it could have been me. It could have been just me doing it. I probably am not good enough. For example I think the girls are a huge inspiration for a lot of women.
‘They only became an inspiration when people realised that it could almost have been me. I am probably not as good as them in sailing but at least I don’t have to be super wealthy or come from the right country or yacht club or at least I was super fit and if I had been a little bit better in the ocean I could have actually done that race.
‘That’s something we want to focus very hard on now and that’s to make the race more down to earth, closer to everyone and the strangest thing is that if you look at the world today most people do extreme things today.
‘Young people do crazy things today. They don’t have to be famous sports stars. People climb things and do things with skateboards and bikes and produce it and film it and that’s the great thing.
‘Honestly I don’t think the sailors in the Volvo Ocean Race are super humans. They are not like Superman or Spiderman or anything like it. They are sailors and they are very ambitious and they have some adventurous blood in them and they want to push themselves and so do a lot of people but they are not inhuman.
‘They are not unreachable and I think that is the most important part of our story, that we are a human story that people can relate to and not too technical.‘
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