Successful European Forum of Sailing Cities in Cadiz

by Dan Ibsen on 28 Feb 2015 Andalusian Olympic Race week took place outside Puerto Sherry, with many Lasers and RS:X sailors on the race courses, good competition in sunshine, medium winds and around 20 degrees.

Thursday 26th and Friday 27th at Hotel Puerto Sherry right at the harbour 31 delegates from cities, organizers and sailing federations, from 15 nations gathered to the first European Forum of Sailing Cities.

Organising the forum is European Sailing Federation (EUROSAF), El Puerto de Santa Maria and Federacion Andaluza de Vela with four very dedicated speakers, and a lot of constructive discussions following the different subject. The seminar created a very positive atmosphere were organisers and cities were more than happy to share their ideas and experience.

Growing Sailing Events is key to growing the sport, and Isidre Rigau from Spain, CEO Summa Sports told about how organizers could develop their bidding process in order to be successful with their future goals.

Isidre Rigau is founding partner and director of Summa Sports, he contributed with major experiences combined with a professional career to the world of sport, with his maximum reference being his participation in the Organising Committee of the Barcelona 92 Olympic Games (COOB‘92) as director of sports logistics.

Since then, he has developed his professional work as a planning and organisational consultant for major sporting events, highlighted by his rigour, methodology and broad, innovative vision.

Among other work carried out for the IOC, his highlights include a standard management plan, monitoring method for Olympic Games Organisation – applied for the first time during Sydney Olympics- full time consulting for the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympics, Athens 2004, Turin 2006 and Beijing 2008. Observer plan for the Sydney Games and Salt Lake City 2002 and the elaboration of a general development plan for Athens 2004 Olympic Games. Operations director for the Barcelona 2003 World Swimming Championships. He has worked an advisor for the Madrid 2012 Olympic Games Bid, managing he production of the questionnaire, dossier and bid presentation.

He also gives strategic and operational planning courses in different universities: Autonomous University of Barcelona, Pompeu Fabra, UCLM – RFE, amongst others.

Creative Sailing Events is a new way of organising events in our sport, instead of only organising only regattas. This is a concept which has been vital for the successful development of Kiteboarding, and Marcus Schwendtner, CEO of International Kiteboarding Association (IKA) told the audience about this new and more professional view on sailing events.

Markus Schwendtner is an independent sports professional with more than 10 years of experience in the organization and administration of extreme sport events and organizations.

After a career in the public and private IT sector, he is currently managing the affairs of the International Kiteboarding Association (IKA) as Chief Executive Officer. With his knowledge from more than 20 years as a competitor in various sports, Markus has now dedicated his work to the development of kiteboarding within the International Sailing Federation (ISAF) and is the driving force behind IKA’s campaign for inclusion in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Markus is himself an ISAF International Race Officer as well as National Judge and Measurer, and leads most of the IKA’s major events as Contest Director. His background in extreme sports and sports promotion made the development of new attractive event formats that connect the sport to the spectators and the media is one of his main focuses.

Sailing & Municipality, A vision of future was presented by Andor Serra, CEO & Marketing director of Barcelona World Race. A very interesting approach from a professional sailing organiser, which has established a strong cooperation with many external partners in order to develop and promote sailing, amongst others is Barcelona City, universities, schools, Commercial companies etc. The goal has been to develop many ‘side-products’ which support and promote the main events, Barcelona World Race – taking place right now – and to grow the interest and thereby attracting sponsors to this 100% sponsor financed event.

Last but not least Olaf Jochmann from Germany, Commercial Director/Head of rights spoke about Modern Media Rights and Media Management from a background about dealing with media rights for a long period.

TV rights are not easy to sell for a sport like sailing, because we do not have any strong organisations organising 'media rights bundling'. The general challenge for sports is that the average TV viewer to day is aroung 60, and the younger generations do not use TV very much.

Today 50% of the global population is mobile, and with regard to Internet 50 % or more of the visitors are generated from facebook and twitter. 70% of all sports fans are on facebook, compared to only 20% just a couple of years ago.
Sailing has to find its own identity, but the youth are not waiting for us. The clear message from Olaf was that Sailng has to move faster ahead, otherwise will loose compared to other existing and new sports.

Olaf Jochmann is a versatile and flexible manager with more than thirteen years of experience in international media and content sales, marketing, advertising, promotion and management. He started in 1997 in Jacobi and Partner GmbH/ and was also Marketing Manager for Development of own E- commerce and Marketing business Concept and Head of Marketing and e-commerce of sport.de GmbH Munich

From 2001 until 2008 he was Vice President IMG Media, TWI: The largest independent sports and Entertainment production company in the world, daughter company of Mark H. McCormack‘s International Management Group (IMG). TWI is distributing and producing more than 9000 hours of programming per year. Acting as Managing Director in Kentaro AG Switzerland + Kentaro GmbH Germany he also was the Head of Global Media Rights Managing with a big team and key clients in Europe and North and South America. From 2013 Olaf is the Commercial Director and Head of Rights Relationships of Perform Media Limited and Perform Media Germany GmbH. Olaf is currently Owner of Lakeside4Media Agency, Germany Shareholder of Hogmore Media AG Agency, Liechtenstein.

At the conclusion of the forum all the participants expressed their gratitude to the organisers from the EUROSAF, El Puerto de Santa Maria and Federacion Andaluza de Vela.

Many of the participants expressed their wish for a continuation of this seminar at an annual basis in the future, and this will very soon be dealt with by EUROSAF.

If you as a major organiser or organising city of international events is interested in joining such a seminar in the future, send a mail to EUROSAF - www.eurosaf.org