A retrospective from Phil Jones, CEO of Yachting Australia (Part 1)

by Rob Kothe and the Sail-World team on 1 Oct 2014 Phil Jones the CEO of Yachting Australia has after 17 years resigned. Sail-World interviewed Jones at length. Here is the first of a multipart interview series.

Jones started his career in 1983 sailing working for the Royal Yachting Association for about seven years as the windsurfing manager, after previously being the windsurfing coach.

Jones takes up the story ‘Then I had a consultancy for about seven years which specialised in sailing and windsurfing, events and other things and as part of that I ran the Ultra 30 series. They are 30 foot nine man open boat which we took to city centre venues.

‘It was a very much made for television product and had various substantial sponsors so Vauxhall was a major sponsors. We produced about five or six programs a year for BBC Grandstand, which is their Saturday afternoon sports program.

‘I did quite a lot of consultancy work at that time for ISAF including the role the Olympic Manager for the Olympic Games in 1996 in Atlanta and I was actually delivering my report on the Atlanta Games in the November of 1996 at the annual IASF Meeting which just happened to be in Brighton in the UK.

‘I had lunch with Campbell Rose who was with Yachting Victoria at the time and Bruce Dickson, who was the then President of Yachting Australia, and he said we are looking for a new CEO for Yachting Australia. I looked out the window and it was about 5 degrees and the rain was going sideways and I said ‘Oh you might want to give me a call’ and it developed from there.

‘During my time as yachting Australia CEO there have been many highlights, one was the Australian promoted ISAF Olympic Commission and its subsequent report which made an impact world-wide.

‘It was interesting how that came about because about 2007/2008 when they voted on the Olympic Classes for London and at that point they dropped the Tornado and I came back and look at the various bits of documentation flying around.

‘One of the things that the IOC produce every year is this co-ordination commission report which basically looks at the 26 sports and makes a comparison between each of them and looks at the things they deliver and don’t deliver.

‘Some of that is very objective in terms of television and those kinds of things but then the International Federation makes comments about various issues.

‘One question was about how they intend to develop the sport in the Olympic Games and in the report after 1996, which was available before we made the decision about 2012, said to make the sport more relevant and exciting in the Olympic Games we are going to introduce faster more exciting boats.

‘I read this and thought you are going to introduce faster more exciting boats and then you drop the Tornado?

‘I thought irrespective of whether you are going to make the sport more exciting in the Olympics and whether faster and more exciting boats is the right thing to do you can’t say one thing and do something diametrically opposite.

‘So I suggested that ISAF establish an Olympic Commission to look at the strategy for sailing in the Olympic Games.

‘Simply about 80% of ISAF’s revenue at the time was from the Olympic Games and so if you are looking in a business sense you have got one customer that is giving you 80% of your money and you need to make sure they are happy and that was what really started it.

‘When we really drilled down we looked at where sailing was sat in relation to sport across the various criteria that the IOC laid down, it didn’t present a particularly good picture.

‘It seemed that ISAF was tending to fiddle with things that they can control in the short term with the scoring and the number of races that count. But these have no real impact on whether the sport is going to get more attraction in the Olympics from the media point of view.

‘While actually if you really want to make progress you obviously have to be getting the sport a lot more exposure over the three years and 50 weeks that aren’t the Olympics.

‘I think it was a good exercise and I think the pleasing thing is that whilst it has taken a while and not all of the recommendations have been implemented the general thrust seems to have stuck and I think we will see in the long term benefits from that.

‘For example the Nothe course in Weymouth, whilst I know there were some detractors but the fact was we presented sailing to a live audience of 3/4000 people every day and the response to it was really positive.

‘Television images of the crowds created atmosphere that pictures of boats going round a course don’t create. All credit to Rob Andrews, the London Olympic sailing regatta director because we suddenly dumped that on him and said can you do this and of course it wasn’t part of the original plan so there was a lot to do to put that in place.

‘It was a good exercise to work through and I have to say bringing it back home as it were to the position of Yachting Australia, in just the same way as ISAF revenue and organisation is dependent on the Olympics, so to a very large extent is our own organisation and so that’s why we thought strategically that was a particularly important piece of work to get involved with.

‘We had not medalled in sailing at the Athens Olympics in 2004. That realisation was a defining moment for Australian sailing Olympic class sailing.

‘We had done well in 2000 from a medal count point of view and I think there was an expectation that a number of those athletes would roll round again and go into Athens.

‘The results were quite good but there is no doubt that we weren’t well enough organised to convert that into medal.

‘Our in depth analysis revealed a lot. Not least of which was really around the question of the team culture and the approach we needed to take in winning gold medals.

‘As a direct result we brought on Peter Conde to have a look at how we could develop a Gold medal plan and we launched that and when you think about it we actually didn’t at that point have an Australian Sailing Team.

‘We never actually looked at it in those terms before. There was no brand for it. There was no identity. There was nothing for the athletes to particularly strongly associate with and that plan was very much a blue print of change that we wanted to make in the lead up to China and to London.

‘It was a defining moment. Sometimes it does take that kind of ooh moment to make you think you need to do a lot better than this.

‘It is interesting now that probably the thing I am most proud of that from a sport that was at a fairly low ebb back in 1997, we now are looked up to within the sporting community as one of the leaders in most areas in which we operate which I think is a demonstration is where the organisation has moved on and to.

‘Our medal target going into London was exactly what we got, three Gold and a Silver.

‘The difference going into London was we had the World Champions in different classes that we were really well organised from a team point of view and that was evident.’