The Volvo Ocean Race, the Perfect Storm and saving the family silver

by Rob Kothe & the Sail-World Team on 22 Sep 2015 At the skippers press conference the day before the start of the 2014-15 Volvo Ocean Race, the seven skippers were asked to put their hand up of they felt that had this race not been one design, they would not be sitting there. Every hand went up.

As the winning skipper Ian Walker recently commented ‘Let’s face it, he (Knut Frostad) saved the event with that one decision.’

So as part of the interview series with retiring Volvo Ocean Race CEO Knut Frostad last week, Sail-World asked him. ‘What are your proudest moments in the last eight years in relation to this race? ‘

His response - ‘I think probably my absolute proudest moment is standing on the start line in the last race in Alicante. Not so much because what was actually on the start line there and then, but because of the decisions we had made that put us all there.

‘None of these races are ever going to be easy. And the races sponsorship, and getting everything together, getting the cities and boats and making that bigger - is never easy.

‘When we came to the 2011-12 race, we had what I call the perfect storm.

‘We had everything happening at the same time.

‘The costs of competing were going through the roof, the race was run by boat designers almost and the development testing and building costs were rocketing.

‘As designers and teams pushed the envelope, we had an enormous amount of really bad incidents with the boats.

‘On the first night after the Alicante start and then into the first week we had boats falling apart. And that continued all the way until we got to Itajai Brazil.

‘But there was only two boats that managed to sail there properly. And that was kind of one of the lowest points in that race.

‘The only good thing was the Brazilian stopover was a fantastic event. We had the record numbers of people and a great stopover. In fact what saved the 2011-2012 event was we had some incredibly good stopovers.

‘We had a great stopover in Brazil. We had an amazing one in Lisbon, and Lorient we had a great one, and a fantastic finish in Galway, with a party like sailing has probably never ever seen before.

‘But all the while the world economy was crashing completely, that had started already in the early months of the race. When we finished that race in 2012 in Galway, everything was red.

‘There wasn't a company that was not hurting. People spoke about the Euro disappearing. Spain had completely crashed. So had Ireland and Portugal.

‘And my expectation was that none of the team sponsors were going to renew and continue.

‘I remember I finished in Galway, and there was a friend of mine in the business world who sent me an article from one of the British newspapers, where the headline was,

'The world is crashing.'

‘And then it said, 'If you are in any of these industries now, find yourself a new job.'

‘Sports sponsorship was number 2.

‘So I think that that was probably the lowest point in my involvement over the eight years.

‘When I went back to the office in Spain, and I sat there, and thought, 'What do I do now?'

‘Fortunately realising that one-off design costs were getting out of control, one of the best things we did was to push the one design agenda, even before the 2011-2012 race started.

‘Without that prospect it would have an incredibly hard - to get those wheels turning for 2014-2015 in those dark times.

‘After the race had finished, all these executives in all these companies, including Volvo - went back to their boardrooms and they got their financial reports and nothing was looking was looking very flash.

‘People were only talking about how deep is this crisis going to go?

‘So the fact that we got the one design wheels turning, and we showed very actively to all the stake holders that we are responsible. And we will cut costs, we'll live in the same world as the sponsors.

‘And we have to go radical. We're going to really make big changes. As we did with the Boat Yard for example.

‘Fortunately Volvo was amazing with this race.

‘For a race entrant, the Volvo Ocean Race is incredibly difficult to get to the starting line. Incredibly hard to sail it. And you just know when you start this race that you're going to have some completely unexpected disasters to deal with.

‘All the people who are in this event, whether they are in my office here in Spain, or they are in the teams, or they are involved in the race one way or the other - they have that attitude that they can't drop it. They just love what we call a good old shit fight.

‘They just love that challenge of 'people telling you, 'This is impossible.'

'Great, I'm going to take it on, is their response.

'And after, Galway, we just started climbing - climbing and climbing.

‘We had to build all these boats in record time. They have to be super good boats in one design.

‘We needed a lot of funding to do that. We had no teams, no customers, nothing...

‘For months it was nerve wrecking.

'Because the crisis continued the whole autumn and the whole winter 2012, 2013.

‘And getting deeper and deeper and deeper.

‘And we started building boats.

‘And I must admit that I had a lot of sleepless nights in that period.

‘But the changes we had made that drove costs down and allowed for late entries made a huge difference.

‘And then, to see all those seven on design boats on the start line, in probably the best race village we had had in Alicante ever - and to meet the sponsors, and Volvo being very happy was like…” Wow!”

‘There was kind of a feeling, 'We did it.' I almost felt we won the race before it started.

‘So it doesn't mean that I think everything was picture perfect. But for me, the race was to get to Alicante on the start line, and bring the race back again.

‘We had some big lows in this last race too, we can talk about Team Vestas at length but that too ended well.

‘But that is all behind us, everyone involved should be proud of what has been achieved and the future for the Volvo Ocean Race is very bright.

‘The Volvo companies have recently expressed their focus and support for the race going forward. This goes all the way to the top, and having such a long term partner and owner in this sport is amazing.

‘They've always been committed, but they are now even more long term in building the event.

‘I’ve just come back from a series of board meetings and workshops in Sweden.

‘In our recent strategy workshop with the Volvo managements one of the top executives of Volvo referred to the race as Volvo’s “Family Silver”.

‘They care about this race and the years and the resource they have invested in it a
lot.’

In the next extract from this interview Knut talks about some of the challenges, lessons learned and future developments with the VOR 65 and more.