Emirates Team NZ's Volvo campaign - a three week wonder?

by Richard Gladwell on 23 Apr 2010
In the secretive underworld of the America’s Cup, the Deep Throat's say: 'if you want to find out the truth, follow the money'.

To understand Emirates Team New Zealand’s fledgling Volvo Ocean Race campaign, maybe the phrase should be altered to say 'follow the dates', rather than the money.

In just three weeks, Emirates Team New Zealand would have us believe that they have put together a Volvo Ocean Race program from scratch.

Some are of the view that it might just have been in their minds for a little longer than that – as it would have been in any America’s Cup team looking to survive a seven year competition drought.

Certainly crunch time for the longest established America’s Cup team would have come at the end of the Louis Vuitton Trophy, with the realisation that the 34th America’s Cup will most likely be sailed sometime in 2014, coupled with the knowledge that a diet of Louis Vuitton Trophy events, was not really sufficient to sustain the team in terms of sponsor, fan or sailor interest.

In an interview Sail-World conducted with Emirates Team New Zealand CEO, Grant Dalton, on the final day of the Louis Vuitton Trophy, 21st March, there was no mention of the five letter word 'Volvo'. It was all about America’s Cup and gearing up to 2013 and 2014.

Maybe we didn’t ask the right questions, but no-one else in the queue outside the Louis Vuitton Media Centre, that sunny afternoon seems to have done so either.

Ten days later, a hundred metres or so away, in a first floor room of one of the Viaduct's many watering holes, the Volvo Ocean Race stopover for Auckland was being announced.

That was ten days after the end of the Louis Vuitton Trophy, on the 31st March. Auckland was said to have been paying half the going fee – which had pundits a little baffled, given there was no boat from the port – the usual prerequisite for a stopover.

Grant Dalton was notable by his absence. No reference was made of this during the announcement. The overheard word was that he was 'back on Friday' (but probably later). From where, was not revealed, or not known, and the subject quickly dropped.

Friday, was two days following – Good Friday to be precise.

Early, the following Monday, 5 April, Sail-World put to Grant Dalton the stories that had been circulating in the New Zealand media that Emirates Team NZ was going to enter the Volvo. Just 30 minutes later came back a terse reply, saying that rumour control was 'off the mark, again, at this stage'.

The operative phrase was 'at this stage'

Just five days later on 10 April, Sail-World was told by European sources that Emirates Team NZ was going to announce a Volvo Ocean Race entry the following Monday 12 April, in Palma, Spain under the flag of Real Club Nautico de Palma, and that Camper would be the main sponsor. That was confirmed the following morning, in Auckland. The Kiwi announcement date was Tuesday, 13 April.

The time from the end of the Louis Vuitton Trophy to the announcement of the Volvo entry in New Zealand was just 24 days, or three weeks exactly from the end of the LVT to the date of the signing of an agreement with the major sponsor on Saturday 10 April.

If the dates are accurate, that is a remarkable achievement.

If not. Well done, anyway.

Grant Dalton picked up on the fast track timing theme right from the outset of the media conference on 13 April:

'One of the questions is why Emirates Team New Zealand wants to do the Volvo race, and there’s a couple of reasons for that. About two months ago we said we weren’t going to do it. One major thing changed: it was that we met with Oracle (Russell Coutts) during the first few days of the Louis Vuitton regatta and they said they intended to do the America’s Cup in ’13 or ’14, at a venue to be announced, etc.

'The Volvo Ocean race starts next year and it finishes in 2012. Kevin, myself and Dean walked out of here and we were standing at the travel lift bay, and one of the guys said ‘why don’t we do the Volvo race?’

'I went ‘yeah, let’s do that.’ So it came in and got on email straight away and started the relationship at that point.

'It’s two weeks ago last Friday that I was in Spain, in Majorca with Camper, and it was one of those days where you walk into a meeting and you just know instantly it is going to be a good day. Because in meeting the Camper people had made a decision that they wanted to do the race – you just instantly knew that you were going to have a good day because they were so easy to deal with.

He touched on the announcement of Auckland as the eighth, and final port to be announced: 'There was a bit of timing issues there because Volvo wanted to announce that the stopovers were all done by the 31st of March – well, we didn’t have the deal done on the boat, so we were sweating bullets there for a little bit to get it all put together, but now it’s perfect.

In response to a question whether Emirates Team NZ actually had sufficient time left to get a competitive entry together, Dalton confirmed another vital time: 'We signed this deal at 12.30 at night Friday two weeks ago in Palma. By Monday morning we were working. You could not do that in any other organisation. Alinghi is in a similar position; I think you’ll see pretty soon Alinghi announce their involvement. It’s the perfect one for them really to get their mojo back and re-establish some credentials. They’re an organisation that can start up straight away as well, but if you’re not in that position, you’d struggle now.'

Friday two weeks ago, in Palma' was 2 April.

Dalton says the relationship with Camper evolved quickly.

'It came through a couple of phone calls that I had with somebody that knew somebody. With people like Matteo de Nora working with us, we’re well hooked up overseas.

After we had that conversation by the travel lift. I came in, I got on the phone and said ‘we’ve got to do this, let’s see if we can pull it together.’

'I talked to Volvo. I knew that Camper were interested, but they had to be interested enough, before I arrived. They had already made a decision that they took Emirates Team New Zealand seriously, and they already had decided that they wanted to do the race. It was one of those things where you could not have wished for a better day in your life. The meeting was fantastic and they’re brilliant people to deal with. To pull this together in two weeks – in my experience you can’t do that.'

The discussion at that first media conference then shifted to the current state of play:

'The boat is well into the design – it’s a Marcelino Botin boat; an in house design,' Dalton said. 'At any one time you can find about 15 people out the back already working on design. All the other boats at this stage in the race are from another design board, Juan Kouyoumdjian. Marcelino Botin did Puma in the last race, she finished second – off a pretty short design time frame.

Operations manager, Kevin Shoebridge takes up the running:' We’re in a pretty nice position with the resources we have here in design world, shore team world, building boats, etc. We’ve put together a group of people around Marcelino – 15 or 16 guys who are working on the design process over the next four months – and they are not coming from a standing star. Marcelino has already done a lot of pre-design work on this class so we’re quite well advanced. We have all the in house capability with structural engineers, rig designers, sail designers and the like.

'The boat will be built at Cookson’s in Glenfield starting sometime in August,' he adds.

'There’ll be a pretty strong association with this team through that process with our guys in the yard overseeing construction, doing the engineering, doing the drawings.

'It’s a very good project for us; it’s nice to have our guys working on another grand prix design', says Shoebridge. It’s nice to have them all thinking and working together, all the various aspects of the team – even the sailing team are involved in helping us with wind tunnels and sail designs and ideas like that in the early stages, so it’s quite all-encompassing.'

Final word goes to Matteo de Nora, Emirates Team NZ's mentor and European connection: 'It’s important to have a full time team. It is important to have a full time team regardless of what they are specifically working on; I think it’s good to keep the team together at all times and they just improve by being together.

'The America’s Cup is every three or four years or whatever – the idea is to have a group of people who are ready for whatever is going to happen in whatever category. It also helps you to identify which people are best for which type of sailing and so forth and to find the best combination of people.'

The Volvo Ocean Race entry means Emirates Team NZ is the first to achieve the full deck of events in the professional sailing world - America's Cup; Volvo Ocean Race, Louis Vuitton Trophy, Audi MedCup and World Match Racing tour.