It took some time but, finally, somebody asked the question. It came from a journalist at a media briefing Team Vestas Wind had organised in Abu Dhabi last month during the Volvo Ocean Race (VOR) stopover.
Vestas officials confirmed that their boat, severely damaged during the second leg, would return. At the end of the briefing, once all regulation queries had been answered, came the question.
“No one would purposely run into a reef,” it began, to a few sniggers. The rest is paraphrased along the lines of, given the immense media coverage that has been gained was there not some good marketing value from the incident?
For the record, it had garnered a lot of attention. Sailing, and VOR, is not a small sport and neither is it an impoverished one.
But it is niche. The VOR is also impossible to follow conventionally, so for the casual sports fan, unless he or she makes the effort, the entire nine-month race can pass by unseen, unheard, unnoticed.
It would have been difficult to miss the Vestas crash, though. The New York Times covered that.
In their year-end list of winners and losers, the crew even sneaked into the latter category, above Victoria Azarenka and below US women’s hockey.
Getting in there, rather than where they got in, was the more impressive feat.
Wired carried a piece. Indeed there was such an evocative aesthetic in the imagery of the accident even the New Yorker was piqued, carrying a typically New Yorker-y piece on A 21st-century Shipwreck.
The on-board reporter Brian Carlin’s documentation of the crash went viral. One video on YouTube has nearly 50,000 views so far and rising.
This week even Richard Branson had taken note. Branson met Morten Albaek, the Vestas chief executive, and blogged about the company’s wind-energy agenda and their efforts to rejoin the race, urging readers to make pledges to the company.
Albaek is a man whose charisma precedes his physical entry into any room.
He had made a stirring, extempore speech the night before at a function announcing the return. He decided to answer the question and here is the long version.
“If Team Vestas Wind and its story ended on that reef, there would be no value,” he said. “But now we are striving to get back into the race, a comeback many people doubted in the hours and days after November 29, then there is, of course, a lot of reputational and brand value to be captured.
“For us to make this a great branding success, we need to get back no later than Lisbon and we need to sail fast and give the other teams a tough race to Gothenburg. If that is achieved then I am sure you have a lot of value to capture.
“If we didn’t make a comeback then having my brand name more known for hitting a reef would have no value. Now we have a lot of value to capture because we’re going to make a comeback that has not been seen for decades.”
The short answer that question then is yes.
Was the question answered by the right man? Yes and no. Albaek and Vestas were affected directly but, by default, the accident also brought the VOR a lot of attention it may otherwise not have received.
So the person to ask would have been Knut Frostad, the race chief executive.
Had he been asked, a response might have gone along the lines of: the crew not getting hurt was the most important aspect, then the salvaging of the boat, then the progress of a smaller race and so on.
Publicity is low priority in such incidents but Frostad and the race as a whole will not have minded featuring, if even for a few days, in major media around the world.
That is the opinion of some veteran VOR-watchers, as well: once it had been ascertained that nobody was hurt, then the coverage was a bonus. One race official privately conceded that.
The thing is that the VOR already does a remarkable job in ensuring that a sport nobody can watch as it is happening, is still followable, not just by a hardcore of sailing loyalists, but by a growing casual fringe.
The race’s mobile application has been one of the major successes of this race.
They know, better than ever before, how to communicate the story of the race and those in it to a mass audience. Every now and again there is nothing like a little misfortune in taking that story even further.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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