Photo:©2006 CupInfo

MH:  I think there’s a limit, we have created something new here ... but, like many things you can over-do it, and the Cup is very special.  You need three a year -- from a logistical and organizational view, three are plenty.  It’s just a big deal and does cost a lot of money, so at a certain stage ... what we are doing now, people are engaged in understanding a new thing, and there’s curiosity and then enthusiasm.  But, you can overdo it, and I think that’s what’s happening in other sports in Europe. 

I look at tennis on BBC world service at home and see some tennis match being played.  They call it after the sponsor now! They don’t even call it after the city it’s in.  I have no idea where it is.  It’s just another tennis match with Mercedes Benz written on the net, I don’t know if I am Hamburg, or Moscow, or London.  And, what’s the point of that?

The same with Formula One -- it’s interesting again this year because the status quo has changed a little bit.  But it’s every weekend, so if I miss this event, there’s one in two weeks time.  And football, let’s not even start there, you are just flattened with football. 

An awful lot of companies understand that they need to do a lot of corporate hospitality around Europe because that’s what business communication is all about.  They don’t necessarily have any interest in any particular sport or theater, but they know they’ve got to do it.  They can’t always take people to football matches.  They have to have a variety of different things. 

A new product, the America's Cup, comes on the market and I daresay, there are two or three companies that would like to take people to Trapani for the long weekend, see something unusual.  Take them out and get them seasick ... see all these trials ... be part of something that hasn’t happened before.  Be part of something that’s going to be the chat.  If you do too much of it you’ll banalize it and we’ll lose the sparkle of what the Cup is.  But then, at the same time, you can only do so much in the period of your tenure. 

So, if the Cup is lost, the Kiwis could say we aren’t going to do any of these Acts, we are just going to go back to New Zealand and we’re going to have the America’s Cup match in February, 2008 and you challengers organize yourselves how you want and we’ll see you 2008 in February and that’s the end of it. 

It really is about, and you can argue that it’s a ridiculous thing, you should have a full time management process, and federation and I’d say to that -- don’t destroy something that’s very special and unique in sports.  Perhaps one of the reasons this event has survived 150 years with all its quirkiness and attracted major players is because of its difference and unique situation. 

You try to sell a concept, and it’s just paper and pencils and talk.  But now we have tangibles you can see, and feel and understand and there is talk in the market space about this.  We are only half way through this event but I think Trapani, for example, would probably say that was a big risk to do that, but well done, because it paid off massively. 

CI:  Hasn’t it also survived because there is a TV audience that can be reached?

MH:  You’re right, the TV situation is very important and we’re building this, but the level of the product is very low at the moment because we never anticipated doing live television this early.  You have to budget all of these things because live TV is very expensive, well, TV is expensive.  To make it live you’ve got to have rights holders around the world that believe this is an important thing to do, and you can’t have an America’s Cup race at prime time between seven and eight at night like you do Champions league because it’s dark you know. 

You can go to a place where the wind is sufficiently reliable that if you schedule it to happen at two o’clock it happens at two o’clock because the sea breeze comes and that’s one of the main reasons we chose Valencia.  So, it’s a very fine balance between all these elements.  You really have to be very careful not to take too much of this because you can make money and sacrifice the core business. 

The core business is the sailing regatta and the core people are the sailors and the teams.  And, if you go too far one way and forget that, you destroy the whole thing.  Without the proper serious sports stories going on in the middle of this, none of the rest can survive.  It all hangs off this core of the event. 
 

	Louis Vuitton Acts: Close Competition Photo:©2006 CupInfo

Internally I spend my time fighting for the core business because I’m a sailor and a couple of the others of us are too.  But the marketeers who come from other sports, with other ideas, or just marketing departments and have a strong idea how to get 70,000 people to the park every day, and sell them T-shirts and that sort of stuff, and that’s cool, and they’re very successful at it, but it’s a balance.  You really have to be careful otherwise it just ends up like everything else. 

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