The Big Interview – Jim O’toole

Sportindustry.biz speaks exclusively to Jim O’Toole, CEO of the World Match Racing Tour, about money and the common misconceptions that the sport faces.

What is the World Match Racing Tour?

The World Match Racing Tour is a professional yacht racing series where the world’s best match racing sailors compete for a total annual prize fund of $1.75m. We have seven qualifying events from France through to Bermuda, in which our sailors compete for individual event prize money, but most importantly for World Match Racing points.

After the seventh qualifier in Bermuda, the top nine on the tour qualify for our finale in Malaysia, where they will be competing for a prize of nearly a millions dollars. Competitors also earn 1.5 times championship points at the event, so if you are third going into the finale and win it – you’ve got a good chance.

For example last year, Ben Ainslie won the Monsoon Cup in Malaysia and the world championship in one weekend, and went home with quite a large cheque!

The sport itself is one-on-one boat racing. Two boats start together, battle for competitive edge in the pre-start, with a countdown from seven minutes to zero, and the goal is to dance around the start so you are in a better position when you cross the line. The course is two, sometimes three laps of a course around 500m, racing around markers – and the first man over the finish line is the winner.

So all the boats are identical for everyone?

Exactly, although the type of boat is different for every event – but yes they’re all identical. For example, in Sweden we were racing in SM-40s and in Malaysia they’re FS-37s.

The venue has to provide around eight identical boats that are rigged the same way, and in each race the boats are rotated, so if a boat does happen to be slightly faster – it is rotated amongst the field.

The Series seems so international, with six different nationalities in the top seven skippers as it stands – why do you think it’s so globally dominated?

Well it’s surprisingly simple for the sailors. The local event provides the boats – so all the competitors need is their kit, their teammates and racing instructions. Just fly in and race. That’s why it’s attracted the biggest sailors in the world.

What you don’t necessarily see is the multi-national crews, for example the Yanmar racing team is skippered by an Australian, but then has two Japanese sailors, one French and a New Zealander.

It is incredibly global but the big sailing countries are Australia, New Zealand, Britain, France, Italy and Sweden.

Although you’re very close to the shore, do you have any problems as a spectator sport?

We are as close to the shore as we can possibly get, we sail within 15-20ft of the rocks if we can. It’s a common misunderstanding that we are miles out to sea, but we bring it close to the mainland for the spectators.

One of the big challenges for other sailing competitions being so far offshore, is of course that nobody can see it. Many years ago our series was raced offshore and for a very small group of people.

Then it was re-structured so that it was brought as close in to the land as we could get. Our goal now is that wherever we go, one of the prerequisites of a venue is that we have to be able to sail right up close.

Do you think the misconceptions and misunderstanding of the series is your biggest problem?

Let’s be honest, compared to the giants of football, cricket, golf, tennis etc, sailing is a minority sport. We acknowledge it and are very comfortable with that fact.

However, we believe that it’s a growing sport. We are definitely the world’s leading match racing series, and we see ourselves up there with the Volvo Ocean Race and Americas Cup which are a totally different form of racing.

As a consistent year-round brand, we are at the forefront of building the story of sailing and selling it as a sport.

Any kind of publicity for the sport is good, but our main job is to bring people towards the Match Racing element of sailing.

The sport can be simple or complicated depending on how you look at it. For the enthusiast, there are complicated strategies, particularly on a psychological level – getting into the heads of your competitors, as well as using bluffs on the water for example.

Essentially though it’s very straightforward, get the other guy out the way and make it as hard as possible for him within the rules of racing.

For more information on the World Match Racing Tour, visit www.wmrt.com