The Big Interview – Knut Frostad

Sportindustry.biz speaks exclusively to Knut Frostad, CEO of the Volvo Ocean Race, about the flagship sailing event’s future plans and the challenges it faces.

For the uninitiated, what is the Volvo Ocean Race?

It’s by far the biggest offshore sailing race that visits every continent in the world so I would say it’s the most global competition you could have. It has participants from all over the world as well, so it is a very global competition and a growing sport.

The numbers are growing by each race and I think that’s thanks to media content. Our content is sought after by sponsors and media in video, sound and graphics. The other thing is that the race is very photo friendly, so the images you get from the race are great, and I think that’s one of our big assets.

During the last Volvo Ocean Race in 2008-09, we had 3.8m visitors to the ten stopover ports in total. So that is quite a good number – whilst spectators might not watch sailing every single day of the two weeks of the stopover they visit, there is also a lot of other entertainment and you can watch the boats very closely.

How does it differ from other sailing races?

Apart from that the race is looked upon as the ultimate event for any sailor competing in offshore sailing. It’s a team sport so there are ten sailors on each boat and they race in a class called Volvo Ocean 70.

Each team designs and builds their own boat to fit a ‘box rule’. This means that all of the different designs have to fit into specific guidelines, a bit like a F1 car would. Within these guidelines, you are free to develop the boats as much as you want.

They are the fastest sailing boats on the planet today, capable of doing 40 knots speed (46 mph).

From a marketing point of view, is the challenge for you about branching out to new fans or keeping hold of the fan base you already have?

It is absolutely to reach out to new people and not only new people but new markets and new countries. What we learnt from the last Volvo Ocean Race is to change the route to include Asia, we did that quite early and although sailing is not a big sport in China for example, we now have huge numbers of followers there, and I think although it is not the biggest sport, it’s a sport a lot of people can understand and relate to – the fact that you race around the world from one country to the other – it’s a basic sport to understand in that sense.

Also we not only look at the Volvo Ocean Race as a sport, we also look upon it as an adventure that we are selling to an audience which is more about human drama, adventure, nature, – a reality show in a sense.

There are ten people in a boat that have to make it work, with very high pressure, stress and a lot of risk involved. Typically the new audience we are looking for are those that are attracted to watch human adventures and not necessarily typical sport freaks.

We will have two separate stories being communicated for the next race. Last time it was perhaps to much sport being communicated for the adventure audience and not enough sport and live action for the sport audience, so this time we are splitting our coverage into sections where we have the sport section which is more live, and going into more detail about the timings and who is leading the race – and an adventure section which is much more documentary based, about the people, the families and the risks they take, as well as the nature and the drama they experience while sailing around the world.

But clearly we are reaching out to a greater audience and we see that in the last race a big group of fans are already coming from people who did not have an interest in sailing.

A good example of that is when we launched an online game in the last race where people could enter their own boats online and race against their friends and the real boats. The engine behind this game is the real European weather model so it’s quite a sophisticated game and we now have 220,000 people playing that game. We knew about 50% of the players actually have no relation to sailing at all and have learned about sailing through the game.

The Volvo Ocean Race lasts 9 months, how does that fit in with the rest of the sailing calendar?

Pretty well because we always start the race late in the Autumn, we always start from Spain, with Leg 1 on the 6th November and then we race through the European winter, arriving early Summer the next year back in Europe and the reason we do that is we cannot race in the Southern ocean close to Antarctica during the Antarctic winter because there is too much ice.

So timing, it fits very well, the America’s Cup is now scheduled for 2013 the year after we race and the Olympic Games is also about one month after we finish so it’s timed pretty well with the other major events.

How can understanding of the sport be improved?

I think one important challenge we have to think about is how we can cover the race when it’s happening out in the ocean.

We have worked very hard on sophisticated technology where we can stream live video images from the boat and actually produce in High Definition, a very good product.

To get that experience even better we decided before the last race to include a cameraman on each boat, so on each boat there is a media crew member, which is a dedicated person who is not allowed to sail or participate in the racing and only operates the camera systems on the boat to cover the stories that are happening.

I think the most important element to making the sport more understandable is one, to use graphics, which we are going to improve a lot in the next race, and two, to concentrate more on the people on board the boats, why their doing it and what they go through in the race. General human stories that a lot of people can relate to.

It has sometimes been compared to trying to make Big Brother on a boat but I often say that although Big Brother is called a reality show, it’s definitely not real, it’s quite fake, while the Volvo Ocean Race is real.

It’s about ten people in a very small space, going at high speeds and putting their lives on the line to win a sport competition and how they work together – its something a lot of people could empathise with, more so then what sail they’re putting up or weather forecasts, which is something that only real sailors would be interested in. Focusing on the human side is what we think is the right strategy to drive a bigger audience.

It is obviously not the most convenient spectator sport, so as far as people turning up to watch the race, opportunities must be limited?

We have had some pretty big starts, with a lot of spectator boats and we are also moving the racing very close to shore, going completely away from the traditional race course. They will race around different marks along the shore which will give spectators about a two hour experience, very close with big screens and commentating, and not much different to a F1 race.

But F1 fans get to see the cars going round the track 50/60 times, surely sailing fans would get to see the boats once or twice?

Oh no, that’s what we’re changing – the boats will now do rounds before they leave off shore as well as an in-port race, so you see them four times. So that has changed, you don’t see them just once now, absolutely not.