Admiral’s Cup Returns: Is Owner Entertainment the Key to Racing?

Keeping yacht owners happy in big boat racing is key, while in dinghy racing Andy’s thoughts turn to how to attract bigger, open meeting turnouts.

Shut up and do the runners!” Back when the Admiral’s Cup was a regular thing, owners of race yachts were lucky if they were given an important job like controlling the running backstays. Even though they were paying the bills, it was rare for them to be allowed anywhere near their own wheel. And who ever gets praised for executing a race-winning move by doing such a great job on the runners? The only time anyone notices what you’re doing is if you mess up and the rig ends up tumbling down.

No wonder the Farr 40 made such a splash when it first arrived on the keelboat racing scene. An owner-driver rule meant that owners would get to do the most fun job on the boat, and swept-back spreaders on the mast meant there were no running backstays in sight. The Farr 40 class had asked, and listened, to what owners wanted. The boat and the class management was configured to give owners more of what they wanted, and less of what they didn’t want. Not having to do the least desirable job on the boat was a good start. As the smarter professional sailors worked out, they were – and still are – in the business of ‘owner entertainment’.

The Admiral’s Cup began to fizzle out in the 1990s and the final edition took place in 2003. This summer it’s back, however, and the Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC) appears to be receiving plenty of entries for this revitalised regatta. Provided the event does a better job of focusing on owner entertainment than it did 30 years ago, the Admiral’s Cup has a decent chance of re-establishing itself.

Owner entertainment lies at the heart of the sport at pretty much every level. When it comes to the British challenge for the America’s Cup, however, who exactly is the owner? Is it Sir Ben Ainslie, who for more than a decade has been doing his best to win the Cup for Great Britain? Or is it Sir Jim Ratcliffe, who offered to provide full backing for Sir Ben’s campaign back in 2017? It must have seemed an attractive proposition at the time, to replace a syndicate of backers in the days of BAR Racing with a single source of funding from Ineos. But now, with the painful benefit of hindsight, there must be the regret of having put all his eggs in that Ineos basket.

A few weeks after the big split between Sir Ben and Sir Jim, and we’re still none the wiser about what led to the fallout. Whatever the reasons, and however irreparable the damage may be, any British challenge for the 38th edition of the America’s Cup will be considerably weaker than the very credible effort we saw last autumn in Barcelona. Egos are the fuel that power these campaigns in the first place, and egos are what tear them apart.

From Big Boats to Dinghy Racing

Much further down the sport, back to grass roots level in the UK, I’m looking back at a moderately successful 16th edition of the Seldén Sailjuice Winter Series. Only moderately successful, because the weather of these past few months has been anything but moderate. Of the eight events attempted thus far, and with only the Zhik Oxford Blue to go, the wind has yo-yo’ed between a flat calm or a series of storms so severe that they’ve been given names by the Met Office. After a 2023/24 winter which delivered event after event of stellar sailing breeze, we’ve been dogged by the absolute extremes of unsailability this season.

That said, I did race my Musto Skiff at the John Merricks Tiger Trophy at Rutland Water and for once the fleet (110 boats representing 51 classes) actually enjoyed some benign sailing wind. And some good racing too, with three back-to-back handicap races around a square course on the Saturday, and a longer pursuit race on a beautifully crisp and sunny Sunday. The battle for overall victory at the Tiger Trophy came down to a tiebreak between a Merlin Rocket and a Norfolk Punt, with Tom Gillard and Rachael Gray’s Merlin just edging the win ahead of the father and son Punt sailors, Colin and Oly Murray.

While the racing in the Seldén Sailjuice Winter Series has been incredibly close (and nearly always is), there’s no denying that handicap competition lacks the purity and simplicity of one-design racing. However, with another summer season fast approaching, how many classes will be able to muster more than 15 boats on the start line for an open meeting? Most dinghy fleets – and keelboat classes for that matter – lack the numbers to sustain their own series. It’s been that way for 20 years or more. Which is why my Winter Series co-organiser Simon Lovesey and I are considering a relaunch of a warm-weather series to bring all the classes together on a year-round basis.

Six years ago we’d made some decent progress getting a series off the ground called the Great British Sailing Challenge (GBSC). Following a string of events during the spring and summer of 2019, it culminated in a grand final at Rutland Water in September that year. A few months later Covid struck, and that fledgling circuit collapsed before it had a chance to get properly established.

A few years on, Simon and I have rediscovered the appetite for relaunching a circuit that will incorporate many of the elements that have made the Winter Series a perennial success. It won’t be easy getting it off the ground, but provided we focus on our core goal, it might just work. That core goal is, of course you guessed already, owner entertainment.

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