Although it has had the highest attrition rate of any Vendée Globe to date, this has been a very successful race for the organisers and for the IMOCA 60 Class.
Let’s compare the strategy of SAEM Vendée, the organisers of this professional sailing race, with that of the groups controlling the professional sports which have always dominated the media – soccer, baseball, American football, Formula 1…
Instead of allowing media moguls to bid for exclusive rights – and then having to bend the product to fit the needs of the highest bidder – the preamble to SAEM’s Multimedia Appendix A) – VIDEO commented:
SAEM Vendée, organiser of the Vendée Globe has taken note of these new elements and has a strong commitment to reaching the widest possible audience, without giving exclusive rights to any of the media. For audiovisual coverage, the organisers are committed to giving open, free of charge and easy access to the race images for all the French and foreign media with the aim of:
- Giving the general public the widest possible coverage of the race, its competitors and yachts.
- Guaranteeing reciprocal arrangements between competitors and the organisers for both production commitments and open, free of charge access to each other’s images. Indeed, SAEM Vendée wishes to create original themes to attract the interest of the new media (interviews with skippers and boatbuilders, pre-race preparations, images of each boat on the day of departure etc.) and to dedicate their resources to creating films which are different to those shot by the boat teams – in collaboration with them, however.
- Enabling all competitors, their and Vendée Globe’s partners to take advantage of high quality audiovisual coverage for all their commitments.
- Respecting competitors’ copyrights.
Bravo SAEM! They paid a production company to put in place the infrastructure to collect and distribute the videos and to run daily radio calls to the boat skippers, and I reckon it has paid off handsomely. A Google search for ‘Vendée Globe videos’ yields 431,000 results. That’s tiny compared to the tens of millions for ball games or Formula 1, but it’s very early days yet for the professional sailing world.
The organisers and the pioneering sponsors are still working out how best to package the sport for mass consumption now that satellite broadband allows the necessary coverage, but they’re moving quite rapidly. There’s already a big gap between traditional ‘pro-am’ racing and the professional events, and it’s growing. Yacht racing will never be the same again.
