GBR Challenge

The AC is no more elitist than F1, Football or any other professional team sport.

You have to be rich to own a team and good at what you do to be part of one.

But anyone can crew at thier local club, play football for thier local pub or "steal a car and take part in the estate GP".   

Coiler - why do you want to remain annon? Are you a (financially) interested party?

I think you are missing the point here - most people here do not agree with government sponsorship of a commercial organisation. The AC is hardly politically correct is with the obscene amounts of money being spent on it.

It also portrays the sport as very etlitist - it hardly encourages people to join our sport does it. I am saying that any media coverage may actually do our sport more harm than good.

Very good question - shortsightedness, lack of undersatnding of the sailing market demographics, not enough sailors in corporate marketing departments. I also think that GBR Challenge let the mommentum go at the end of the LV Cup when they should have been out looking for sponsership.

Whilst to sailors AC match racing maybe less exciting than big fleet Olympic races, I still feel that it is the 2nd best PR platform to get Sailing to the general public, the human intrest angle (Ellen, BT challenge) being the best.  

The last GBR Challenge made national news and at least 2 or 3 1/2 hour slots on Grandstand only the Olympics and Ellen gets more. To Joe Public it the most understandable form of our sport (as a sport and not a human interest story) especially when edited Rally style, i.e. results and spectacular highlights.

It would be very interesting to look into the finances of the Billionaire backed syndicates to see how much actually ended up coming out of the Billionaires pocket – I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that once you take all the sponsorship, merchandising, advertising, corporate hospitality benefits e.t.c. into to account they won’t be seriously out of pocket. (You don’t get to be a Billionaire by throwing money away.)  What the Billionaires do is provide the creditability and underwriting that the corporate world need before it will take a risk.

Sorry hurricane are you saying the AC gets prime time TV - if so where, I have not seen it.

Come to think of it I have not seen any sailing on prime time TV. We all know how much fun sailing is on the water but as a spectator sport it will never rate highly.