No looking back for Bourke

Those who know Glenn Bourke as the boy who grew up sailing off Balmoral in Sydney, or as the winner of seven world championships in sailing, or as an Olympian, or as the man who wielded the final say in Sydney's 2000 Olympic sailing events will confirm that he has the knowledge, the credibility and the capacity to manage an event of global proportions.

"I grew up over there and learned to sail here as a kid," he says while reacquainting his toes with the white sand of Balmoral beach and pointing to a house partially obscured by trees. Bourke is back to relax for a few weeks in the southern sun, half a world away from his new digs in England.

From England he directs a close-knit team organising the massive 220-day event that will be closely watched by more than 800 million spectators.

Right now is crunch time. It's 18 months from the start of the 2005-2006 Volvo Ocean Race, and Bourke's life is getting busy. In September, he finalised the new rules that govern the construction of the fast, high-tech 70ft boats classed as Volvo Open 70s that are being built for the race.

So far, 31 international teams are listed as preliminary entries. That is to say, they have paid an entry fee of 1500 pounds. The cost of building a Volvo Open 70 is around $4 million. The total cost of competition is around $20 million.

"You can do one for a bit less than that and you can do one for more," says Bourke. "It depends on how Corinthian or technical you are in your approach and how much your sponsors wish to spend on marketing and hospitality."

For the armchair spectator, Bourke may be described as the seagoing version of Formula One's Bernie Eccleston. He boldly directs negotiations between sponsors and sailors, and he is responsible for the recent controversial decision to make Melbourne a stopover port instead of Sydney. It was just one of many hard decisions he would make and will continue to make in transforming the boats, the rules and the event.

The 2005-2006 Volvo Ocean Race starts after an in-port race in the seaside town of Sanxenxo in the Spanish region of Galicia. The fleet of Volvo Open 70s will start the first of their offshore races on November 12, 2005 from the adjacent port of Vigo - the very same port from which Columbus set sail more than 500 years ago for India and unexpectedly hit the Americas.

Melbourne, specifically the Docklands precinct, is one of nine stopover ports for the Volvo Ocean Race. The fleet will arrive in Melbourne after completing the first of two punishing legs that will take the boats deep into the Southern Ocean.

En route from Cape Town to Melbourne, there will be two scoring gates; one situated halfway into the leg at the Kerguelen Islands (French possession in the Indian Ocean) and the other, Eclipse Island, off the south coast of Western Australia.

NEW FORMAT FOR NEW-FOUND ENTHUSIASM
Bourke's first task as CEO was to reinforce the Volvo Ocean Race with sailors. Although the race must be commercial and corporate to survive, it also needs to enthuse the entire sailing community - its core audience.

The first challenge for Bourke and his handpicked team was to develop a new format that would make the race an even more difficult challenge. A new points-scoring system, which rewards offshore racing and inshore racing, was introduced. This new system makes the in-port races critical to the outcome of the overall race.

Bourke explains: "For the in-port competition, we decided that we'd actually overweight [in points] the inshore races. When you think of a 26-day leg versus a three-hour race, it is less than one per cent of the time. But we decided to give the in-port racing half points.

"So for a long leg if you win in a 10-boat fleet, you earn 10 points, but if you win the in-port race you will get five points. Because it is so crucial to a crew's overall score, we believe the teams will be going ballistic trying to win the in-port races. In a short in-port race, there's always a chance to get on the podium if a crew does everything right on the day.

"Even if they haven't performed on the previous long leg, they have an opportunity to challenge in the next in-port race."

DESIGNING THE NEW OPEN 70
The improved hull design and longer waterline of the new 70ft boat will make it much quicker. Some experts are predicting that the new Volvo Open 70s will achieve somewhere near 37kt maximum hull speed.

That speed is about the same as the maxi catamarans, and 500-mile days are expected in the Southern Ocean, where the boats could reach this speed with a hard breeze and following seas.

"We met with designers, safety authorities, sailors, and started with a really extreme view," says Bourke. "Let's start off incredibly extreme with this race and let people talk us into a common theme."

How extreme? "We did consider catamarans," Bourke says, despite the fact that he also believes catamarans would be detrimental to the race.

"A catamaran would have taken all sorts of things away from the race," he explains. "It takes the history away; it adds an enormous amount of unknown danger and risk because so many of them break in attempting to sail around the world. And you can flip a catamaran over pretty easily. They are more fragile; they're more volatile.

"We just asked the sailing fraternity, and 90 per cent of people or more came back and said no, no, no, not catamarans - so that made the decision for us."

The Volvo Ocean Race would continue as a monohull event, but there were still complex questions to answer.

"We know we've got a monohull; we know we've got to make it fast so it gets around the world quicker so the race is a little shorter. We've got to reduce the time in ports," says Bourke. "And then we've got to juggle that around the weather windows of starting and finishing in Europe in summer."

Bourke and his organising team questioned everything. Why not reduce the number of crewmembers? How can we make the rules more beneficial to women? In the end, the number of crewmembers was limited to nine for an all-male crew, 10 for a mixed crew of at least five women, and 11 members for an all-female crew.

TECHNOLOGY & SAFETY
The new Volvo Open 70s will be built using leading-edge technology and design. The hull is constructed from carbon fibre and honeycomb or foam sandwich cores.

The rigs will be carbon fibre (a material previously banned for construction of Volvo Ocean 60s) and the rigging will be non-metallic ropes (called PBO) that are much lighter than wire or rod rigging. Obviously this means every component of the boat gets lighter, which directly improves boat speed.

To ensure the new Volvo Open 70 design is as safe as the outgoing Volvo Ocean 60 (VO60), Bourke's team took the VO60 and used the same level of structural integrity and level of engineering specification. On top of that, the team consciously adopted advancements introduced into sailing since the old VO60 rule was written.

"The new Volvo Open 70s have more collision bulkheads than before," says Bourke. "In contrast, though, the faster the boats go the more risk there is. Sailing in general will never get away from that issue.

"There is an element of risk involved, but what we've done is try to create an environment where there is the least amount of risk in the most modern piece of equipment we can put on the water. For example, life rafts will be accessible through the transom of the boat so if the keel happens to be knocked off and the boat flips upside down, the crew can pull the life raft out through the back.

"We've done as much as we can in terms of safety without slowing the boats down and making them too heavy and too outdated. It is a fine line between how many safety measures you include in a new class without making the boats too heavy."

BY INVITATION ONLY
For the in-port races a sponsor's guest, a Volvo guest and a member of the media will be invited to sail onboard each Volvo Open 70, so there will be three people at the back of the boat experiencing an in-port race.

"In what other top-level sport is a full amateur able to compete with full professionals?" asks Bourke. "None! Can you ever hope to kick a ball with David Beckham, or stand at fly half and receive a pass from George Gregan in a test, or drive Juan Pablo Montoya's F1 car in a Grand Prix? You can't do it in any other sport. This is the only sport where you can.

"By allowing invited guests onboard during an in-port race, all of a sudden a lot more people are getting direct exposure in the racing environment and that's unique."

In terms of media technology, the boats will have the latest video-editing and compression software installed to send video footage, stills and radio interviews immediately. In the last race, each boat had three onboard cameras; this time there will be six, and some of those will be remote.

"That's not all," says Bourke with a grin. "There will be an emergency button on the deck so if it looks like the boat is going to roll out or some action footage is going on, a crewman can hit a button with his foot and that will start the cameras rolling.

"All the crews understand the responsibility of promoting their sponsors, and they realise that some of the best action footage seen in the past has come from these extreme situations like wipeouts."

THIS AIN'T FOOTY
"This may sound like a cliche," says Bourke, "but it is the truth as well: ocean racing embodies some interesting facets that other sporting events don't. It is a bit of a cross between sponsoring an Everest ascent and sponsoring a recognised sporting competition like football.

"There are two equally important aspects to the Volvo Ocean Race. The event offers adventure and the struggle of man against the elements, and the other is the intense sporting competition.

"In addition to unravelling the sporting story, we want to focus also on the broader human aspect of the event; the agony of drifting through the doldrums, the ecstasy of blasting through icebergs in the Southern Ocean, or the pain of being away from your wife and kids for months at a time. Then there's the risk associated with it: the speeds that the boat is going, the lack of sleep and the difficult conditions. It becomes a more well-rounded story."

The Volvo Ocean Race will start on November 5, 2005. The finish will be on July 18, 2006. There will be 100 to 105 sailing days, and there will be around a total of 115 days in port. That's a reduction of six weeks in duration (40 days) from the 2001-2002 Volvo Ocean Race.

A reduction of 25 days from the event's duration can be credited to the speed of the new Volvo Open 70 boats compared to the previous VO60s.

So how can Glenn Bourke's influence on the event ultimately be measured?

"I believe the Volvo Ocean Race sailing community trusts me," he says. "At least I hope so! Even if we get to a point where they don't like the decisions I make, if they can understand the logic behind the decision I will be happy.

"If I can explain the decision on their own terms they will generally be happy with the direction, as long as we can make it equitable to all. I might be naive in saying this, but at the moment there's a warm and positive enthusiasm from the sailors about the next Volvo Ocean Race."