Selling a Sailing Race : Plans Are Under Way to Make Around-the-World BOC Challenge a Big-Time Event

I do not understand it when people say they are not frightened of the sea. I am. The sea can be very nasty.

--Single-handed skipper Guy Bernardin

Inside the dark, paneled walls of the Explorer’s Club, next to the room where a 12-foot polar bear (stuffed) bares its fangs, the president of Capital Sports, Inc., gazed out over the podium at an audience comprised of BOC group representatives, editors from discreet sailing publications, members of the World Wildlife Fund, assorted corporate types and a handful of sailors.

“We may not be sailing experts but we are experts in sports marketing,” Bob Arrix said.

Arrix, sporting carefully trimmed silver hair, a nice suntan and a Kirk Douglas cleft in his chin, went on to explain how his firm had taken the U.S. Open and turned it from a $250,000 event to a $515 million one. How it had implemented the Equitable Old Timer’s Program. Why it had purchased the Panasonic Millrose Games. And how it was going to turn the BOC Challenge into a Big-Time event. The BOC representatives, the yacht brokers and most of the sailors nodded appreciatively.

Mark Shrader, who sailed in the previous BOC challenge in 1986-87 and who would be race director for the 1990-91 event, scheduled to leave Newport, R.I., on Sept. 15, joked he wanted to resign his new position upon learning prize money would be increased from $15,000 to $100,000 for first place.

Words such as “presenting sponsors,” “official sponsors,” and “tele-marketing” were being bandied about freely. Press kits were handed out.

In the third-to-last row, a middle-aged man with a tired, gentle face and a battered briefcase shifted uncomfortably. As a skipper who had covered nearly 100,000 miles alone, Guy Bernardin had faced icebergs, 10-story high waves, sharks and gale-force winds without losing his cool.

In the first BOC challenge, for instance, Bernardin was piloting his 38-footer through a storm in the Indian Ocean when a wave caught the tiny boat on the stern, tipping it 160 degrees and flipping Bernardin out of the cockpit--without a lifeline. As he hung suspended in midair, two thoughts chased each other through Bernardin’s mind.

“It was the most fantastic impression of freedom I have ever had,” Bernardin said. “Floating in space like that, I felt empty. High. Free.”

Gellic practicality won out, however, and Bernardin’s second thought was to grasp on to something. Flailing about, his hand brushed across the running back stay that ran the length of the boat, and by grabbing it, he was neatly deposited back in the cockpit when the boat came upright.

But now, the thought of various high-powered companies taking over a race that had sprung out of a conversation among sailors over a couple of beers was very unsettling to Bernardin. And the image of his beloved 60-foot-boat, in which he finished fourth in the last BOC Challenge, being plastered with decals like Al Unser’s Indy car, had him in a near panic.

“If, say, a company bought sponsorship in the race, would we all have to use the product, or display it,” Bernardin asked.

No, he was told. The only thing the sailors would be required to fly was the race flag. But Bernardin, somehow, wasn’t satisfied.

“I don’t know,” he murmured in French to his companion. “I don’t know what is going to happen to this race.”

What is going to happen to the race, of course, is exactly what has happened to every other sport, from horse racing to the triathlon. It’s going to go commercial.

“Sailing is rapidly becoming a high profile, big money sport, alongside golf, tennis and motor racing,” said Richard Giordano, president of the BOC (British Oxygen Company) Group.

To most of the sailors, the aspect of commercialization was not viewed as particularly intrusive or unwarranted. Once out on the seas, they reason, there is little that can be done to distract a man from his mission by way of public relations.

“That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” said Tony Lush, who sailed in the first BOC Challenge. “Things have a way of changing, of evolving. And this race is one of those things.”

But for Bernardin, described by Lush as a “solo hitter’s solo hitter and the epitome of independence, the concept bordered on repugnant.

“It’s going to be a lot different,” Bernardin was saying after the presentation of the race’s official film, Around Alene. “It would seem to be not as adventurous. Like they are taking the freedom out of it. It will be nothing like the first race, I can tell you that.”

In 1982, only 17 sailors in boats of varying sizes set out from Newport, in the first BOC Challenge, making stops in South Africa, Australia and Rio de Janiero. Bernardin, in the smallest boat in the field, was making his second attempt at an around-the-world voyage.

“It was something I had always wanted to do,” said the 44-year-old Frenchman, born in Brittany, the grandson of a tall ship captain. “And the race gave me the vehicle in which to do it.”

Like many of his fellow Frenchmen, the lure of single-handed yachting had proved irresistible to Bernardino. In 1978, he quit his job managing a French restaurant in Santa Monica and sailed a 40-year-old Pacific International Class 26-footer from Los Angeles through the Panama Canal to England, accompanied by his wife, Mitzi. From there, he participated in his first single-handed race to the Azores and back, competed in the 1980 OSTAR (the single-handed Transatlantic race), and then attempted his first circumnavigation alone.

Aboard RATSO II (backwards for OSTAR), Bernardin made it to Capetown but was forced back for repairs. A few days out, his radio conked out. Undeterred, he sailed on for 123 days before reaching home.

“No one knew where I was for four months, really,” said Bernardin matter-of-factly.

But the idea of racing around the word, instead of just sailing around the world, seemed precisely the sort of adventure which could satisfy the hunger in Bernardin’s isolated, restless, soul.

And it did, at least the first time.

“We were discovering a new thing,” Bernardin said of the race, won both times by compatriot Philippe Jeantot. “There was a sense of high adventure, of comradeship, even though we just talked by radio.”

Knowing he needed a larger, better boat if he was to be competitive a second time, Bernardin scurried about and drummed up enough sponsorship to have a sturdy 59-foot-10 craft named Biscuits Lu constructed for less than $200,000.

“He did an amazing job,” said Lush. “Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough money to get the specialized weather equipment, and that hurt him somewhat.”

More than that, however, was the tragedy that befell Jacques de Roux, the former French submarine commander who was lost at sea in the Indian Ocean December, 1986. His boat, Skoiern IV, was found drifting and it was presumed de Roux had been washed overboard without a lifeline.

“Once that happens it is all over,” Bernardin said.

Jeantot, heavily backed by the French bank, Credit Agricole, had the technology, the support crew and, of course, the brilliant sailing ability to repeat as the champion, while Bernardin, a conservative sailor, finished fourth overall.

“It was too much like a job,” he said. “I am not sure if I will race in its again. We will see what happens. Right now, everything is vague.”

Even without the BOC Challenge, however, Bernardin is not at a loss for new adventures, new experiences. In 1989, for instance, he plans on racing in Jeantot’s new event--an around-the-world, single-handed, non-stops race.

The tough part is never the sailing, says Bernardin.

“The hardest thing is to get to the starting line,” he said. “Getting the sponsorship, the money, on your own is very difficult. It is a job for three people, not one entrepreneur.”

But that’s the way Bernardin has always operated--alone, beyond the pals of even the most solitary of solitary sportsmen.

“Why do I do it?” Bernardin asked. “I do not know. It is like a drug--once it gets into your system, you’re stuck with it. It’s something like being a race-car driver, constantly going faster, and faster yet. Pushing the outside of the envelope, as test pilots say.

“When you’re out there alone, you push yourself to new limits. And there are nice moments, like a lovely sunset. But when you come back on land, you feel a different person. A better person. There is more serenity, more balance. A new life. It’s fantastic.”