Knut Frostad has never been someone to shirk a challenge.
When he was called upon to become the chief executive officer of the Volvo Ocean Race in early 2008, he had already carved out a long and successful career in business management and administration.
However, Frostad does not belong behind a desk. The Norwegian knows what it is like to be buffeted by gargantuan waves and gale-force winds in the dead of night, hundreds of miles from dry land. And whether he is on water or on foot, the 44-year-old clearly relishes a challenge: he cut his teeth on the waves in his early teens and went on to compete in dinghy sailing at the 1992 Olympics, followed by four editions of the race he now oversees, including twice as a skipper.
Before he took the reins of the Volvo Ocean Race, Frostad even went on a month-long expedition to Antarctica. So can an appetite for such challenges prepare someone for taking control of a major sporting event?
“I wouldn’t say I’m an adrenaline junkie, but I’m not risk averse,” he told SportBusiness International. “I think you do need to be a bit brave if you are running a sporting event as you have to make it different to the other ones out there, and the nature of the Volvo Ocean Race is unique.
“There is the same danger and risk as there was in sailing 200 years ago, and those elements are great stories to be told. In sailing, though, you are always trying to minimise risk. Sailors will never go closer to icebergs than they need to.”
Spreading the risk by increasing the footprint of the race has been an integral part of Frostad’s strategy at the helm, particularly considering the icy winds of the global financial freeze which led to six teams signing up for the 2011-12 campaign - two fewer than the previous edition of the race in 2008-09.
One initiative by the organisers has been to impose new measures to prevent teams from spending their way beyond the reach of their competitors. In the 2008-09 race, for example, the budget for Ericsson - which supported two yachts including the winning boat - was thought to be well in excess of €50 million and more than five times the budget of some of the other teams.
However, with new rules tightening guidelines on boat designs and restricting the number of sails and the number of sailors over the age of 30 in each crew, Frostad believes the race has “capped the cost of winning” and taken necessary steps towards eliminating unfair advantages for the wealthier outfits.
“We have made almost 100 changes to the rules for the teams,” Frostad says. “To drive interest in a sporting event, you need to have some sense of a level playing field. If one team has a massive advantage, that kills the sport.
“The feedback we received from the sponsors was that we needed to do something and I think we’ve achieved maybe 80 per cent of what we should do in this area, but we want to keep pushing this policy [of minimising investment discrepancies in teams] in the future.
“We would like to have had more entries this year, but perhaps we would have ended up with fewer teams if we had not have introduced the new measures. In any case we have a more competitive field of entries without the big budget gaps.”
A possible expansion of the schedule, which has changed considerably since the first edition of the race in 1973, is “one of the things on the table” for future development in the sport according to Frostad. Volvo Ocean Race 2011-12 race boasts 10 stopovers across seven continents but there is an appetite for more as ports continue to realise the commercial benefits of hosting legs across the series.
“We are looking carefully at the schedule, but in this economic climate we need to make sensible decisions,” says Frostad, who also adds another possibility is staging the race on a more regular basis than every three years to maximise the opportunities for all stakeholders.
“In the future I think we will see it happening more often than it is today. When you build an audience you need to keep it, rather than try to build it all over again.”
For the full article see the latest edition of SportBusiness International published November 1.
