Robin Knox-Johnston looks at history.
Could the 2018 Golden Globe Race have been fairer and safer?
Issue 125: March/April 2019
As I write this column, four of the five sailors remaining in the 2018 Golden Globe Race have rounded Cape Horn and are bound north for the finish line in France.
By the time this issue hits the street, the race will perhaps be over. This seems like a good time for reflection.
Sailing — and sailboat racing in particular — has changed dramatically over the years. This isn’t a bad thing on the whole, but somewhere along the line, solo around-the-world sailboat racing morphed into something inaccessible to amateur competitors. In the 1968 Golden Globe Race, all nine entrants were amateurs, and all sailed across the start line in boats they owned themselves. In 1989, for the first running of the Vendée Globe (the modern equivalent of the Golden Globe), Jean-Luc van den Heede took a sabbatical from his job as a schoolteacher and finished third with a budget of about $300,000 (in today’s dollars). Today, the Vendée Globe is dominated by professional sailors racing aboard boats owned by sponsors who fork over millions to get a place at the start line.
Then along came Don McIntyre to resurrect the Golden Globe Race for a second running, 50 years after the first. And the 2018 GGR was truly a second running, to the extent that the rules of the race kept the boats modest and largely restricted equipment and technology to what the 1968 racers had on board.
I’m a fan of the 2018 GGR, but I’ve come to realize that it’s not because of the retro nature of the race. I don’t care whether the racers are navigating with sextants or with GPS, or whether they’re listening to music from cassette tapes or an iPod, or whether their cameras use film or are digital (and the sea doesn’t care about these things, either). I’m a fan of this second running because, on the world stage, this is the only sailing race for the rest of us.
Since the 2018 event was announced, it has enjoyed tremendous support worldwide. That enthusiasm hasn’t waned, but it has been countered by the voices of some prominent sailors and marine journalists who’ve been, to varying degrees and for different reasons, critical.
Nearly all the criticism of the race is about the rules intended to keep the race retro. Some critics have cited the several dismastings and rescues as evidence that these rules have put lives in danger. (GGR sailors are restricted to receiving only verbal weather reports, making it nearly impossible for them to be their own weather routers, but to what end? Are we nostalgic for the inherent risks of sailing the Southern Ocean without weather knowledge?) Some object to the seemingly haphazard ways the race rules have been applied, and some think the boat designs allowed are unsafe for this race.
Regardless of the merits of the criticism, I think Don McIntyre has run up against a wall in trying to stage a 1968 race in 2018. If running a genuinely retro race, McIntyre wouldn’t regularly communicate personally with the racers via text and satellite phone, giving them an emotional crutch not available in 1968. He would publish online only the racers’ self-reported positions, not their transponder-transmitted GPS-derived positions, thereby preserving the integrity of the race’s navigation rules. (Credible claims received prior to a recent rule addition imply that at least some racers were receiving positions from SSB communications published online and relayed by third parties.) He wouldn’t give racers their positions on a whim because “skippers are interested in where they are in the fleet and where other entrants are . . .” And the irony of restricting the 2018 boats to a short list of full-keel production boats with barn-door rudders is that the nine-boat 1968 lineup was more diverse and included two multihulls.
Trying to re-create the 1968 race is at best a distraction from, and an obfuscation of, what this race is about. At worst, it’s resulted in an uneven playing field on which lives could have been lost for the sake of retro.
My hope is that the focus of the 2022 GGR will be on preserving the spirit and accessibility of the 1968 race, not the technology. My hat is off to Don McIntyre for pulling off what he has, but I urge him to shift away from the retro corner he’s boxed the race into and instead focus on his biggest accomplishment: running a race that brings us back to that golden age of sailboat racing when the competitor on the world stage could very well be a sailor from your marina, sailing a boat that could be yours.
