America’s Cup is a popular sport, but the rules are 167 years old

But then it is true that sailing can become a popular sporting event because of the America’s Cup.

With the America’s Cup, sailing goes pop. But.

It is the numbers that prove it. Just look at the record result of our new format “The Cup Trial” aired from September to mid-October, which generated a total audience of 2,000,000 viewers/users/readers (250,000 individual users) using all our platforms: on our website, on our Youtube channels, Facebook, Instagram and through our newsletters sent to subscribers.

These are huge numbers for a specialized sailing media such as we are. They are numbers from popular sports like Formula One or Moto Gp. But those who think that sailing can become in Italy a sport practiced at a competitive level like soccer (4.3 million) or cycling (1.3 million), on the boost of the interest shown by the last America’s Cup that has just ended are taking a blunder. Competitive sailing is practiced continuously by 170,000 Italians. Few? So many instead, given the complications involved in practicing sailing, starting with the costs involved and the logistical complications. To give you a more complete picture, we estimate that about 2 million are those who go or have gone sailing. To give you an idea, motorcycling has only 70,000 competitive practitioners; motoring is not even captured by official statistics.

But we are not talking about competitive sportsmen here, we are talking about fans who follow a sport even if they do not play it. Exactly like F1, which has an average total audience in Italy of about 1.5 million viewers per event.

We speak of automotive Formula One not by chance. The newly completed America’s Cup format is as close as it gets to the top automotive category. The fastest and most high-tech boats and cars there are, the best drivers (sorry, we don’t call them sailors), teams of dozens of technicians working year-round, stratospheric budgets, well-defined tracks (sorry again if we don’t call it a race course) (in the case of America’s Cup sailing, the famous boundary).

If this new format of the America’s Cup for the first time in history had viewership similar to that of Formula One, what is missing to make it a sport followed permanently by hundreds of thousands of viewers in Italy and millions worldwide?

We need new superpartisan rules with the goal of not benefiting any team, an annual/biennial frequency of the event, an organizer also above the parties.

For those who do not know, the rules of the America’s Cup, called the “Deed of Gift,” which is still the foundation still in effect today, was born on July 8, 1857. Two centuries ago. In summary, the “Deed of Gift” gives the winner (defender) the right to dictate all rules and the right to organize the next challenge.

167 years have passed, then cars did not exist, sailing did. Then motor racing in its top expression, Formula One (born in 1950), gave itself a federation that dictates the rules, the FIA (International Automobile Federation), and another, private, one that organizes the event and promotes it (today Liberty Media), which in turn distributes among the participating teams part of the revenue it produces by selling the event to sponsors and nations. Is it not also time for the America’s Cup event to retire the the “Deed of Gift,” which shamelessly favors those who win the event and limits the possible revenue to equip themselves with a state-of-the-art facility?

The audience attracted to adrenaline-pumping, spectacular sailing like the new America’s Cup is there. What is missing is an organization that capitalizes on this to make the America’s Cup a popular product. Who wouldn’t like a Cup with a dozen or so participating teams held every one to two years?

Luca Oriani