And another one bites the dust

We look at the continuing demise of the ORMA 60ft trimaran circuit

The house of cards that the ORMA 60ft trimaran circuit is proving, seems to be falling over at an increasingly rapid rate with the news that Biscuits la Trinitaine, long term sponsor of Marc Guillemot, is to withdraw its support for the forthcoming season.

This follows the withdrawal from the circuit of other significant sponsors such as Belgacom and Bayer, while Jean le Cam and his French tinned vegetable producer Bonduelle have moved into the Open 60 circuit.

Biscuits la Trinitaine, a biscuit manufacture based near the ORMA heartland of La Trinite-sur-Mer has backed Guillemot for the last seven years. The reason for the withdrawal, the company has stated, is escalating costs within the class.

"The huge inflation in the operational budgets of the boats in the ORMA class are prohibiting companies of our size access to this type of sponsoring," said a company spokesman. "Today we must compete against teams with budgets four or five times larger than ours. These higher costs have prompted our withdrawal."

While Biscuits la Trinitaine has been involved with Marc Guillemot over the last seven years, their involvement in the 60ft trimaran circuit dates back longer. In 1993 Canadian Mike Birch persuaded the head of the company, Bernard Petit, to try sponsoring a boat and they backed him in the Transat Jacques Vabre that year on an Open 60 monohull.

The subsequent year they acquired Philippe Poupon's trimaran Fleury Michon IX. In this Birch scored a third place in the 1996 OSTAR, before naming his successor - Marc Guillemot. In 1998 Guillemot persuaded the company to build a new boat and so their present boat was launched. This Guillemot raced to second place in the 2000 OSTAR and subsequently second in the 2002 Route du Rhum.

With four major sponsors withdrawing from the circuit clearly ORMA must be looking hard at what they must do to stem the tide. As with any development class they need to look at how to prevent costs from escalating further.

Many, in particular designer Nigel Irens, believe that the increased emphasis on Grand Prix is what is killing the circuit. Grand Prix require large crews to be employed while, remarkably, Grand Prix also seem to draw relatively little media attention. In France, as indeed elsewhere, the sporting aspect of the class never gets the same amount of attention as its more potentially dangerous and adventurous side ie offshore and singlehanded.

While there is much truth in this argument and dispensing with the Grand Prix would certainly be one solution to the present crisis, we feel this course of action would be a considerable loss. Seeing these 60ft wide beasts being pushed to the max by a full crew, flying around the race course, screaming into marks on one hull with another boats travelling at 30 knots only feet away is one of the foremost spectacles in our sport. Interestingly while anyone seeing this from outside of France would be utterly gobsmacked by it, in France they have been exposed to fast multihulls for so many decades now that one gets the feeling from the public and media that it is almost a case of 'so what?'

In our opinion ORMA have been guilty of not upping their game organisationally. The circuit program appears to be now more or less cast in stone with a couple of offshore events - one crewed, one shorthanded every year intermingled with a smattering of Grand Prix events. It is becoming stayed as a result. More variation needs to be put into the calendar and a much greater effort made to recapture the imagination of the media and the general public. At the same time they need to look at capping costs for grand prix. Limiting crew numbers to five or six (instead of 11-13) would be a good start.

There is the longer term problem that the class is simply not international enough and ORMA again need to look at how to address this and encourage foreign competitors. At present there is only one competitive foreign boat in the class and that is skippered by a Frenchwoman.

What is certain is that if ever there were a time for a non-French team to get into the class, now is it: where previously no competitive boats were available, now it is becoming a buyer's market.