Laying down the Law (nicely)
As head of the umpires who observe and rule on the racing, Bill Edgerton plays a key role in ensuring fair and consistent racing between the teams.
At an event such as the Louis Vuitton Trophy, where teams are racing with other people’s multi-million dollar equipment, there is an added responsibility to ensure collisions don’t occur. Not only because breaking other people’s stuff is not polite, but because having one boat out of action could really put the event behind schedule.
“Our game plan here is to do everything we can to avoid collisions,” says Edgerton. “We have this very heavy penalty for contact – the ‘hard contact’ rule. But the thing is just to manage expectations for the teams and that is partly about being very straight and open with them, and also to remind everyone that this is about exhibition as well as about competition. This is about putting racing back in the public eye.”
Collisions are part of match racing, and asking sailors to pull back from tight situations in the heat of battle is easier said than done. So how does Edgerton believe he can rein in the sailors’ competitive instincts? “We actually can’t,” he laughs. “I’m not stupid! You can’t control that but you can temper it and as the event goes on, and the event becomes more competitive towards the semi-finals, we have less of a problem, because as the time on the boat is increased, every hour they spend on the boat means there is less risk of damage because there is so much more learning on board.
“So as time goes on, we can afford to ease up a bit over the course of two weeks because the teams have gone through that learning curve and they understand the situation better and they know how to handle it.”
Whereas it would be easy to think in terms of the umpires as the unsmiling judge and jury of match racing, Edgerton is looking for a more open relationship with the sailing teams. He prefers a more two-way consultative discussion with the teams, which is why he was keen to bring in the observers on to the back of the race boats. “It would be nice to think that all umpiring is just straight black and white - that it is this or it is that. It’s rarely as simple as that. We have observers on the back of the boats now which means we are giving more information to the sailors about we are seeing a situation developing. That is a dialogue that we’re having through radio from the umpires through to the sailors.”
One of the challenges of umpiring is to create a consistent set of interpretations that are applied evenly across all matches. This means it takes time to build the trust between a group of umpire and a group of sailors, so after more than two years’ break since the Louis Vuitton Challenger Series in Valencia 2007, it must feel like starting all over again.
However Edgerton says it is not as difficult as you might imagine. “It is still largely the same group of people we’re dealing with here. They are on different boats, but most of the relationships go back a way. We are using people who were all the top-line umpires from Valencia 2007, and we are using a lot of the same calls and interpretations, so I think the dialogue continues. It is just that instead of dealing with Ben Ainslie of Emirates Team New Zealand, for example, we are now dealing with Ben Ainslie on Team Origin. So there is enough continuity that I think everything is working OK.”
