America's Cup CEO Stephen Barclay on the Race's Competition and Tragedy

The America’s Cup is the Super Bowl of the sailing world. We have a preseason, the America’s Cup World Series, and playoffs, the Louis Vuitton Cup. If you measure the audience in terms of ratings and spectators, these events stand head and shoulders above anything else in sailing. My role as the chief executive is to conduct those events. The Cup is a medium-size business, employing over 100 people, with tens of millions of dollars a year in revenues and expenses. It’s a bit of a handful to manage.

In recent years, we’ve wanted to put the Cup on a sounder financial footing and make it accessible to people other than the very, very wealthy. To do that, we needed to bring the race in from 10 miles offshore to where people can see it. For the sake of television, the races had to start on time. You can’t have this huge buildup to a race and then have the television saying, “delayed due to lack of wind,” which is a huge problem in sailing.