A fond farewell after the big Volvo Ocean Race idea pays off

An expatriate veteran called it the best-devised UAE sporting event he has seen.

Azzam, Team Puma’s Mar Mostro and Groupama jostle for position as the third leg of the Volvo Ocean Race gets underway.

For a moment here I imagine I am Knut Frostad, which means I get to be a really cool Norwegian guy. Occasionally in life I have longed to be a really cool Scandinavian guy, so luckily this works for me.

I am the chief executive of the Volvo Ocean Race, and I must weigh the value of the just-completed Abu Dhabi stopover against the drawbacks. The drawbacks turned out to be considerable for reasons unrelated to Abu Dhabi but utterly related to its cartographical position on the globe.

To surmount those drawbacks, it would take a beautiful stopover and a big idea.

So first, tally up the drawbacks. Questions about the drawbacks have come up at the first three stopovers, and the questions have been fair, reasoned, prudent.

The path from Cape Town to Abu Dhabi happened to coincide with an expanding zone fraught with piracy, so that mixing Abu Dhabi into the round-the-world route wound up raising safety concerns, which raised logistical concerns, which raised race-integrity concerns.

The boats would have to go into a "stealth zone" and into a "secret port," somewhere between Cape Town and Abu Dhabi.

They would have to board a mighty hulk of a yellow ship, something these ferocious-yet-delicate boats do not seem to enjoy. The loading might take two days, according to hardworking people who know these things.

The ship would transport them to a second port, in Sharjah, where the teams would vie in a one-day sprint to Abu Dhabi. Leg 2 would splinter into two stages. The points awarded for Leg 2 would fray into an 80-20 permutation. The race would grow a bit harder to follow.

Flow would go disrupted. The trick of curling through the Strait of Hormuz would go unfulfilled.

And, in a funky twist, the race would ask the boats to undergo two sprints - 98 nautical miles from Sharjah, 106 back to Sharjah - which did not factor into the choices in their original and painstaking yacht designs.

"I was probably in the slightly sceptical camp," said Ian Walker, the Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing skipper, wondering "how on earth we were going to lift all the boats up, with the rigging in them, without damaging anything."

Instead, he said, the boats managed to go up in one day, easier than imagined.

Instead, he wound up saying, "I actually wouldn't rule it out as something you might want to do in the future." He brought up the Tour de France, whose bicycles have travelled on ferries to incorporate English stages.

Instead, the stopover and the big idea did outpace the drawbacks.

For one thing, you could view the sprints as oddballs, or you could view them as fine quirks. There are two ways to assess this comment yesterday from the Camper skipper Chris Nicholson: "It's quite difficult for a sailing team mentally preparing for an offshore leg to have to sail with high intensity on an inshore course."

You could say it heaps on fresh inconvenience, but you could say that fresh inconvenience further flatters whomever wins.

"We're still going around the world," the Puma team skipper Ken Read said. "That's the big one to me. Always has been. Without Abu Dhabi, piracy or not, there might not have been a race now."

Then I, playing Knut, factor in the stopover.

It drew 120,000 people, 20,000 on Friday, according to the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority (ADTA). It breathed in a sterling sliver of land that seemed almost born for a Volvo stopover. An expatriate veteran of UAE sporting events called it the best-devised UAE sporting event he has seen.

Yet to push the boons decisively over the burdens, there comes the big idea, and that came from Frostad himself. Until the 38-year-old race visited India and China in 2008/09, he said, it could not call itself a true round-the-world race. View the stopovers of past races through a 21st-century lens and they do seem … culturally limited.

Now they incorporated the Middle East, and the Arab welcome of which Mubarak Al Muhairi, the ADTA director general, spoke in the send-off, and a country with a lush dhow-sailing history.

Now the circumnavigation found an intensified picture of the world, where suddenly there's a ceremony with both Arab and Chinese attire, with an "official mayoral handover" involving Abu Dhabi and Sanya.

Those grizzled sailors of yore - OK, 38 years ago - barely would have recognised it, but it exemplified the value of Frostad's idea. Find me anywhere on the planet years on, and I still would tell you this. And I'm not even named Knut, even if secretly I sometimes have wished I were.

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