It may be a solo race, but it won't be a solitary experience. Not for the 20 skippers who set sail this weekend in the Around Alone Race, cameras and modems affixed to their masts so millions of vicarious adventurers can read their email.
"Watching sailing on TV is about as much fun as watching grass grow," says Alan Ramadan, president and CEO of Quokka Sports, based in San Francisco. "But if you can become incorporated in what's really happening on the boats, then you can feel the excitement, even if you're not a sailor."
Ramadan's 2-year-old company developed Total Sports Immersion (TSI) as a way to let people experience pro-sports events online. It uses streaming audio and video and satellite data, so Web fans can see and hear their favorite sailors in action, track their progress around the clock, read their email, and even join the race as virtual sailors.
Millions of sports junkies and thrill-seekers were immersed in Quokka's site during the 9-month-long Whitbread Race, which ended in May. The company is now gearing up to present the high drama of the Around Alone Race, in which sailors circumnavigate the globe singlehandedly in 40-foot to 60-foot boats, with only four stops along the way. The eight-month race gets underway Sunday in Charleston, South Carolina.
It's taken hundreds of HTML monkeys and video techies to get the Around Alone site ready for launch. Cameras had to be lashed to the 20 yachts and prepared to endure the most extreme weather conditions. Each vessel was rigged with two satellite systems: One sends and receives email and telemetry -- information like the boat's location, its direction, the water temperature, and wind speed. The other satellite allows Quokka to collect audio, video, and still photos.
"We want to be on the absolute edge of the application of technologies, not the development of them," says Bill Schaefer, Quokka's vice president of technology services.
For example, Schaefer's crew used existing technology to develop the site's Race Viewer, a sophisticated Java applet that shows each yacht's exact latitude and longitude. A map illustrates the course each boat has taken, with overlays of current conditions and weather forecasts and actual navigational charts.
The Virtual Race allows Web surfers to use the data -- together with each boat's design specifications, human-performance factors, and time-management factors -- to compete against one another and the actual racers in real time.
Whitbread winner Paul Cayard said Virtual Racers beat his boat in nearly every leg of the race. But he supports Quokka's site and welcomes its efforts to open the world of sailing to a wider audience.
"This event was made for the Internet," says Cayard, who is AmericaOne's skipper in the upcoming America's Cup. "It was a 24-hour-a-day race. It didn't matter what time zone someone was in. They could just log on and follow me [and the other sailors and crews] 24 hours a day."
Cayard sent regular, detailed dispatches to the site, outlining the challenges that he and his 11-person crew faced as the Whitbread unfolded. At the end of each leg, Cayard learned how his online audience was multiplying: The site had been getting 200,000 daily hits before the race began. The number grew to 5 million at race time and hit 13 million by the time the action was well under way.
Quokka president Ramadan says the numbers surpassed his wildest dreams.
Ramadan says the demographics for Web surfers and sailors are surprisingly similar, because sailors tend to be affluent. He claims sailors go online three times more often than the standard sports fan.
Susan Daly, vice president of Quokka's Sailing Network, says most of the audience for the Whitbread and Around Alone sites don't know their jib from their mizzenmast. It's the intimate vantage point that makes the races so compelling for Web surfers, she says.
"A lot of people who won't ever climb Everest would like to know what it feels like -- or how it feels to sail over 40-foot waves at 30 knots," Daly points out.
The Around Alone race is particularly well-suited to armchair adventure, Daly says, because of the extreme duration of the race -- covering 27,000 miles -- and the fact that sailors are going it alone. "The Around Alone is about man against nature," Daly says. The sailors will be constantly making decisions with life-threatening consequences. When you're directly wired into boats you can experience that. That's our target."
It's an expensive undertaking for Quokka. ComSat, the communications satellite company, and Compaq Computer have provided equipment, according to Schaefer. The company started in Australia and moved to San Francisco in 1996 to be more connected to the new-media community. It's supported by a host of venture capitalists, including Intel, MediaOne, Accel Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Media Technology Ventures. Quokka received US$5.2 million dollars in its first round of outside financing in 1997 and recently announced having received another $16 million.
The company has no plans to advertise, but anticipates that advertisers will call when the race gets under way and pageviews soar, as happened with the Whitbread race.
Ramadan describes his next business move as an effort to grow the company "in three dimensions." First, he plans to cover more major sailing events. Then he wants to replicate his business model to cover the increasingly popular realm of adventure sports. Ultimately, he'd like to go beyond the Internet to distribute digital assets through broadband models.
Schaefer says the folks at Quokka headquarters are "all pretty jacked and a little tired," as they prepare for the crush of content set to start streaming onto the Around Alone site on Sunday.
"Before the race launches we're on pins and needles," Schafer says. "We have a lot of technology we're integrating. And we've tested and tested it, but you still just never know."
