I’ve been racing a yacht at Cork Week (blogged at www.bsar.info) and was re-reading a favourite sailing book “Winning in One-Designs” by Dave Perry. In Chapter 1, Dave tells a story of how he explained why sailing was so compelling using American Football as a comparison. To paraphase and anglicise think about other complex team sports e.g. Rugby Union.

Sailing and Rugby have some strong similarities; to succeed in both sports you need to creat a team out of a group of people with signifcantly different roles and skills, some primarily physical, some needing significant awareness and intelligence both at a tactical and spatial. They both have complex rules, tactics and strategies that take years of practice to become truely fluent at.

Where sailing differs and adds significant additional complexity is that Rugby (and nearly all other sports) takes place on a field of play that is defined to be similar. In sailing the “pitch” is constantly changing in fact the equivalent rugby pitch would

• be moving slowly under the players
• be a diffferent size each time you played
• change size during the match
• have patches that were soggy, icy and/or sandy
• have irregular 1-3 foot high ridges all over it

In addition a sailing crew does not have all the coaches and substitutes able to offer different tactical options depending on how the game progressed and usually the rules are enforced by referees that are typically not on the pitch and disputes are sorted out in a pseudo court after the race has finished.

Even on a techical level there are some that say that the highest performace yachts are more complex to design and get to go quickly than a Formula 1 racing car. It is worth noting that Adrian Newey, probably the most sucessful Formula 1 designer, has an ambition to design America’s Cup yachts.

I believe there is no more complex sport than sailing. If you accept that sport can be used as a metaphor for business, then in today’s increasily complex business environment sailing has more to offer than any other sport.