Sailing and the internet a marriage made in heaven

By CHRIS BARTON

Many have tried, over the years, to unravel the enigma of the frequent male need to blob out in front of a small screen and watch sport.

The best explanation is found in the genes. The male is simply craving combat - a genetically engraved instinct dating back to when he protected his mate and family at the cave entrance.

In today's more civilised world, actual combat has become a ritualised spectacle where real combatants are the few - the prime athletic specimens of our race. Lesser men watch this sport for a perfectly respectable reason: to sublimate their urge to beat the hell out of male neighbours or other perceived threats to their cave and clan.

I use this explanation frequently as I head for the couch armed with today's civilised combat tools - the TV remote and a beer.

"Just sublimating my urge to do battle," I inform the nurturing species in our household as I settle down to an afternoon of sport.

"Hrrumpff!" comes the reply, the universally recognised female response indicating pleasure because you are doing your bit to maintain a civilised society.

Television is the next best thing to being there when it comes to watching sport. In many cases, it's better - especially if it's raining, or your seat in the stadium is so far back the combatants are reduced to ants on a pool table.

With TV you can get up close and personal, which usually compensates for missing the atmosphere of the real thing - although it is hard to replace the roar of the crowd when the All Blacks score at Eden Park.

It was this sort of experience - up close, personal and like being there - that I was looking for when I checked out the net as another possible medium to help me sublimate my need for mayhem.

Sadly, the net is still far behind TV for most sports. Take cricket for example. It is great to be able to check out live matches at The Pavilion or the king of cricket sites, Cricinfo, which is also linked to NZ Cricket. There you'll find enough statistics and analysis to make a cricket aficionado weep with joy - wagon wheels, worms, player rankings and other match graphs.

For live games you'll find a scoreboard and some dedicated soul typing in ball-by-ball live commentary. And in some cases live audio.

But while it's brilliant to be able to watch live games anywhere in the world this way, it just doesn't match TV, and it's nowhere near bringing you the live atmosphere of, say, a raucous terraces crowd.

There is, however, an exception where the internet is better than TV for watching. It's the sport of sailing. The round-the-world races the Race and the Vendee Globe offer the ultimate in combat - man (and woman) fighting both the elements and others to win.

Much of the immediacy of watching these races live comes from the technical wizardry of New Zealand company Virtual Spectator. That's the company that transformed viewing sailing on TV during the Americas Cup with on-screen graphics that suddenly made a boring-looking sport interesting to watch.

But if Virtual Spectator shines on TV, on the net it excels. From the company's site viewers can download a 10Mb file (about 40 minutes on a dial-up modem) to be installed on their Windows-based PC. For best results you need a Pentium II and about 96Mb of memory, 40Mb of disk space, plus a good graphics card - although the software will work on lesser machines.

The latest version of the software provides the interface for viewing Virtual Spectator events - at present the two round-the-world yacht races, but in the near future other sports, including rally car racing and soccer.

The opening screen presents a globe. Selecting an event such as The Race will takes the viewer to the Southern Ocean and an animated view of the catamarans and their progress. Yesterday Club Med skippered by Grant Dalton was weathering "hailstorms and particularly violent waves" but still making 21.8 knots and leading Innovation Explorer by 781 nautical miles.

Switching to the Vendee Globe, I found Michel Desjoyeaux on PRB just holding off Ellen MacArthur on Kingfisher which had closed to 16 nautical miles behind as both cross the equator "in testing conditions, searing heat, little or no wind ... doing battle to get north of the doldrums ... "

All this is brought to you by the miracle of global positioning systems on the yachts which instantly relay their longitude and latitude via satellite and then, thanks to Virtual Spectator's software, are transformed into live animated graphics of their progress via the internet.

This remarkable feat has been so successful that many of the yachts in the Vendee have Virtual Spectator on board - using it via a satellite-based internet link to see where they are in relation to other yachts and for its weather information overlay.

Virtual Spectator executive vice-president for technology Craig Meek says 20,000 spectators have downloaded the software since the Vendee started. Until last week, it was free, but now viewers are being asked to pay $US9.95 to unlock extra features such as scrolling commentary, audio and video clips. Plus the ability to set camera angles, zoom in and out and replay aspects of the race.

But that's not all. At Kingfisher Challenge the viewer can get really up close and personal with Ellen MacArthur. Not only does she provide regular pictures of her progress, along with audio clips and regular e-mails to anyone registered, but there's also a web cam on board giving live pictures from the cockpit.

There are even full details of her sleep patterns courtesy of Ellen's Actiwatch - a special wrist microcomputer she wears at all times which sends data via satellite link, which Virtual Spectator plans to include as another feature on its pay-to-view interface.

Virtual Spectator isn't the only player in internet sailing. You can also catch the BT Global Challenge run by Quokkasports. The site's 2D tracker does not match Virtual Spectator but the gallery of photo, video and audio reports is impressive.

Mr Meek believes the only thing holding back widespread use of the internet as medium for watching sport is the deployment of fast broadband connections. With broadband comes streaming video quality that is just as good as a TV picture. Add to that 3D animation overlays, including vital signs such as pulse rates direct from tiny sensors on athletes' clothing, plus online interactivity control of the viewing experience, and live spectator chat to add to the commentary, and you have a winning formula.

But he says the key is to be able to tell the background story - something the company has learned from bringing onscreen graphics to TV. And when that story telling is all about sporting combat, well ... you really can't lose.


Links


The Pavilion

Cricinfo

NZ Cricket

The Race

Vendee Globe

Virtual Spectator

Kingfisher challenge

BT Global Challenge

Quokka Sports