Record-breaking audience for Dramatic Volvo Ocean Race
Dramatic Volvo Ocean Race watched by more than four billion
The unique excitement and drama from the Volvo Ocean Race reached in 2011 a much larger audience around the world. Volvo Ocean Race’s drama-packed opening has captured the attention of a record-breaking audience this year, latest figures show.
Online media with a cumulative audience of more than four billion have featured the world’s longest and toughest professional sporting event between the opening of the Alicante Race Village and the Leg 1 start (October 14-November 5), according to third party monitoring sources.
That’s three times the figure achieved at the same period of the 2008-09 race with double the number of online sites featuring news from the event. Facebook and Twitter fans have been equally avid followers of the race. The Race has also seen massive growth on iPhone and iPad apps as fans on the move keep track with the latest news. The official app was only launched in late October but has already trebled (55,802) the number of downloads achieved in the last race.
The Volvo Ocean Race is a sailing race that began in the 1970’s. During the nine months of the 2011–12 Volvo Ocean Race, which started in Alicante, Spain in October 2011 and concludes in Galway, Ireland, in early July 2012, the teams are scheduled to sail over 39,000 nmi (72,000 km) of the world’s most treacherous seas via Cape Town, Abu Dhabi, Sanya, Auckland, around Cape Horn to Itajaí, Miami, Lisbon, and Lorient.
The Volvo Ocean Race is the only professional sailing event that visits ports around the world and it is a delicate balance to select a track that is not only challenging to sail, but presents an attractive business case for potential sponsors and partners for both the race and the competing teams.
Interest in hosting the Volvo Ocean Race in Europe was received from 34 cities, 15 of which went through to the final phase of the bidding process. This clearly underlines the enormous interest the race generates and makes Europe by far the most competitive continent in the selection procedure.
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