World Race

THE WHITBREAD Round the World Race has been a bonanza for Baltimore. A half-million people visitedWaterfront Festival '98 at the Inner Harbor to inspect the sleek boats during a pause in their nine-month, 31,600-mile race, which began and ends in England.The competitors marveled at Baltimoreans' enthusiasm and boating knowledge. With the nine boats reversing course on the bay to begin the next-to-last leg in their contest, Annapolis becomes the focus of the Whitbread festivities.Maryland's (sailing)

Norfolk, Va. -- As six giant Volvo Ocean Race sailboats sped through the mouth of the Chesapeake toward Baltimore a week and a half ago, Gary Jobson stood on a dock, steaming mad. The ESPN commentator's carefully plotted plan to jump aboard a yacht appeared to be in shambles. The camera crew was late getting to the marina. The weather wasn't cooperating. A boat that was to ferry him to the racing yacht was 70 miles behind schedule. Jobson, once a force in the round-the-world race, was now, literally and figuratively, left waiting on the dock.

Baltimore and Annapolis will again play host to the Volvo Ocean Race Round the World when the racing vessels set sail to circle the globe in 2001-2002, Volvo and local race officials will announce today.Propelled by the success of the 1998 stopover, the region beat out New York, Boston and Newport, R.I., to be the second U.S. stopover port next race. Competing to be the first U.S. stop are Charleston, S.C., and Miami. The selection of one of those cities is to be announced tomorrow. Fort Lauderdale, Fla., which played host to the racers in 1994 and 1998, is no longer in that competition.

Tim Troy has a good job, a nice home and an attractive family. Next year, he'll trade it away for long stretches of awful weather, lousy food and no one for company but himself. Troy, 46, has his sights set on "5-Oceans," a global circumnavigation held every four years that bills itself as "the ultimate solo challenge." As many as 20 skippers will take part in the race on 50- and 60-foot high-tech yachts. "I've been trying to do this for almost 15 years," Troy said. "I'm not getting any younger.

Early yesterday afternoon, a band played, sirens on police boats blared and the water cannon aboard a fireboat shot plumes of water over the Inner Harbor as the racing yacht Swedish Match moored alongside the Amphitheater and Maryland's year-long affair with the Whitbread Round the World Race officially began.Over the next 30 minutes, during christening ceremonies for Swedish Match, Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, ambassadors, corporate executives, race officials and crew congratulated one another for initiating another romance between the city and sailing.

As the steeples and domes of the Annapolis skyline emerged from the dawn mists yesterday, Nance Frank and two of her all-female crew stepped ashore from the new sloop they had just sailed in from Norfolk, Va.Ms. Frank and her crew of 11 will spend most of the next four months on the sleek, 64-foot racing yacht, testing their endurance and training for the 33,000-mile Whitbread Round the World Race.It would be the second all-female crew to compete in the race, and the first Americans in the quadrennial event sponsored by a British brewery and recreation company.

As a Volvo official formally announced the return of the Volvo Ocean Race Round the World to Baltimore and Annapolis yesterday, he urged local organizers to find a local entry to fuel the excitement."

By the time the final yacht crosses the finish line of the Volvo Ocean Race, the Swedish automaker estimates that it will have invested $40 million to $50 million over four years promoting the premier round-the-world sailing race. The sponsor thinks it is money well spent. "We will get back twice that amount - maybe three times that amount - in media exposure alone," said Anders Lofgren, commercial director for the Volvo Ocean Race, who formerly headed Volvo automotive operations in Thailand and Australia and was in charge of worldwide financing for both cars and trucks.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Shortly after reaching Florida in the grueling Whitbread Round the World Race, Jeremy "Jez" Fanstone invited more than 200 sailing pals to his late-night birthday party. He took a stretch limousine, filled with admirers, to various hot spots. Feeling rather lively, he even tried to serenade a crowd of his buddies, a move that royally irritated the Elvis impersonator on duty for the evening."I wanted to sing," the burly sailor recalls, not too ruefully. "Elvis said I tried to steal the mike from him. He got very upset."

FREMANTLE, Australia -- In 1903 an intrepid photographer hauled a cumbersome box camera way up the fore topmast stay aboard the English clipper Garthsnaid as it ran like a scared hound before a howling Southern Ocean gale.When the photographer tripped the shutter, his plate-glass negative captured a moment of pure terror that still provokes an involuntary shiver of fear among armchair sailors.Looking down aft through the maze of rigging, one can see men clinging pitifully to the outer edge of a yard wildly canted toward the boiling caldron of the sea.Behind the ship, looming like a vast black mountain, is the mother of all waves, a sheer wall of water that rises up, up and up to dwarf the mizzen and make the struggling helmsmen look like Lilliputians.

The 2005-06 Volvo Ocean Race finally has an anchor. Organizers of the regatta announced yesterday at a news conference in Madrid, Spain, that the fleet will begin its 31,000-mile circumnavigation in Vigo, Spain, an Atlantic port city just north of Portugal. The race will start on Nov. 12. It will make a 23-day stop in the ports of Baltimore and Annapolis in April 2006 before pushing across the Atlantic for the finish line at a yet-to-be named Baltic Sea port in early June. This is the first time since the event, founded in 1973 as the Whitbread Round the World, will be starting outside Great Britain.

By the time the final yacht crosses the finish line of the Volvo Ocean Race, the Swedish automaker estimates that it will have invested $40 million to $50 million over four years promoting the premier round-the-world sailing race. The sponsor thinks it is money well spent. "We will get back twice that amount - maybe three times that amount - in media exposure alone," said Anders Lofgren, commercial director for the Volvo Ocean Race, who formerly headed Volvo automotive operations in Thailand and Australia and was in charge of worldwide financing for both cars and trucks.

MIAMI - Imagine an all-star game that takes nine months to complete. In which the biggest names in the sport aren't chauffeured to the field of play in limos or allowed to sit down after a token appearance. Where, instead, they are scorched, glaciated, drenched, battered and cut off from family and friends for weeks at a time, their bodies pocked with sores and bruises and nourished by nuggets of freeze-dried food coaxed to edible form by water warmed on a one-burner hot plate. An all-star game in which, if injury strikes, your doctor will be your own teammates.

"Chessie Racing: The Story of Maryland's Entry in the 1997-98 Whitbread Round the World Race," by George J. Collins and Kathy Alexander. Johns Hopkins University Press. 240 pages. $34.95. This is a book for several audiences -- the serious sailor, the vicarious adventurer, and the proud Maryland landlubber. Chessie Racing's entry into the 1997-98 Whitbread Round the World Race engaged an interest far beyond the normal appeal of ocean racing, even in a water-bred community like ours. This was achieved, in major part, through the first partnership between an ocean racing syndicate and a nonprofit organization, the Living Classrooms Foundation.

If you think yacht racing's a non-contact sport for the blue blazers and khakis crowd, you should have gotten a look at the two-inch square patch on Tony Kolb's throat yesterday. Kolb, the bow man for the illbruck Challenge in the Volvo Ocean Race, was working the "coffee grinder" winch on one of the organization's boats as it raced to Baltimore from Charleston, S.C., this week when one of the handles broke. He fell forward and the remaining jagged metal caught him just under the jaw on the left side of his face, ripping a huge gash in his throat.

Captain Steve and Aptitude, two runners based in the United States, are among the top three choices in the $6 million Dubai World Cup tomorrow at Nad Al Sheba Racecourse in the United Arab Emirates. Captain Steve is the 8-5 morning-line favorite and Aptitude the 5-1 third choice. Godolphin Racing's Best of the Bests is 3-1. As the richest race in the world, the Dubai World Cup headlines the richest day in horse racing. Purses for the six races for thoroughbreds total $15 million. Purses for the Breeders' Cup, North America's richest day, total $13 million.

Today in waters off Southampton, England, 10 boats begin a journey of 31,600 nautical miles - the Whitbread Round the World Race - a test of courage and skill for the globe's best sailors. They will battle the elements and each other in a chase that runs through the tropics and skirts Antarctica. And by late May, after a stop in Baltimore, a new champion will be crowned back in Southampton.Pub Date: 9/21/97

The Orioles received a fax yesterday from Gavin Brady, helmsman of Chessie Racing, inviting center fielder Brady Anderson to accompany his crew from Baltimore to Annapolis Thursday as part of the ceremonial sail before the continuation of the Whitbread Round the World Race.Anderson, who's on the 15-day disabled list with hand and shoulder injuries, isn't sure if he'll accompany the Orioles to Chicago later this week, but said he would decline the offer either way.Pub Date: 4/26/98

The Chesapeake Bay may not have a successor to George Collins' Chessie Racing in next year's Volvo Ocean Race, but five of the boats that will race around the world have been designed in Annapolis. Farr Yacht Design Ltd., which produced EF Language, the Sweden-based winner of the 1997-98 Whitbread Round the World Race, is out to repeat its success in the world's toughest ocean race. It might be said that winning the race has become almost routine for New Zealander Bruce Farr and his Back Creek design team.

For six months, local professional sailor Terry Hutchinson has been working quietly to put together a Chesapeake Bay entrant in next year's Volvo Round the World Race. The effort has reached a critical stage. He needs $2 million in the next two weeks. The deadline is as unforgiving as it is imminent. Unless Hutchinson can start the 6-month-long process of building the 60-foot boat by Oct. 1, his chances of making the starting line off Southampton, England, on Sept. 23, 2001, will be all but gone.