I love the Volvo Ocean Race. The idea of circling the planet in a boat that has about an inch between sailors and the world’s oceans … is compelling. I became fully aware of the eight-month, round-the-world event, often described as the “Everest of sailing”, in 2011, ahead of the 2011-12 race, which included a […]

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It is a great job: Recording the highs and lows of a Volvo Ocean Race sailing team during a nine-month circumnavigation of the planet. It is a horrific job: During the 40,000 or so nautical miles of the journey, the onboard VOR reporter will encounter heaving seas, deep cold, blistering heat and the spartan living […]

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I am a big fan of the Volvo Ocean Race. Sailing around the world in eight legs, going through all the oceans, circling the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn … one of the last great romantic/daredevil adventures we can have on a planet in an era when we can get nearly anywhere by […]

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I am fascinated by the Volvo Ocean Race. The sailing, certainly, and the people, but also the geography. What other sports event teaches you about … Point Nemo?

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A fairly significat chunk of what sports journalists do is cover scheduled events. Games. Press conference. Interviews. Unscheduled news generally sets off some scrambling. A hiring, a firing, a change in policy, a violent opinion — we expect that sort of unexpected, but it requires extra effort. What we do not expect is scheduled events […]

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A key part of the Volvo Ocean Race are the stops they make along the round-the-world, 39,000-nautical-miles-sailing part of it. When an ocean event gets a chance to sell itself to landlubbers. The organizers pack up and ship a race-themed village to each of the major stops around the world, and the six-boat fleet has […]

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It gets worse. Just when it seemed as if sailing the Volvo Ocean Race represented a level of misery unmatched in world sports … now we learn from our colleague at The National, Osman Samiuddin, their food is nearly unpalatable, as well. Sailors don’t eat, in the round-the-world race. They “refuel”. This, on top of […]

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It often turns out this way, in the news biz. Weeks of making something out of nothing. And then a stretch of time where you have big events colliding on the calendar. This is one of those “colliding big events” weeks, here in the UAE. Four events that pretty safely fall into our top 10 […]

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Have I mentioned I love the Volvo Ocean Race? Oh, yes. I have. The first leg, from Alicante, Spain, to Cape Town, South Africa, ended yesterday, with the Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing boat, Azzam, the first across the finish line. Azzam needed 25 days to cover the 6,500 nautical miles from the Mediterranean to the […]

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We know this for a fact: The island of  Tristan da Cunha is the most remote inhabited location on Earth. The Hawaiian Islands are more remote, collectively, but seven of them are inhabited. If you tire of one, you can hop over to the next. Can’t do that at Tristan da Cunha. The nearest humans […]

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