VOR: Chance to Design the Volvo Ocean Race Trophies... Drama and Beauty in Equal Measure

Drama and beauty in equal measure: Volvo Ocean Race invites the world’s designers to create its new winner’s trophy

by Sophie Luther

“It gets in your blood and you can’t get rid of it,“ so said the late Sir Peter Blake, winner of the 1989-90 Whitbread (which became the Volvo Ocean Race in 1998), with Steinlager 2, and a competitior in the four previous round the world races prior to his winning moment.

During its 37-year history, 148 teams have crossed the starting line of what is now and has been for three events, the Volvo Ocean Race, the most famous of round the world races. Many sailors return five, six, seven times, to take on a battle not only with Mother Nature, but with the world’s best crews. Why? They do it all for the glory of winning, for there is no pot of gold to be had at the end of this, the most epic of adventures and challenging of sporting events, just a stunning trophy.

And now, ahead of the 11th running of the event, beginning in Alicante in Spain next year, a new trophy will be commissioned and Volvo Ocean Race offers all agencies and designers the chance to be the new designer and creator of what is no ordinary trophy.

As the world’s best sailors step forward next year in a ’Clash of the Titans’ the Volvo Ocean Race 2011-12 is shaping up to be one of the hardest fought. It will be a story of battle and of cut-throat competition, but one also of great beauty and mystery as the teams race day and night, at sometimes 40 knots or more, across four of world’s greatest and wildest oceans and round the legendary Cape Horn. Albatross will glide in their wake and whales will sleep in the their paths, but nothing will stop the teams from pushing the limits to earn the right to hold the new Volvo Ocean Race, much coveted, trophy aloft on the winner’s stage at the end of the nine legs and 10 in-port races in July 2012.

Not only will the trophy be awarded to the overall winner of the Volvo Ocean Race 2011-12, it will be seen by at least 1.6 billion followers of the event and it will make its own special around the world ’trophy tour’. Its final resting place will be in the museum at Race Headquarters in Spain, where it will be on permanent display.

To find out more about the tendering process for this, and other trophies for the Volvo Ocean Race, please email your company profile to newtrophy@volvooceanrace.com BEFORE midnight 11 June 2010.

Volvo Ocean Race