It’s rare for us to run as many ‘official’ event reports as we’ve done for the first part of the Volvo Ocean Race, but frankly the content coming from camp VOR is so damned good that we’d be remiss not to feature something from them almost every day. The MCM program seems to have finally come of age, and the onboard daily reports are engrossing, well-written, and as good as they are, they seem to be getting better and better across the fleet. The video content is good as well, especially VOR’s daily voiceover’d compilation of the onboard footage, and at least a couple of MCMs are doing a nice job with still photos too.
The most common complaint we’ve heard from our readers is that the information is overloading the distribution; in other words, there’s so much noise that it’s hard to get the information in a coherent, organized way. But it’s out there, and here are a few routes we’ve found to get the best info as efficiently as possible to the type of info consumer you are.
For the obsessive/compulsive or unemployed: The below links are for each team’s Livestream page, where they post every picture, video, and text report that comes off the boats. We’ve found that if we open the following links in separate tabs on the same browser window and then use the ‘bookmark all tabs’ function, we can open our browser whenever we want, select that bookmark, and instantly have a tabbed report of everything that’s happened since the last time we checked in. Here are the links:
Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing
Puma Ocean Racing
Camper with ETNZ
Groupama Sailing Team
Team Sanya
Team Telefonica
Volvo Ocean Race Official
For the visual consumer, or those with A.D.D.: For those that don’t have the attention span to follow what each crew ate for dinner and who got the latest battle wound, the best why to get an easy video update is by subscribing to the Volvo Ocean Race YouTube page, or by visiting it each morning. A subscription is nice because you get an email when each new video goes live, while the play lists that VOR has created and the YT-suggested links after each video can easily eat up hours of your time.
For the newspaper reader, or those still on dial-up: We can’t overemphasize what a spectacular job we think the MCMs are doing on their keyboards. These guys are clearly taking their jobs as seriously as any on the boat, and their writing is almost always entertaining. A bonus is that it’s quick to digest, especially if you can read the written reports as they come in without having to wade through videos, pictures, weather reports, and press releases The best place to do that is VOR’s ‘All Quotes’ page, and when we’re looking to catch up quickly on the day’s action, that’s where we head. You can find it here.
