Big Pimpin’
Can a boat change the world? It depends on the boat…
Today saw some real international news taking place. Good news and we figured that we could all use a little good news these days. Before I elaborate let me tell you a story. There is a lot of power in a single idea. Two and a half decades ago, well behind the iron curtain, there was an idea to enter a Soviet Union boat in the Whitbread Round the World Race. It was an absurd notion on the face of it, but the boat, named Fazisi, was designed, built and raced around the world. This was at a time when the edges were just coming off the Soviet Union, the period of glasnost and perestroika, a time when most people in the west had never set eyes on a Russian person.
By the time Fazisi finished the race the Soviet Union had collapsed. No it was not the fact that there was a Soviet boat in the Whitbread that led to the collapse, but Fazisi, the first ever Russian private professional sport enterprise, perhaps did play a small part in it…
The bigger deal, however, was the role she played in the sailing industry, becoming a harbinger of things to come. Back in 1989 there were comparatively few sailboats in Russia. Look at the international market these days and the majority of super yachts are owned by Russians. Fazisi led the way and we almost ended up with world peace… Almost…
These days we have anything but world peace so it’s time for another grand gesture.
Vlad Murnikov, the force behind Fazisi, is now an American citizen living in Massachusetts. With the mess in Ukraine once again straining relations between the West and Russia, it’s time for some on-the-water diplomacy. Time for another sailing adventure. This morning we loaded a container packed with a dozen mxNext’s mini-SpeedDream boats, half of them being shipped directly to Russia.
While politicians are bickering, escalating sanctions and countersanctions, Russian sailors are surfing the internet looking for the latest and coolest innovations and guess where they landed – right on the mxNext website. So once again sailing is reaching across international boarders in a person-to-person effort to change things – one boat at a time.
Better still, we have another half-shipment of boats going to another country in Europe. When you think of a country known for precision, quality and exquisite design you probably think of Switzerland. Well, to balance out our high level diplomacy with something more neutral, as in Switzerland neutral, we are also sending seven brand new mxNext’s to Geneva. How about that? The place known for its top notch craftsmanship is buying high-tech carbon boats from America at times when the daily news tells us that we are shipping jobs overseas. Crazy isn’t it?
So there you go. The first lot of mxNext’s are off the production line are being sent out into the world to create a little world peace and to showcase the fact that great, new, innovative products are still being built in the good old US of A. Check some video action here.
