Another great symposium, I hope you agree we've had some incredible orthopedic science this morning and I think there's a lot more to come in the coming days, but I think this next talk for you is going to be a little bit different and it's my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, Mr. Kenny Reed, who I met with my family many years ago in our hometown yacht club of Barrington, Rhode Island, and he really has an inspiring story, is one of the most accomplished sailors in the world. I will tell you, he lives in Newport right now and he is president of North Sails, which is probably one of the most prestigious, if not the most prestigious, sail making companies in the world and is the international America's Cup commentator. But aside from that, Ken is also a three-time All-American sailor, a three-time America's Cup helmsman and strategist, which for our UK colleagues in the audience, I'll remind you you haven't won back in 170 some odd years, so we can talk about that later if you like. Two times Rolex Yachtsman of the Year, two times skipper of Puma Racing's El Mostro during the Volvo Around the World Race, winner of over 50 national, North American, and world championship sailing titles, and the current record holder of pretty much every sailing race there is, the Transpac, the Bermuda, the Transatlantic Monohull Speed Record aboard the Super Maxi Comache, if I said that right, which is the fastest monohull in the world. And through all that, I think Ken would tell you that his goal has simply been to get on the boat and win. But that said, I asked him here today because beyond being a highly successful and competitive athlete in the world of sailing, he's also a trailblazer. And the world knows him to be a powerful speaker, leader, strategist, innovator, and team builder, particularly under pressure. And I think many of these things are some of the traits that we aspire to as surgeons in our own profession, things we want to master as well. So I'm hoping he can come and share a little bit of his story and his wisdom with us. Just to give you an idea of his life, he flew in basically yesterday from Sardinia, halfway around the world to be here, and in a couple hours, he's flying halfway back around the world to do the next championship race, and that's his life. So it's a pleasure and honor for me to invite him up to speak to us, and I welcome him up here. Thanks, Kenny. Appreciate it. Hi, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Chris. It's actually an honor to be here. I've been listening to some of your speeches for the last little while to try to acclimate myself to the audience. Frankly, I haven't understood a single word that was said. I have to, I guess I have to come clean if I have any disclosures. My only disclosures are that I have two fake hips. Actually, I think I'm here for a selfish reason, and that's because I'm falling apart, clearly. I had my two hips done at a pretty young age thanks to hockey, according to my doctor. He thanked Bobby Orr for his wealth that he was accumulating. Bobby Orr turned on a whole generation of hockey players in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and I was one of them, and the equipment was pretty bad back then, and he says that he's done more hockey hips than he can care to imagine. So I will be collecting resumes because it's just a matter of time before my ankles and feet fall apart as well. So I walked through the auditorium, and kind of like the speeches, I really didn't understand very much at all. But one thing that's really interesting is I think technology in so many ways runs your business very similarly to the sailing world, to the sailing business, to the sport of sailing. So that's what I'm going to talk about, is how technology is changing all of our lives. There was one side, so again, I tried to understand in the auditorium, all the booths, and I'm looking at all the equipment, and I'm trying to figure out how this stuff actually works. And I saw a sign that said non-evasive surgery, and next to these letters, non-evasive surgery, there was a big-ass drill bit about this big. So I think your definition and my definition of non-evasive are very, very different. So I'm going to move along here. I'm going to show you a side of sailing that you've probably never seen before, and again, this is technologically based. Our sport is evolving like you can't even fathom. It is turning into spaceships rather than sailing ships. This is what most of us would think sailing is. Most of the boats we've been on in our whole lives look more like this. This is now a modern cruising boat. They go five times faster. They have twice the amount of room down below. Even cruising has changed dramatically. How many people have sailed in their lives? How many people have sailed a sunfish in their lives? Probably a lot of people. This is what I grew up sailing when I was a kid, going three or four knots, hiking out as uncomfortable as you could possibly be. Well, this is what every kid wants to do now. They want to fly. A moth is the new boat of choice for our kids, for the next generation. The Olympics. The Olympics is what a lot of people aspired to do. Keelboats. This is back in 1962. This is what the Olympic classes looked like. Well, now it's athletes. The 49er class, kiting, windsurfing. This is about athleticism. This is about physicality, as well as strategy. Then offshore. Offshore is something that I have really fallen in love with over the last 20 or so years. This is the first around-the-world race winner, a boat called Ceula II from Mexico. This is Comanche, the boat that Chris just mentioned, the boat I built for a client which holds every single major offshore sailing record there is right now for a monohull. Comanche, just on an easy day, does 25 knots. Ceula II might have done 15 at the very most all the way around the world. Even single-handed sailing has changed. The technology that's gone into these single-handed 60-footers that these crazy, predominantly Frenchmen sail around the world, they're flying. They're actually getting the boats completely out of the water. Our sport has changed. The speed record is now 78 miles an hour with a boat called the Vestas Speed Rocket. It's going to go higher. I guarantee you it goes higher. The best way to describe what technology has done to our sport is with the best brand in sport. The best brand in sport is still the America's Cup. Everybody's heard of the America's Cup. The America's Cup is what every young kid who wants to be a sailor aspires to do. I was lucky to be part of it for a few times. Let me show you what the modern America's Cup, if you haven't seen it, what the modern America's Cup actually looks like. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 78, 79, 80. Not exactly our grandfather's America's Cup. High speed, high octane. Listen, back in the turn of the century, this was the highest technology that was out there. Wooden rigs, wooden spars, wooden boats, as some people would say when sailors were real sailors back then. The J-boats of the 20s and 30s, all the modern American moguls bringing out their, building J-boats to try to defend the America's Cup. The 12 meter era, right after World War II came in, this is the America's Cup that I grew up with right off of Newport, Rhode Island. As kids, we'd go out and watch the races, and this was my America's Cup. This was what's called the IACC, 75 footers. Again, technological marvels of their day, but they had their upside, their downside. I got to skipper Dennis Conner's boat for two America's Cups in 2000 and 2003, which is a whole nother speech that I could talk about someday. A lot of it would be probably R-rated, knowing Dennis, but it's all about boat speed. It's all about technology. The fastest boat always wins the America's Cup, and there was no better example of this than Australia too. After 132 years, the United States held the America's Cup. This brash group of Australians came over with what they called their weapon. They shrouded their boat all summer long. Nobody ever saw the keel. The keel was what was referred to as the wing keel. Nobody saw it until after they won the America's Cup in the best of seven series. Alan Bond so famously put his hands out of the water, the boat came up, and there lied wings on the end of their keel. The fastest boat always wins the America's Cup. This group went back to Australia as absolute heroes. Now, technology can go wrong at the same time. This is in San Diego in, I believe it was 1995, the America's Cup in 1995. The boat broke in half. The skipper John Bertrand sat at a press conference and very smartly was asked, what happened out there today? And he said, the boat wasn't strong enough, as it sank in 2,000 feet of water off of San Diego. Same thing for young America in 2003 in Auckland, New Zealand. I even sank an America's Cup boat training in Long Beach. This is something, and maybe it's a badge of honor. Maybe you have to, you got to sink a boat at some stage to make sure that you're trying hard enough. We had a new rudder in the boat that day. I spun the rudder to turn the boat down. Rudder broke off, put a hole in the back of the boat about this big four and a half minutes later. We were jumping in the water and the boat was on the bottom soon thereafter. So technology can go awry at the same time, as we all know. One thing that's really helped our sport is television. Television is finally able to explain quite a complicated sport and a sport that hasn't been really easy to televise to the modern public. Listen, there's obviously the standard media that we all see and try to believe every single day. But the biggest difference has been how we show sailboat races on a TV set. Again, technology has allowed us to essentially overlay a grid on the TV along with boundaries. Believe it or not, the sailors know where these boundaries are with a series of lights in their boat. They're not allowed to go outside the boundaries. Keeps the racing closer together, shows people who's ahead and behind, and it's really changed. Actually the person who created this software also did the ten down, the down marker in professional football. The ten yard down marker, that glowing stripe. So this is technology that has spread through many different sports. This has changed the game for us, because like a lot of aging athletes, I found myself in the booth after a while, after my America's Cup career was up, and I've done three of these now for the global feed, and it looks like in Barcelona in 2024 I might be doing my fourth. I find it fascinating. I find it just as hard as actually sailing, but it's a lot less pressure at the end of the day. So the technology kept going in our sport. The America's Cup started coming out of the water, catamarans going 40, 50 miles an hour. San Francisco Bay in 2013 saw Oracle and Emirates Team New Zealand bashing it. The first team to get to nine wins won that America's Cup. At one stage the Kiwis were ahead eight to one. So not only had technology shown a totally different side of the sport of sailing, but it also showed the ability for boats to change overnight and literally flick a switch in another different direction and bring out huge amounts of boat speed on one day that they didn't have the day before. The biggest comeback, some say, in professional sport from eight to one to win nine to eight, and it was Todd Harris, who is my partner in the booth who's done a lot of different sports, said, Kenny, if I were you, I would quit right now. It's never going to get better than this in your sport. Call it a day and cash it in, and I wasn't smart enough to do that either. Larry Ellison, finally after the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars he had spent to win the America's Cup, finally had his America's Cup. But again, this did not come without pain as well. They destroyed their first boat sailing in San Francisco Bay. This wing, this hard wing itself would have been about a $10 million mistake. Artemis, also on San Francisco Bay, another catamaran trying to foil, literally broke apart and killed somebody on this Saturday afternoon, killed a great sailor from England. Listen, technology does not come without its price sometimes. Pushing the boundaries does not come without its price. New Zealand won the America's Cup in Bermuda in 2017, but in the semifinals, flipped over and many thought had lost their boat. Two days later, they were back on the race course. They go on to win the America's Cup, and the same thing for American Magic. This passed America's Cup down in Auckland, New Zealand. Went around a mark, lost control. The boat took off. It landed so hard that it blew a hole out of the side of the boat and the boat was underwater. All the electronics destroyed within a matter of minutes. They never recovered, never won a race. The whole series ended up going home winless. And don't think it's going to stop there. Every time that any of us, whether it's your industry or my industry, any time that any of us think that technology has reached its peak, we're always surprised and we're always wrong. The fact is Ineos, the Brits, who Chris just mentioned, who haven't won the America's Cup since originally losing it a long, long time ago, they have teamed up with Mercedes, Formula 1, in their attempt to try to bring new aerodynamic capabilities to sailboat racing. Same thing with Alinghi. Alinghi, the Swiss team who's challenging for the next America's Cup, has joined up with Red Bull Racing. And again, trying to seek any advantage possible and how to change the parameters, how to change our sport with thinking that has never been seen before. The person who designed the Team New Zealand boat that just won this past America's Cup had never been in a boat before. Never been in a boat before. Think about that for a second. It's all software, it's all computers, it's all VPPs, it's all CFD, it's all this letter alphabet soup that most of us don't really understand, but it sure does produce really fast boats. The software itself is off the charts. Simulators have become a big part of everything that is done in the sport of sailing. What the sailors are doing is they're learning how to sail these boats in the simulators, and then the computers learn how to then beat them, then they have to figure out again. So it starts this chain reaction, this evolution of how to try to sail a boat faster and faster and faster. So it's really changed. It's going to continue changing. We haven't seen the last of flying boats, because flying boats are where it's at. And like I said before, if your kid wants to get into sailing, they're going to want to do this. They're not going to want to plot along in the water like the good old days in the sunfish that we all learned how to sail in. So one more technology story, and this is my own. So I did my America's Cups, and then I was really lucky to trip over the sponsor Puma, and Puma decided they wanted to do the around the world race. It's called the Volvo Ocean Race. Puma is an unbelievable sponsor, first of all. They are as crazy as you could imagine. They wanted to do bizarre things that none of us ever could have dreamt of. And this is one of them, go around the world. Around the world, the Volvo Ocean Race was 10 stops around the world. It is thought to be the hardest race to ever compete in and win. You want to push yourself, go try to sail a boat around the world. This is Sir Peter Blake, who tried six times. Won his sixth time, actually won it. One of the legends of offshore sailing, a Kiwi. That was the whitbread around the world race. It switched over to the Volvo Ocean Race. When Volvo got involved, the almighty buck kind of got involved. People like Simon Le Bon from Duran Duran lost his keel in the middle of his attempt to go around the world. An all-female team was the first to win its class in 1989. And then came what's called canting keel boats, boats where the keel would wag hydraulically from side to side, increasing the power in the boat and allowing boats like this to go 40, 50 knots. Crazy, crazy speeds going around the world, flying off of waves in the middle of oceans. So, what is the Volvo Ocean Race? 39,000 miles, 135 days of sailing. We spent, on average, about 20 days per leg with a 10-person crew. I sailed in three Volvo Ocean Races. I did the first one as just partly, and then I skippered this Puma project for two of them. Never won it, second and third, and I'll tell you why. Top speed, 47 miles an hour, and I can tell you that that is gravity actually taking over. That's a big wave, and you're heading down what we call down the mine shaft, and there's no place to go. There's just darkness at the end, and at that stage, everybody's just holding on for dear life because you know that wave's coming right over the top of the boat. So, it's a scary place to be sometimes, especially at night when you can't see what's in front of you. The most wind we had in the Southern Ocean, we had almost 10 days straight of over 50 knots of breeze and waves you stop guessing at the height. You actually hope for nighttime because you can't see how big the waves are. That's when you know things are getting a little dicey, and you're as far away from land as anybody can get. So, welcome to my choice. This is what I wanted to do, and off the record, I don't even like to swim. I hate getting wet. I barely, like take a shower every once in a while, I'm okay with, but besides that, I really don't like being wet, so this might have been one of the most bizarre and strange career choices anybody could ever make, but you do it for your team. 25 strong, included boat builders, sailors, administrators, designers, sailmakers. We were all inclusive. We became a family. That's the beauty of this whole thing. It's that ability to become a family. Built a carbon fiber boat, custom carbon fiber boats, right down to specifics. Even our toilet was carbon fiber, and you can't save enough weight. The lighter you are, the faster you're going to go. We had the glamour of the Selma Hayaks, who was the grandmother or godmother or something of the boat. My favorite day, I'd sailed around the world two and a half times. The scariest I ever was during that period was throwing in a first pitch at Fenway Park. It was terrifying. Testing training, 10,000 miles of testing and training, constantly trying to evolve the boat so you're prepared when the start comes. Living in this carbon fiber hollow shell, and that's all it is. There's no amenities down below, because amenities cost you weight. Weight costs you speed. Then we took safety very seriously. We went to all kinds of safety at sea schools, learned how to use every aspect of all the safety equipment we had on board. This is the button you never want to push. This is the man overboard button. It was my big fear as being the skipper, is having to make that phone call to a mother, a brother, a sister, a father, to say that their son or daughter wasn't coming home. Fortunately, knock on wood, that never happened. I was on one leg. We lost one sailor on a transatlantic leg on another boat. Seven lives have been lost in this race. This is not for the faint of heart, and it's not without risk. The worst part is the food, freeze-dried food. I always say, anybody who wants to lose a bit of weight, do a leg on a Volvo race. I lost 17 pounds on one leg once trying to eat this garbage, and this is one thing I certainly do not miss, freeze-dried food. Learning how to sail day and night around the clock, just as hard at night as you do during the day. Finally, you get to start this race against all equally as prepared boats, equally as prepared wealthy sponsors. Finance usually isn't a problem, and here we are. About a week and a half into this race, we're fine in our legs, so to speak. We're about three miles behind. We're in second place. We're about 100 miles ahead of the third place boat, and the largest bang I've ever heard in my life. It's either the keel just fell off, or the mast just fell over. It was the latter. The mast fell over. In essence, it was four years of work right down the drain, right there on the spot, or so we thought. We had to get this thing on board. We had to get the sails cut away. We had to get the mast back on board, because if we didn't get the mast on board, think about it, we didn't know what broke. We have a spare mast that somehow we have to try to get to Cape Town, South Africa, which is the end of this leg, so we can continue with the race, but if we don't know what broke, the spare mast actually is identical to the mast we have in right now. We get the mast back on board, and then is the realization we're in the middle of nowhere. We're in the middle of the South Atlantic, and the closest point of land is a place called Tristan da Cunha. Tristan da Cunha is the most remote inhabited island on earth. 285 people, seven surnames, to give you an idea. Yes, it's as bizarre as you could possibly imagine. Here we are trying to get ourselves there. We realize we don't have enough fuel to get to Tristan da Cunha. We don't carry enough diesel to go 700 miles, and then the 1,200 miles after that to get to South Africa. And on the phone, amazingly enough, a Russian freighter goes 100 miles out of their way, and as the captain said to me over the radio, sailors help sailors. It was one of the coolest things I've ever been involved with in my life. This massive Russian freighter comes out of nowhere and delivers us 48 jugs of diesel fuel to get us to Tristan da Cunha, and it was something they didn't have to do, something that several other freighters actually passed by and refused all of a sudden to speak English. They didn't want to talk to us. And we get ourselves to this volcano in the middle of the South Atlantic called Tristan da Cunha. That's the entire town right there. That's the 285 people. We're there for five days. While this is going on, a ship has been rented in Cape Town to come out to Tristan da Cunha to lift our boat up and to bring us back and to try to continue. We have to make the start of this next leg, which is in two weeks. They had a golf course. It was actually the cow patty that they called a golf course. I own the course record. It's the only course record, but the holes were trash can lids, so my putting problems were pretty much alleviated on this particular golf course. What their factory is, they sell lobsters, and only three ships per year come out to Tristan da Cunha, and those three ships bring out supplies, and they bring back lobsters. There's no airport. There's no helicopter pad. It's too far away. And there's our lonely little boat. We had around-the-clock watches to make sure it didn't drift away. Finally, the ship comes, lifts the boat out of the water, plunks it on top of the ship, and this will most likely, I'm guessing, most likely be the last time I ever saw Tristan da Cunha as we powered away. That's our five-day trip back to Cape Town. All the while, we're doing around-the-clock watches to try to repair our boat, which is pretty dinged up after a mast falls over the side, and we figure out, after taking the old mast apart, that everything on this boat is carbon fiber or titanium. There's about 10 little pieces on the boat that are stainless steel. One of those stainless steel pieces, the piece that held on one of those shrouds, is what broke. It was probably, you always hear it, it was the $10 item. Well, this was literally the $10 item that broke. It was pulled off of a rack by a person that pulled the wrong type of stainless steel. That was it. It was always going to break. It was just a matter of time. So technology is everything you can imagine, but if the people aren't prepared to do the right thing, and a person has a lapse, then guess what? That technology isn't worth anything, and that's exactly the case. We had to fix our sails. We had a US versus Russia basketball to try to take care of some of the wrongs that were done during the Olympics, I believe in 72 or something like that. We got our boat back to Cape Town, got the mast in with 24 hours to spare, and this is the next day. This is the day after we got back. This is the start of the race to Abu Dhabi around the tip of South Africa, and we took this as a good sign, and a sign it was. The rest of the race was unbelievable. We wanted to be the first team to ever win the Volvo Ocean Race without finishing a leg. We got docked 40 points in that first leg because we didn't finish, and we lost the race by 15 at the end of the day. The Southern Ocean leg, like I said before, the Southern Ocean leg was 10 days of over 50 knots of breeze. We had three people in the bunk. We had a separated shoulder, a blown-up elbow, and a bad back. We needed some of you guys around. Actually, you should have been our 11th crew member, but we kept going. We kept persevering, dodging whales, albatross everywhere, frostbite down to 60 degrees south right by the caps. This is where the biggest waves any of us had ever seen are in the world. Essentially, the weather systems go unencumbered around the world. You have to take care of everything. The diesel engine charges the batteries. It works the water maker. The water maker creates water. With that water, you put it in the freeze-dried, and you create food. If the engine doesn't work, essentially, you starve. You have to be able to fix everything. You are totally self-sufficient. The only people out there who can save you are the other competitors in the race. This Southern Ocean leg, when you see the mountains of Chile after going across the Southern Ocean, and this is the rock, this is Cape Horn, when you see this rock, this is the happiest moment of your life because you're heading north. You feel saved. We brought a box of cigars and a bottle of rum, kind of old traditions. Never dive when it comes to sailors. John O. Swain's been around Cape Horn five times. I've only been around twice. I felt like kind of a rookie. After all this, after a 21-day leg, 10 days of 50 knots, two boats almost sank, had to pull into Chile, we get around. We won the leg by less than a mile over one of our arch rivals. It was the most phenomenal experience of any of our lives, especially after everything we had been through. We got across the finish line to kind of a scene that none of us ever could have imagined in our sport. This was, I guess it was all over television, the trials and tribulations of this leg. What was going on out in the ocean? These kind of, as we were described, these warriors of the sea trying to not only beat each other but beat the elements at the same time, using technology to get out in front of weather systems and go as fast as possible and somehow try to keep the boat in one piece. It was very cool. People really, I mean, I had never seen anything like it. I still get kind of choked up about it because I remember it like it was yesterday. This is some nation of our experience. It's a bittersweet symphony that's like Trying to make ends meet You're a slave to the money, then you die I'll take you down On a road I've never been down You're the one that takes you to the places where all the faiths meet, yeah You know I can't change, I can't change, I can't change, I can't change But I'm here in my moment, I am here in my moment And I'm a million different people from one to the next I can't change my moment, no, no, no, no, no You've got to change your violence, no, no, be in silence You've got to change your violence, no, no, be in violence So, when you chase storms around the world, you expect the worst. And that's essentially what we do and what we did for a living. The best part about a Volvo Ocean Race or about an experience like this is the people. And this all goes full circle, right? We're talking about technology. It's really about the people. The people create the technology. Everybody on stage before me, the smarts in this room, thank God you're on our side to try to help fix people. Because it's the people, it's the ideas, it's the engineering, it's the design, it's how to interact with that technology at the end of the day. Our failure in this race was actually because of a person. Just picking the wrong thread of the wrong style of stainless steel. It's these people. If any of these people called me tomorrow and said I have a problem, I would be on their doorstep in two seconds. Because that's how much we meant to each other. That's how much we relied on each other. And at times in life and death situations. So technology is great. But please, if you're going to take anything out of today, remember it's the people that create the technology and the people who are your teammates and the people like in this room who are your brothers and sisters, they're actually the important ones. They're the ones that make it work. So on behalf of all sailors in the world, I hope this has been a bit of an education as to what our sport is really like. It's a pleasure being here today. Thank you for everything you do. And I'll be back. It's only a matter of time before these ankles wear out just like the hips did. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Kenny. I think just in the interest of time, that was incredible. And it's nice to get a glimpse into a world which is foreign to most of us and see what that's like. I know you were here earlier in Hertz and you saw some of the stuff that we do and how we push the envelope technologically, for example, with ankle replacements and things like that. And you saw that we're worried about failures and all. So I guess just one quick question before you go. In the world of sailing, do you see, since you seem to be equally driven by and at the mercy of technology, do you see technology in the sailing world eventually coming over to our world? That's my one question for you. Well, I would imagine it already has. So the materials that we use that I mentioned before, aramid, spectra, carbon fiber, there's talk of graphene, there's talk of all these man-made, unbelievably strong materials. And if it weren't for these materials, we couldn't do half of what we do here, right? We couldn't be as light, we couldn't be as fast, we couldn't be as strong. So one of the presenters was talking about steel. There's no such thing in sailing almost anymore. Sure, there's a lead bulb at the end of the keel that keeps the boat upright. But besides that, these are carbon fiber, completely man-made marvels. And I'm guessing that already everybody in this room has had some association with that type of technology. So it ain't stopping, folks. You know it, I know it. This is only going to keep going. And as long as when I go under the knife with one of you, that non-evasive drill bit that's this big isn't used, I'm going to be good to go. I'm okay with it. Thank you.

Kenny Reed

sailing

technology

evolution

sailboat racing

competitiveness

safety