There were relieved faces all around Galway this weekend as the Volvo Ocean Race and the party it carried in its wash, the biggest series of free concerts ever staged here, cranked into gear.

Tourism officials were happy that the largest and riskiest ever investment in a major tourism project in this country, a whopping f8m, proved a success. The race organisers will audit the impact on the economy. Failte Ireland says it will be more than f40m.

Everybody was happy that the weather proved as good as anything we have seen for an international showcase event.

Smiles

But the biggest smiles of all came from the race organisers' pavilion. Ireland may have done more for the Ocean race than the Ocean Race could ever do for Ireland.

A week or so ago the future of the race that likes to claim it is the second biggest in sailing, after the Americas Cup, was in serious doubt.

The race was proving too expensive, at f20m a boat, for its commercial backers.

It had credibility problems among the general public, who refused to get excited about whether Eriksson 4 was going to finish ahead of Telefonica Black.

Those two sponsors own 56pc of the boats in the race between them. Brazilian Torben Grael, who is going to win the race, is virtually unknown even in his own country.

A race that once had 29 starters, in its days as the Whitbread Round the World race, was down to seven. One of the boats which started with such fanfare in Alicante last year did not make it to Galway.

The so-called Everest of sailing, pitting man against nature across 39,000 nautical miles of open ocean, was in danger of becoming a casualty of the recession.

In too many of the stopovers, the race had barely caught any local imagination. In Cape Town and Boston it was scarcely noticed. Only Rio had generated any decent TV coverage.

Galway was different. They first realised that when tens of thousands of people came out at 4am on a weekday morning to welcome the boats, whose arrival is random affair dictated by wind direction and strength.

Ian Walker, skipper of the Green Dragon, spoke of the emotion of his crew when they spotted the bonfires on the islands and coastline and hear the first cheers from the harbour.

The race's former contestant and now CEO Knut Frostad said that only Auckland in 1993 matched what he had seen Galway. No other stopover in the current campaign came close.

The flotilla of 500 boats, Blasket or Aran ferries, yachts, fishing smacks, hookers, jetskis and even kayaks in the harbour for Saturday's inshore race was the biggest for many years, a reminder of the days when 3,000 boats used to turn out for the race departure in Portsmouth or its arrival in sailing-crazy New Zealand.

The Volvo Ocean race is not the only sporting event in trouble.

The auditors from Formula 1 arrive in Galway on Wednesday to see how costs will be trimmed. "All technological sports are challenged in the current environment," Frostad said. He says the next race will have shorter stopovers. He also wants more Galways on the schedule.

The bidding process for the next race has already attracted 81 entries, including three from Ireland.

None of them are likely to match what happened this weekend. Galway lived up to its reputation as a party town.

Wisdom

It was a close run thing. "When I looked at this place on a rainy Wednesday afternoon last November I began to doubt the wisdom of what we had done," Failte Ireland chairman Redmond O'Donoghue said.

The rusty skeletons of dock machinery and ugly oil tanks were cleared just weeks ago. One of the memorable images of the weekend was the line of camper vans and caravans parked on the road to Salthill.

The biggest talking point of all was the weather. "We will have to schedule more events for the week of the exams," John Concannon of Failte Ireland concluded.

- Eoghan Corry