The Eternal Question for SailGP

By Lydia Mullan

October 29, 2024

Sailing’s answer to Formula 1 racing is a multihull spectacle. Even those of us who are smitten with the classic racing yachts of yesteryear can’t argue with SailGP’s ingenuity. I’ve heard it described with many words: cutting edge, spaceship, freak show. And it all starts with you—yes, you.

The truth is that yacht racing is difficult to watch. If you can secure a spot on a spectator boat, there’s the constant push and pull of staying off the course and not drifting into neighboring spectators. If you’re watching from land, it’s often impossible to tell what’s going on, who won the start, which side of the course is favored—assuming you can see the racing at all. It’s at the mercy of fickle wind, so it’s hard to plan for or televise and is both too boring and too confusing to have appeal outside of the sailing community. Not to mention that many of the pro fleets you’d want to watch (America’s Cup, Vendée Globe, The Ocean Race…) happen on a multi-year calendar, so you have to wait years between events. Even when athletes stay with a circuit long enough to compete in multiple events, the casual spectator forgets half the principal players by the time the next one rolls around.

In the digital age, when visibility translates directly to funding, the spectator problem is troubling. Everyone is looking for new ways to secure their stake in the attention economy. But I’d argue no one is trying harder than Larry Ellison and Russell Coutts were in 2018. Fresh off a painful defeat in the America’s Cup, the pair set in motion a plan to create their own racing league. Though at first glance it may have had the optics of a bad case of sour grapes, the idea of a regular circuit that would bring the foiling AC50s to venues around the world had been conceived while Coutts’ and Ellison’s American team were still the reigning champions. It was meant to be a part of the lead-up to the next America’s Cup that they hosted, an event that would not come to pass. Instead, they lost the Cup and ceded the Deed of Gift (the governing rules of the America’s Cup, which largely leave the rules and organization of the next competition up to the current victor) to New Zealand.

Though they’d be unable to enact their plan for the next Cup cycle, Coutts and Ellison still had their hearts (and bank accounts) set on bringing this new kind of racing to fruition. The idea was that sailing could be reimagined from the ground up to go from a fringe sport to mainstream by centering the competition around the spectators rather than innovative builds or ambitious race courses. They just needed three little things—several years, a massive investment, and buy-in from the world’s best sailors.

At first their circuit was met with skepticism. The general public who had never cared about sailboat racing still didn’t care, and the sailing public, who’d been growing increasingly nostalgic for the romantic 12 Metre days, weren’t totally onboard with another race for foiling machines that looked nothing like the sailboats they loved. Who was the target audience here?

Still, the ingenuity of the plan kept the momentum up. Without the Deed of Gift, Ellison and Coutts could really reconfigure racing from scratch. If they wanted more people to watch, it had to be accessible. To be accessible, it had to be televised. To be televised, they had to control the wind delays.

Since there was nothing to be done about the wind itself, they needed a new boat, one that was both manageable in heavy air and exciting in light air so that there was never a reason to cancel racing. Thus the F50 was born. The light, foiling hulls can get moving without much breeze, and the wing foils (imagine the sail has been replaced with a vertical airplane wing) can be adjusted for more or less “sail” area via interchangeable top sections of varying sizes. This means at almost any wind speed, the boats can fly, almost exclusively sailing faster than the wind due to the wizardry of foil physics.

The downside to sailing faster than the wind is that the F50 is always sailing close hauled. This, combined with courses that have both windward and leeward gates (i.e. courses look like a big square with different teams choosing different corners of the square to sail to), makes it a little difficult to tell what’s going on. To help, SailGP has invested in a fleet of commentators and LiveLineFX—incredible real-time graphics that make it easy to understand even for non-sailors. This commentary does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to accessibility and is informative without bogging the excitement down.

Each SailGP event comprises two days of three races. The scores of the first five races (day one and two races on day two) are totaled, and the top three teams compete in the sixth and final winner-takes-all race. This makes for brutal disappointments and thrilling come-from-behind victories.

The races are also short—just 15 minutes. To accommodate this, the marks are movable by remote control so that the race organizers can adjust the course and ensure that each race day lasts an exact amount of time.

The result is that it fits neatly into a television spot and is a social media hit, with high octane races and viral crashes and wipeouts. Interest in the league continues to grow outside of the sailing world, which has been an elusive audience for other races. The audience, it seems, includes the thrill seekers and the micro attention spans of the internet age. Still, it’s not the phenomenon with sailor-spectators that it might be.

Part of making SailGP work long term was courting the best talent in the industry. Many of the current teams include sailors who also compete in the Olympics or America’s Cup, so the SailGP racing schedule tends to accommodate other elite events. (Season 4 ended in time for the Paris Olympics, and season 5 will pick up just after the 37th America’s Cup wraps up.)

The season 5 calendar is still shaping up at press time, but it kicks off in Dubai in November 2024, followed by Aukland, New Zealand; Sydney, Australia; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Rio, Brazil; New York City; a to-be-announced city in Great Britain; a to-be-announced city in Germany; Taranto, Italy; Geneva, Switzerland; Andalucia-Cadiz, Spain; a to-be-announced city in the Middle East, and finally Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

This calendar includes racing all but two months of the year, making for a much more consistent schedule than the other big events, which mostly operate on a once-per-four-year basis and have to restaff their entire operations each time. Consistency is better for the athletes and shore teams because they can expect regular employment and longer training programs, but it also means a lot more content generated, more sponsor visibility, and more for the audience to watch.

Another point on which they’ve totally eschewed their America’s Cup origin is that there are no covert operations in the SailGP fleet. Because the boats are identical, gone are the carefully guarded design secrets. In fact, during the season 4 Bermuda stopover, SailGP welcomed me into the tech base and gave me a tour of their data management setup. Each boat is covered with sensors that monitor loads, speeds, and anything else you can imagine, and all of that information is available to the other boats in the fleet.

So, for example, one team could retroactively check how another team was trimming their foils during a particularly speedy leg or tack. This open source approach to the data of each boat makes for highly competitive racing but is also a way to monitor the boat’s health and troubleshoot issues on board. Teams can go to the race organization and say, “Hey, during this maneuver we were really struggling with stability. Can you walk us through why that might have been?” and the analysis is easily available.

The main critique I hear about grand prix foiling cats is that they don’t look like sailboats and what they’re doing doesn’t feel familiar to sailors. I’ll admit to being in that camp when I first got wind of SailGP. This isn’t for sailors, I’d assumed, this is just to go viral. Even four years on, I thought of it as something separate, more like NASCAR or F1 than a sailing race. Or maybe it’s for the powerboat folks who care more about speed than the adventure of getting there. They must’ve been the target audience, not us.

But upon actually attending a race, something made intentionally available to as many people as possible with the stopover schedule, what I found instead was exciting, nuanced racing supported by impeccable commentary and graphics. The fast, short courses kept things fun and aggressive, and despite being at opposite ends of the tech spectrum, it made me miss the sporty, competitive dinghy racing of my youth. While I’ve heard every criticism in the book about how our sport is becoming unrecognizable in these modern flying speed machines, I found that while watching SailGP, I saw something familiar after all, something that brought me unexpectedly back to those young summer days when I first fell in love with sailing.

I’m not too proud to admit when I’m wrong. Maybe this actually is for sailors too, if we’re willing to give it a chance.

A Bright Future

In addition to the overall trophy, SailGP teams compete for a second trophy in the form of “The Impact League,” an opportunity to give back to host communities, make sailing more sustainable, and improve their team’s all around impact on the world. It’s up to the teams how they choose to go about making a difference, but some efforts have included sustainable meal plans, environmentally conscious outreach in the cities they visit, and advancement opportunities for members of underrepresented communities in the sport. At each stopover, teams receive a score from a panel of judges, and those scores are tallied throughout the season in nine categories to crown a winner. At the stopovers, the Performance and Impact trophies are displayed side-by-side and treated with equal veneration, and the league reports that competition is as fierce off the water as on it.

Also in the spirit of opportunity and improvement, SailGP has devised a strategy for getting female athletes on the boats. Recognizing that women were capable of sailing the F50 but that the lack of professional opportunities for women in the sport led to an experience gap between male and female contenders, SailGP began incorporating support and training for female sailors in season 2 and quickly moved on to having women competing on the boats in light air configurations and acting as strategists. Team USA’s Sarah Stone even acted as a grinder in addition to her role as a strategist during season 4, proving that all these sailors needed was the opportunity.

For more on SailGP, visit sailgp.com.