My visit to the Bermuda stopover of SailGP’s Season 4 circuit came with a few revelations. I’m based in Boston, and the first surprise came in realizing that in terms of travel time, the Bermuda stopover was actually closer to me than next month’s New York stopover. The flight was under 2 hours.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have been somewhat skeptical of SailGP and their ultra high-tech racing program. Like many sailing traditionalists, I find that there’s a romance lacking in the modern flying contraptions developed by the America’s Cup and SailGP. However, that’s exactly where I went wrong—in mentally grouping the America’s Cup and SailGP together. Anyone would be excused for making the same mistake. Racing short course foiling machines, significant crossover in the athletes participating, and one being born from the other…the identities of the two events are tangled.

SailGP was created by 2013 America’s Cup principals Larry Ellison and Russell Coutts who saw the structure and the challenges presented by the Deed of the Gift from the inside and wanted to create something new that solved the modern Cup’s problems. In starting fresh, they could design a program that wasn’t bogged down by the America’s Cup’s baggage (and I don’t mean the history and the legacy of the America’s Cup; I think we can all agree that some of the most incredible moments in sailing history have happened on the Cups venerable circuit).

But by starting fresh, SailGP was able to incorporate new programs and better infrastructure for sustainability and the future of the sport. They did away with the secrecy and the design competition, they made space for new athletes, and they prioritized the spectator over the sponsor.

In order to make the events more spectator friendly, the courses are located close enough to shore that people can actually see the racing from land (though the spectator fleets are always out in full force as well). But it’s not just the local spectators who can watch the events. SailGP is built to be televised. They have designed their program from the ground up to be as accessible to as many people as possible. The boats themselves are made to sail in a huge variety of conditions, so they are almost guaranteed to be able to start on time on race day, regardless of the wind. The races are also short—three 15 minute races per day. The marks are even movable mid-race so that they can adjust the course to help each race last the exact amount of time necessary to fit neatly into a TV spot. Finally, because these the boat sail almost exclusively faster than the wind, they’re pretty much always sailing upwind to a gate. This makes understanding what’s going on at a glance a little bit confusing, so SailGP has invested in a fleet of commentators and incredible real-time graphics that they’re calling “LiveLineFX” that make it easy to understand what’s going on, even for non-sailors. This bid for accessibility has helped their circuit reach more people than ever, and in the social media age, the spectacle of high octane racing is a social media hit. Not to mention that having 13 events per season gives much more visibility than the America’s Cup can offer with its events several years apart.

Also on the America’s Cup redesign front, the one design F50 fleet helps defer costs and allows sailors to compete against sailors not against designers. There is no secrecy. In fact, SailGP welcomed me into the tech base and gave me a tour of their data management set up. 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, one team would be able to retrospectively 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 all that analysis is easily available.

These data experts work out of shipping container offices that are strapped down and sent from destination to destination. Outside, a separate team assembles the boats with massive cranes. Each wing—they’re not quite sails, more like airplane wings—is in two parts. The bottom piece is always in use, and the top piece can be swapped out to make different rig sizes depending on the wind conditions expected that day. There’s certainly no jumping halyards on these boats; the race organization has a specialized team that manages, maintains, and assembles the wings.

From the tech base, I then had the opportunity to hop on a chase boat and get out on the water during the practice on Friday. These boats are phenomenally fast, and even the chase boats cannot keep up with them when they approach max speeds—about 60mph. The teams say that this practice time on the water is essential to their competitiveness in the races and cohesion as a team. In fact, in the previous event in Christchurch, New Zealand, where numerous collisions spelled drama for the whole fleet, the most commonly cited struggle for the drivers was that they simply had not had enough practice time on the water at that venue.

Unfortunately, that practice time does result in extra opportunities for issues on board, and in Bermuda the American team fell victim to that, capsizing their boat and sending the sailors spilling out of the windward hull for a dramatic drop. No major injuries were reported, but there were certainly bumps and bruises, especially as multiple sailors fell into the wing and punctured it. It was impossible to make repairs in time for the next day’s racing, and Team USA was out of the running for Bermuda.

On Saturday the other nine teams competed in three races. Led by Phil Robertson, Team Canada was looking very strong, topping the leader board. Each SailGP event comprises two days of three races. The scores of the first five races are totaled and the top three teams compete in the sixth and final winner-takes-all race.

In Bermuda, it came down to the last leg of race five to determine the podium moving on to the final. Though there was incredible sailing across the fleet, it was ultimately Australia and New Zealand who secured top spots and a fierce battle for third place between Canada and Spain. Race five ended with a tie between the two teams on the leader board, but because Spain had placed higher in the final race of the five, which is used as a tiebreaker, Spain advanced on to the final.

The final race quickly became a match race between Spain and New Zealand, with Australia falling back. Ultimately, New Zealand’s Peter Burling couldn’t hold off Spain’s Diego Botin, and the Spanish team pulled off a win. Notably, they are the youngest team that SailGP has ever had in terms of average age of the sailors on board, and they are still looking for sponsorship to secure their spot in SailGP Season 5, so a win against sailing legends Peter Burling and Tom Slingsby (Team Australia) is a major accomplishment for their program. They also won the Los Angeles Grand Prix and are in third overall for the season ranking, so hopefully there is a pathway forward for this talented young team.

Season 4 will conclude this summer after events in Halifax, New York, and a finale in San Francisco. The teams compete for the overall trophy and prize money as well as something SailGP is calling “The Impact League,” an opportunity to give back to host communities, make their sport more sustainable, and all around improve their team’s impact on the world. This includes the sustainable meal plans, advancement opportunities for underrepresented communities, and environmentally conscious outreach in the cities they visit. Each team receives a score for their stopover performance from a panel of judges. Those scores are tallied throughout the season in nine categories to crown a winner at the end of the season. Currently Switzerland, Australia and Denmark lead The Impact League.

In addition to The Impact League, SailGP should be commended on their strategy for getting women on to the boats. Female sailors are on every SailGP team, and unlike in the America’s Cup where they race separately, these women are equal teammates with their male counterparts on the F50. SailGP began incorporating support and training for female team members 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 is a grinder in addition her role as a strategist. These intentional pathways into the league help to bridge the experience gap and make up for the lack of professional opportunities for female sailors across the sport.

The spectator experience for SailGP is undoubtedly different from that of most sailing racing, but I found that even without a home team to root for, it was exciting, nuanced racing supported by impeccable commentary and LiveLineFX graphics. To be honest, it made me want to put the laser in and get into a scuffle at a crowded mark rounding. Despite being at the opposite end of the tech spectrum, somehow it made me miss the sporty, competitive dinghy racing of my childhood. I’ve since moved on to bigger boats, but SailGP had me revisiting those days of short, fierce races in a 420. And while I’ve heard every criticism in the book about how our sport is becoming unrecognizable in the modern flying speed machines, I found that being there, watching SailGP, I saw something that brought me unexpectedly back to those summer days when I first fell in love with sailing.

For more on SailGP and to find out when their next event is, visit sailgp.com.

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May 2024