As SailGP approaches its fifth season of racing, this professional sailing league is finally flying on its own two foils.
For the first three seasons of the racing series, one team dominated the championship title and the seven-figure prize. However, a surprise win in the fourth season championship demonstrated that SailGP’s talent pool is increasing, and that other teams now have the skills to compete for the title.
Moreover, with the fifth season starting in November, almost all of the 11 teams are financially independent from the league, team valuations have surged, and the league is welcoming its first woman driver, new technologies, more teams and events — all signs that indicate that SailGP is achieving a new level of maturity in professional sailing.
During the first three seasons, the Australia SailGP Team and its driver, Tom Slingsby, an Olympic gold medalist, won the championship title each year. They looked unstoppable.
This changed last season when the driver Diego Botin, also an Olympic gold medalist, and the Spain SailGP Team won the winner-takes-all Grand Final race in San Francisco in July.
“We had a really good season, but the nature of this game is only one person can win, and it comes down to a very short final,” Slingsby said.
Spain’s win was impressive given that it finished last in the third season.
“I was surprised they won; I wasn’t surprised they were vying for victory,” said Russell Coutts, SailGP’s chief executive and a five-time America’s Cup winner. “It was a matter of when, not if.”
Botin attributed some of his team’s win to the shared data. Each F50 catamaran used in the series is identical and carries 125 sensors that process 1.15 billion data requests per hour by SailGP’s Oracle-based cloud. All teams can access this data.
“It’s a massive platform to improve, to learn, to get better,” Botin said, adding that the shared data helps foster equality. “You know exactly what other teams are doing.”
Looking ahead, Botin expects even more leaderboard dynamics this season.
“There’s so much potential in SailGP to improve that you can start at a certain level, and it’s about how you develop through a season as a team,” he said. “I expect that the results [will] be really well mixed through the events.”
He’s not alone in this thinking.
“Everyone is just getting better and better as the league grows,” said Peter Burling, an Olympic gold medalist and America’s Cup winner who drives the New Zealand boat.
In addition to stiffer competition, the league is seeing more teams that are privately owned. Coutts said that in the first season, Larry Ellison, a founder of Oracle and an America’s Cup winner, owned all six teams.
This, however, was a start-up investment.
“The direction from Day 1 was that each year those teams should be reducing their funding requirement,” said Andy Thompson, the managing director of the series. “As we’ve grown, we’ve reduced the kind of reliance on central funding each year.”
This season, Coutts and Thompson said that almost all of the teams would be financially independent.
“We will likely only have one team that’s being funded by the league,” Thompson said of the New Zealand team. “New teams coming in are fully funded.”
This is being reflected in team valuations.
During the nascent days of the series, Coutts said that owners could acquire teams for their running costs, a figure that he put from $5 million to $10 million.
“Nowadays, we wouldn’t sell a team for less than $45 million,” he said.
Thompson said that constraining operating costs was still a fundamental concern.
“We’ve put a cost cap of $10 million per season for each of the teams,” he said. “As soon as those costs start to inflate, it means that it’s going to be more challenging for each of the teams to stand on their own two feet.”
This season also marks a major step toward inclusion.
In 2021, the series announced the Women’s Pathway program to create gender equality in the male-dominated league. Since then, women have sailed in numerous onboard roles, but this season will shatter a carbon-fiber ceiling when Martine Grael, a double Olympic gold medalist, takes the helm for the new Mubadala Brazil team
“I think it’s a great step forward,” Coutts said.
“When you look at the candidates from Brazil, she’s the standout,” he said. “She can perform under pressure, and it’s now a matter of putting the right team around her to compete and win.”
As with all newcomers, the Brazilian team can expect a steep learning curve.
“Are they going to go well from the get-go?” Coutts asked. “Probably not, because they haven’t had the time in the boat. But will they succeed eventually? I have no doubt that they will.”
In another sign that SailGP is paralleling other professional sports, teams are buying talent.
“For the first time in my knowledge in sailing, an athlete has been traded to a team, and in order to get that athlete, they had to pay a transfer fee,” Coutts said about the driver Giles Scott, an Olympic double gold medalist whom the Canada SailGP Team bought from the Emirates Great Britain team for an undisclosed amount. “Things that are commonplace in the major professional sports leagues that have been missing from sailing will be developed in SailGP over the next two years.”
Technology represents another frontier.
F50s fly above the water on hydrofoils that, like airplane wings, require speed to achieve liftoff.
This has been problematic at some events with light winds where boats have trouble achieving the necessary speed through the water — about 16 knots, or 18 miles per hour — under wind power alone. Without this speed, F50s drag their hulls through the water, which slows the boat.
This season, all boats will be equipped with a drop-down electric motor that can be deployed in light-air situations to enable foiling, or to help boats get back onto their foils if they fall off, for example during a maneuver.
While SailGP is still completing the details for how this will be integrated into racing, the motors represent a step change.
“It’s a new innovation for sailing that hasn’t really existed before,” Thompson said. “I think it will ruffle some feathers for sure, but we’ll implement it in the right way.”
In addition to motors, this season will see one additional team and one additional event compared with last season.
Drivers say that while more teams mean more congestion on the water, more events can create more opportunities during the season to recover from a less-than-great result. “I think you can have a few little ups and downs in the season, but it’s making sure that if you have a bad one, it’s not too bad,” Burling said.
While the series has reached some important milestones ahead of this season, Coutts and Thompson still see significant growth potential.
“One of the things that we want to do is expand the number of venues,” Coutts said, noting that 20 to 24 events per season would be ideal. “Then we can start to commercialize what I would describe as the series within the championship,” describing regional titles.
Also, as the number of teams grows, Coutts envisions changing the event format from a series of fleet races to a round-robin format.
“We’re starting to think about a format where you could perhaps have seven and seven, so two groups of seven at the same venue,” he said. “And then the top teams from each group race a final at the end of it.”
Coutts said he also hoped to create a permanent training base with a dedicated training boat. This, he said, will help new teams flatten their learning curves, while enabling all teams to deepen their benches.
“That will jump the league to a whole other level and will allow the teams to train their pipeline of sailors,” Coutts said. “To become truly professional, that’s the next stage.”
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