SAILING’S GREATEST SHOW
‘Box office stuff’ is how Ben Ainslie described the opening day of the latest Sail GP event, in Chicago, USA. And truly, it was: the sun shone, the wind blew, the crowds waved their Stars’n’ Stripes flags as the foiling F50s whizzed around in front of an iconic city skyline. Sailing, Hollywood-style.
This is a new vernacular for sailing. Ainslie and his peers may be the biggest names in the sport, but they are not showmen. Sailors are not athletes used to hyping the crowd or capturing a stadium with tension – they’ve spent most of their careers competing on the horizon.
SailGP set out to change all that. When it was launched in 2018 it proclaimed its modest ambition of redefining the entire sport. The event would pit the world’s greatest sailors (they unquestionably are) against each other in gladiatorial, high stakes competition designed to appeal to those who’d never watched a yacht race in their life.
The first season introduced a five-event, six-team series designed around a broadcast-friendly format. Then, just as SailGP was starting its second year, Covid happened. Global sport hit the buffers, and the entire season was jettisoned. It restarted in April 2021.
SailGP is now in its third season, and this year sees the event take a step up – more teams, more venues, more changes, more championing of its causes. But founders Russell Coutts and Larry Ellison have ambitious plans for the series, and to continue to grow SailGP needs more people to follow it, to invest in it and, above all, to love it.
MONEY TALKS
SailGP is famously bank-rolled by some of the deepest pockets in the world. Larry Ellison, founder of
