In light winds off Navy Pier New Zealand best mastered tough conditions in front of packed shorelines to win the season-opening Rolex United States Sail Grand Prix in Chicago. Peter Burling led his team to victory over Tom Slingsby’s Australia and Phil Robertson’s Canada in the first three-boat event final of Season 4.

It was a day to remember for last season’s two bottom placed finishers as Diego Botin’s Spain and Sebastien Schneiter’s Switzerland won the day’s two fleet races. But the victories weren’t enough to get them into the final which saw very light conditions – with the F50s in the 29-meter wing configuration – and a win for the Kiwis.

Burling said: “This puts us obviously in a great position for the season, we’re really happy to walk away with the win. In this first one, you know it’s going to be a long season and eventually it’s going to come down to the last race we know but it’s definitely nice to win a few along the way, this feels good.”

It was first blood for Burling in one of the league’s fiercest rivalries between himself and Slingsby that had played out throughout Season 3. Slingsby said: “Honestly we are really happy, it’s a second place in the first event of the year. Of course we wanted to win, we felt like we sailed really well, and we had a good shot at it but the Kiwis were better in the final race so hats off to them.”

Canada finished fifth and second in the fleet races on day two which was enough to make it into the final, but the team never managed to get in front of its southern hemisphere rivals. 

Robertson said: “It’s a great start to the season, and good for the team, it’s a solid result with all the chat that was going on and an unsettled lead-up to this event, look we had our backs against the wall and we delivered.”

It remained an event to forget for the home team with Jimmy Spithill’s United States finishing in ninth place in the standings.

Spithill said: “We need to learn the lessons and come out swinging in LA. If you look at last season what really hurt us was rotation. We are going to keep the team as locked as we can, take the lessons. It was just a couple of small mistakes yesterday that really cost us. But otherwise the team was sailing pretty well.”

Elsewhere ROCKWOOL Denmark SailGP Team opened the season with a solid fourth place finish, one spot ahead of Botin’s Spain. France, Emirates GBR and Switzerland occupied positions six through eight, while newcomers Germany found it tough going in the conditions to finish tenth.

Huge crowds packed Navy Pier for a second day as the event continues to go from strength to strength. Lynn Osmond, President and CEO of Choose Chicago, the city’s official tourism marketing organization, said: “Chicago consistently ranks among the top tourist destinations in the world, and it’s events like SailGP that truly make our city shine on the global stage. We’re so proud that SailGP selected Chicago to kick off Season 4 of this global race series and hope to welcome this exciting event back to Chicago for Season 5!”

Season 4 continues with the inaugural Oracle Los Angeles Sail Grand Prix Port of Los Angeles on July 22-23.

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Tom Slingsby and his Australian team showed why they are one of the most dominant forces in sport as they claimed a third straight SailGP Championship. In a dramatic race on a sparkling day on San Francisco Bay, Slingsby outfoxed his rivals and held off a stunning late challenge from Peter Burling’s New Zealand to claim the SailGP Season 3 title and $1 million prize.

After winning the final Sail Grand Prix of the season ahead of Emirates Great Britain and Canada, Slingsby made it a day to remember with victory in the Championship Final Race over Peter Burling’s New Zealand and Ben Ainslie driving for Great Britain.

Slingsby made his intentions clear from the outset of the season-deciding three boat race, with an aggressive strategy that saw him get the better of both Burling and Ainslie in the pre-start and lead them over the line.

Slingsby said: “It feels unbelievable obviously, that was just a crazy race, a crazy week, a crazy year, but this one feels the best, just the way we sailed all year. Just before the race I just said to everyone here that I’m so proud of them, and no matter whatever happens we win together and we lose together, and fortunately for us things went our way and we were able to win the Championship Final Race as well.”

Slingsby said it was satisfying to claim the title after being the dominant team all season, with Australia making the most finals and winning the most events.

Slingsby said: “For sure, I’m not going to lie, we’d have felt a little hard done by if we won the championship this year with an event to spare and won the San Fran event comfortably and then lost the season, that would have been really tough. But everyone from around the world tunes in because they don’t know who’s going to win. We had the three best teams out there and everyone got to witness an amazing race and I think that’s better for our sport as a whole – we’re going to create new interest, more spectators and fans and that’s a good thing.”

A late error just before the final mark from Australia had opened the unlikeliest of windows for New Zealand to claim victory, but Slingsby held on to deny his fierce rival Burling an upset win.

Burling said: “We got ourselves right back in there at the end, we dug deep, we didn’t give up and we kept fighting, and I’m gutted to not pull it off, but you have to hand it to the Aussies, they are incredible.”

After looking like being a serious threat for the title on day one of San Francisco racing with a blistering performance, it was a disappointing second day for Ainslie and his team as errors saw it finish a distant third in the three-boat final.

Ainslie said: “It wasn’t quite clicking for us today as it was yesterday, and the Championship Final Race wasn’t our finest that’s for sure. But you know, as a team we have learnt a lot this season and can be really proud. Hats off to the Australian team though, what a performance to do the three-peat, it’s a fantastic achievement.”

Earlier in the day France had kept its faint Championship hopes alive with victory in the first fleet race, but Quentin Delapierre finished sixth in the second to end his team’s season in fourth.

Canada finished second in the day’s second race behind Australia and ended its debut season in SailGP in fifth place. Nicolai Sehested’s Impact League winners Denmark endured a more difficult time on the water and finished fourth in the event standings. It meant they fell to sixth in the final Season 3 standings.

Jimmy Spithill’s year to forget for the United States ended on a bright note with a third place in the last fleet race of the season, but the home team finished the season in seventh.

The battle for last place was fiercely contested all weekend and ended with Switzerland and Sebastien Schneiter avoiding the foot of the ladder in its debut season. Spain continues its restructuring period under new driver Diego Botin and ended Season 3 in ninth.

Season 4 is just a month away and will open in spectacular fashion on June 16-17 at Chicago’s Navy Pier for the Rolex United States Sail Grand Prix. It’s the first of 12 events that will span the globe – and see a new team join the startline – before the league returns once again to San Francisco for its Season 4 Grand Final on July 13-14, 2024.

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In a gutsy and impressive performance New Zealand defied the odds to win the Singapore Sail Grand Prix. The win cements [skipper] Peter Burling’s position as the main threat to Tom Slingsby’s charge for a third straight season title, with New Zealand now clearly second in the Season 3 standings. The Kiwis are also the only team besides Australia to win more than one event this season. 

Day two of the Singapore event was dominated by three teams, with New Zealand, Denmark and surprise packet Switzerland finishing in the top three of both fleet races. It was a day to remember for the Swiss, as they claimed their first ever race win to finish the event in fourth, agonizingly short of a first final appearance.

Nicolai Sehested’s Denmark raced well to finish second in race three, win race four, and pushed the New Zealand team all the way in the final. A strong first day was enough to see Australia make the final but its indifferent form from the day two fleet races carried into the final and it finished third.

For Burling it was a victory to savor, after his team started the event on minus four points for a contact incident with the United States in pre-event training.

Burling said: “Coming into this weekend on the back of those penalty points and just seeing the way the team came together under a bit of adversity is super pleasing for us as a group. It’s two from two against the Aussies now in the finals, we’re more than happy to keep chipping away and now looking forward, we want to firstly try to make the top three which obviously this weekend helps out a lot with, and then to try to be in our best possible shape going into that final to win the season.” 

It was a third event-final appearance of the season for Nicolai Sehested and a first time in second place on the podium after a solid weekend for the Denmark SailGP Team which saw it keep in touch with the all-important top three. 

Sehested said: “We closed the gap to the top today and that’s all we need to do. We still have two more events to keep closing the gap, it’s only in San Francisco that counts, so we will just keep chipping away and we don’t mind sitting in fifth until the San Francisco event.”

The Australians now sit 15 points clear of fourth place with three events remaining and are all but guaranteed a place in the Grand Final. Slingsby said: “We’re feeling really good, we’re really happy with how we’re looking on the ladder. It’s going to be amazing going back to Australia. It feels like we can just do our thing and sail and just try to get some decent results, we don’t need to go out there and get first to make the final. So, we’re going to go out there, sail free and try to get the win in front of the home crowd.” 

It was a banner day for Sébastien Schneiter and Nathan Outteridge, co-drivers of the Swiss team, as they claimed their first ever win and very nearly pushed their way into the final with a second-place finish in the day’s other race.

Swiss strategist Laurane Mettraux said: “It was pretty cool out there, I’m just very happy for the team, for Sébastien and for everyone who is working in the shadows. Finally, it came! It all sort of came together today, I think we knew that it was going to just take time and we had to wait a little bit and obviously today was the day.”

Quentin Delapierre’s French team dropped out of the top three in the season standings after an eighth place finish at East Coast Park, while fourth for Ben Ainslie’s Great Britain team in Singapore was enough to see them replace France in the Grand Final positions. 

Seventh at this event for the United States leaves them seventh in the championship and driver Jimmy Spithill looking unlikely for a second straight Grand Final appearance, while Canada’s early season form seems to have evaporated as Phil Robertson’s team sits sixth in the season standings. The Spanish team’s struggles continued with a last place in Singapore leaving driver Jordi Xammar only 1 point above the bottom-placed Swiss on the season three ladder. 

SailGP’s global championship returns to the iconic waters of Sydney Harbour for its next event, the KPMG Australia Sail Grand Prix on February 18-19, 2023.

SINGAPORE SAIL GRAND PRIX FINAL STANDINGS

*New Zealand docked two points in championship standings for contact with United States in pre-race practice 

SAILGP SEASON 3 CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS (after eight events)

*United States penalized 4 season points
*New Zealand penalized 4 season points  
*Switzerland penalized 2 season points 
*Spain penalized 2 season points

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It was difficult to tell who was more awestruck when the stars of two high-performance sporting worlds met in St. Tropez earlier this week: Jimmy Spithill and Tom Slingsby—the rock star helmsmen of SailGP—or Sergio Pérez and Max Verstappen, the brothers in arms of Formula 1’s Oracle Red Bull Racing juggernaut. But after a day of technical geek outs, safety drownings three races and a couple of sprints, it was clear to all that the two worlds are more closely aligned than auto and sailboat racing have ever been.

For Verstappen, it was his first time on a boat of such shape and size (jet skis are apparently more his jam). “Or is it a yacht?” Verstappen asked Spithill after sailing. To which the Red Bull-sipping Aussie skipper shrugs and responded…“Boat?”

It didn’t matter, so they agreed that the foiling F50 is just a boat, which was to Verstappen’s observation, “extremely impressive to see.”

Days after winning the Heineken Dutch Grand Prix, Verstappen alternated with Pérez in the jump seat onboard USA SailGP Team’s F50 during staged races against Slingsby and his Aussie squad before taking the wheel themselves and participating in “time trials.”

For the record, the Australians succumbed 2-to-1 to the Americans and their guests and the data had yet to confirm which of the F1 drivers was quicker on their drag races, but the overall result was a win for all: both Perez and Verstappen got a light-wind taste of F50 foiling. And they liked it. And SailGP’s social fanbase got a nice big F1 bump.

“We’ve bought all sorts of athletes on the boat and it’s consistent—that the shock…how difficult it is to swap sides on the boat especially when you’re foiling,” Spithill said on a Zoom call with journalists afterward.

“It’s different…the speeds on the water feel impressive,” Verstappen said. “It was nice to be on the boat…looking around and watching them tune it to perfection.”

At lower-than-desired windspeeds and using the F50s biggest wing and foils, comparisons were eventually drawn between the two sports. “In the past, we couldn’t say we were comparable,” Spithill said, “but now, with the F50s, with the speed, the tech, the data, which we both heavily rely on…We would have loved to show them the windiest stuff, but we were stuck in first gear.”

Pérez had a good go of it, too, and admitted that while SailGP didn’t look like an extreme sport to him on TV, his day in the jump seat changed his opinion. “I really enjoyed it,” was Perez’s takeaway, to which Slingsby teased, “…if we’d had a bit more wind…”

“It was enough for us,” Perez said with a chuckle. The Mexican superstar, like Verstappen, was intrigued by the onboard comms, the speeds, and the effort required of the sailing team to get the boat around the racecourse. “These guys are pretty chilled out,” Perez said. “It wasn’t a real race, but the atmosphere is nice and F1 misses that sometimes; people are too focused and too many people are on their own…here people get along well.”

The prospect of a Mexican SailGP team was tabled, which wouldn’t be a stretch given the sailing talent in Mexico, Pérez said, but with his lack of sailing prowess, he wasn’t raising his hand to lead that effort. But when two worlds collide, you never know what might happen.

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The New Zealand SailGP Team has comprehensively established itself as the new form team of SailGP Season 3, winning three fleet races and dominating the event final at the ROCKWOOL Denmark Sail Grand Prix in Copenhagen. On a bumper day of racing in front of packed grandstands, Peter Burling sailed to victory in front of an impressive France team led by Quentin Delapierre and Nicolai Sehested’s home team. 

The win sees New Zealand close the gap at the top of the championship standings to sit 4 points below season leaders Australia, as Tom Slingsby’s team missed its first event final in six events to finish the Denmark event in fourth place. 

Burling said he was incredibly proud his team managed to keep its strong form from Plymouth going in the Danish capital: “It’s amazing to see the team come together and win four races in a row, we had some good opportunities at the start of the races, and to be honest the race is easy when you’re leading at mark one, we had all the time and space in the world.” 

New Zealand team strategist Olivia Mackay experienced her first event win after not racing with the team in Plymouth.“It was incredible out there, I just can’t get over this feeling, it’s been such a cool journey for us as a team, everyone has been learning and contributing together,” she said. “It’s fantastic.” 

For French driver Delapierre it was a debut appearance in an event final, with his team showing good form ahead of its home event at the France Sail Grand Prix in Saint-Tropez in September. “It’s an amazing feeling to make this first final for me to be honest,” he said, “the team worked really hard to get to this point where we are all on the same page together and we are really happy. We are ready to keep this momentum going for the rest of the season now.” 

It was a second event final in a row for Sehested’s Denmark SailGP Team presented by ROCKWOOL, and it delighted the home fans with a consistent day of racing to remain in with a chance of the Grand Prix victory right up until the day’s final moments. The home team for this event now sits in third place in the overall championship standings. “I feel pretty good about this event,” said the Danish skipper. “The fact we made the podium race again, we are only going to get better. We’ll look at this final, and learn and keep improving. We have had this great confidence around our team for a long time now and it’s finally really getting there for us.” 

For the first time in nearly 12 months Australia didn’t feature in the event final, with a fifth, third and fourth place in the day’s three fleet races not enough to see it advance. Great Britain didn’t participate in the event after damaging its boat during training on Thursday, meaning eight boats started the three fleet races on Saturday.

Among the other boats competing this weekend the Jimmy Spithill-led United States team produced a much-improved performance from recent events to finish in fifth place, while in contrast the early season good form of Phil Robertson’s Canada continued its recent downward trend, as it finished in sixth place. Switzerland, featuring co-driver Nathan Outteridge in his event debut for the team, and Jordi Xammar’s Spain rounded out the final placings. 

SAILGP SEASON 3 CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS (after four events)

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It was a day to remember at the Great Britain Sail Grand Prix in Plymouth for Peter Burling and Blair Tuke’s New Zealand SailGP Team, as it claimed its first event win in SailGP. In the three-team final match race, New Zealand triumphed over fellow event final debutants, Nicolai Sehested’s Denmark and season standing leaders, Tom Slingsby’s Australia in challenging conditions on Plymouth Sound.

Before the day’s official racing, Sir Ben Ainslie’s British F50 was driven by The Duchess of Cambridge in a friendly Commonwealth race against New Zealand, accompanied by UN Patron for the Ocean Lewis Pugh, on the event racecourse, with the home team emerging victorious.

New Zealand bounced back from its loss to the Duchess of Cambridge in the best way possible, winning the second race of day two to secure a place in its first event final, and then storming to the Great Britain Sail Grand Prix win.

Burling said: “I think a lot of people would have expected this of us by now and it’s great to have put together a good weekend and put in such a dominant performance. We have been working really hard to improve and I think we truly proved that today, we are just so much more comfortable with the boat now than we have been.”

The Denmark SailGP Team presented by ROCKWOOL warmed up in the best possible way for its home event in just three weeks’ time with an impressive day two performance, delivering two second place finishes to secure a place in the three-boat podium final for the first time ever.

Sehested said: “It’s been a long time coming for us, and it’s really pleasing to have made the final but if I’m honest it feels a bit sour. We felt like with the wind shift we didn’t have much luck in the final and it destroyed our chances of winning but that’s racing.”

For the first time in a while it wasn’t Tom Slingsby and his Australian team on the winner’s podium, with a broken rudder – which was fixed in record time by the SailGP Technical Team –  nearly prematurely ending their afternoon in race five.

Slingsby said: “We are not disappointed at all actually, we are ecstatic about coming second in this event, it was just a really tough day for us. It looked like we wouldn’t be in the final with a gear breakage but it was an incredible effort by our team to get us into that final. And to come away with second place, wow, we are really happy.”

Great Britain missed the final – and the chance of winning its first event of the season – in controversial circumstances with a late penalty against Australia meters from the finish line in the day’s final fleet race.

Ainslie said: “It’s really frustrating. I mean it’s tight in SailGP, it comes down to those narrow margins. Chief Umpire Craig Mitchell and I have had our disagreements in the past and I’m sure we will again in the future. I think it’s a bad call, it’s really frustrating and we are really disappointed, but that’s top-level sport, it happens, we have to take it on the chin and move on.”

The United States SailGP Team finished in seventh overall, but CEO and Driver Jimmy Spithill has faith that the early investment in strengthening the team’s foundation will pay dividends over the 11-event season. 

“We’ve made an investment in this combination,” Spithill said. He points to first-time event winners, the New Zealand SailGP Team as an example of how patience and persistence can pay off. “Look at the Kiwis; it’s taken them the entire season to sharpen up, and we feel we’re on a similar path. We’re slightly chipping away, but we’ve got to be realistic and it’s going to take some time.”

The European leg of the championship continues in Copenhagen for the ROCKWOOL Denmark Sail Grand Prix on August 19-20. For tickets, head to SailGP.com/Copenhagen for more information, and for details on how to watch the action in Denmark head to SailGP.com/watch.

GREAT BRITAIN SAIL GRAND PRIX | PLYMOUTH // FINAL STANDINGS

1 // New Zealand // 10 points  

2 // Australia // 9 points

3 // Denmark // 8 points

4 // Great Britain // 7 points

5 // France // 6 points

6 // Canada // 5 points

7 // United States // 4 points

8 // Switzerland // 3 points

9 // Spain // 2 points

Individual race results can be found at SailGP.com/results.

SAILGP SEASON 3 CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS (after three events) //

1 // Australia // 29 points  

2 // Great Britain // 24 points

3 // New Zealand // 22 points

4 // Canada // 22 points

5 // Denmark // 20 points

6 // France // 15 points

7 // United States // 13 points

8 // Spain // 8 points

9 // Switzerland // 7 points

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Just ask Australian Tom Slingsby, CEO and driver of the Australia SailGP Team. He’s now hit this seven-figure payday twice, most recently on San Francisco Bay, where he led his team to a decisive win in SailGP’s Season 2 Grand Final. Checks, trophies and Champagne fountains aside, this 2-for-2 win is also a classic sports story involving friendly, respectful rivalries between three top SailGP skippers and teams that stretch back to the America’s Cup in 2013, when wingsail-powered multihulls first raced across San Francisco Bay. One marked difference, of course, is the ocean of data that’s available for anyone seeking to decipher the critical ones and zeros.

While history suggested that the Australia SailGP Team would win SailGP’s season-ender in March, the outcome was far from certain going into the preceding Mubadala United States Sail Grand Prix. Slingsby and his mates had won four of eight regular-season regattas, but the United States SailGP Team, led by Jimmy Spithill, demonstrated impressive leaderboard consistency themselves, with five podium finishes. Nathan Outteridge and his Japan SailGP outfit also consistently proved their on-the-water prowess. But while the season’s title may have been Slingsby’s to lose, winning it required the Aussies to strike the right balance of boatspeed, boathandling, and that oldest and most ephemeral quality of competition: confidence.

In SailGP’s first season, Slingsby and company enjoyed $1 million worth of spoils and the first taste of Champagne from the SailGP trophy, while Outteridge and company ­finished second to the Australians. The US team, under different ­leadership, finished DFL.

The American team’s second run at the title and the money didn’t start off well either. It almost seemed as if they were cursed.

“Given everything that’s happened, we somehow made the finals,” Spithill says, referring to his team’s Season 2 setbacks, which included a no-fault regatta-ending collision with Japan in Bermuda, a collision with an unidentified floating object in Italy, rudder problems in Great Britain, and a badly timed maneuver ahead of the Denmark event that resulted in a leg cast and last-minute replacement for wing trimmer Paul Campbell-James.

Amid this racecourse strife, however, the United States SailGP Team dug in and, ahead of the San Francisco event, earned their spot on the starting line of the three-boat Grand Final in San Francisco—alongside the Australian- and Japanese-flagged foilers. Outteridge led his team to wins in Italy and France, but a sixth-place finish in England plus a pair of fourth-place finishes in Spain and Australia meant the Japanese-flagged team wasn’t guaranteed a spot in the Grand Final race until they posted strong results in San Francisco.

“Initially, it was a story about eight teams, then it [became] a story about three teams,” Slingsby says. “Anyone who counts out Nathan Outteridge isn’t really on the ball.”

All three contending SailGP drivers, plus many of their ­crewmembers, were involved in the 34th America’s Cup, where wingsails and foils changed the game. Outteridge was a helmsman for Artemis Racing, while Slingsby served as Spithill’s strategist for Oracle Team USA’s comeback win against Emirates Team New Zealand.

RELATED: Australians Ace First Event of SailGP Season 3

“We know these guys extremely well—we’ve worked with them in the past,” Slingsby says. “It brings a level of respect. We know their skills, and maybe we know their weaknesses also.”

SailGP, however, isn’t the America’s Cup. This traveling grand-prix sailing circus is raced aboard one-design F50 ­catamarans, each of which carries 800 sensors producing more than 240,000 points of open-source data per second. As part of an information-shari ng approach, each team can study and dissect each other’s data. SailGP also records and shares on-the-water communications and video from each boat during races, which can often be equally important to performance measurements.

“The data is super helpful,” Slingsby says. But he admits his team’s usual up-fleet position means others are watching the Australian boat’s data more closely than the other way around. “But if we’re struggling a bit for speed, or we’re struggling a bit in our maneuverability, we’ll look at other teams to try and figure out what the differences are and how we can improve.”

Few people know this deep-dive analysis game better than Philippe Presti, Spithill’s longtime coach who also worked with Slingsby during his first SailGP season.

“It can be overwhelming if you don’t know what to look for,” Presti says when we meet in his office at SailGP’s Technical Base on San Francisco’s Pier 96 before the racing gets underway. He’s showcasing his proprietary software that synchronizes the team’s data with recorded audio and video feeds, which we watch on a pair of giant monitors.

“I can tag moments and study them later,” he says, explaining that he can take a photo from his coach boat or talk into his microphone, and the software synchronizes this media with the boat’s raw performance data.

“You’ve got a huge amount of data and you have a small amount of time training, and the goal is to find the golden stone,” Presti says. There are two ways to identify the most important information: “Either you go for the big data and you treat a lot of information, and you get some information back eventually,” he says. “Or you do it the other way around: You look at what you think will make a difference and then you dig around its specific information.”

While teams and coaches can operate in raw data, SailGP runs the numbers from all eight boats through Oracle’s cloud to create a second-level analysis that’s shared equally among teams. Presti presents both his and the league’s findings ­during team debriefs.

“People have this impression that because there’s data, the computer decides for you,” Presti says. “It’s totally different. The feeling is super important—it helps you look at the correct information, and this information helps you convince the [team] that this is the thing to look at. This is not a human reduction.”

Presti’s philosophy of mining performance gemstones wasn’t lost on Slingsby and the Australia SailGP Team. “For sure, we look at the performance report each day,” Slingsby says, “but we go to the data after we see something on the water.”

He explains that on his team, everyone is responsible for different areas. “I’m often looking at rudder lift and steering angles and turn rates and maneuvers,” he says, adding that the jib trimmers, for example, typically look at lead positions and sheeting angles, while the flight controller looks at ride-height and stability numbers. “We all do this in our personal time and come back with conclusions on how we can improve.”

Each team might tackle its data management differently, but parallels remain.

“Jimmy and I are pretty similar in that we’re both confidence sailors,” Slingsby says. “When Jimmy’s confident, he does amazing things, and when he’s down on confidence, I think—like myself—we can struggle a little bit.”

While it’s always interesting to pit two confidence sailors against each other in a match race, Slingsby is clear that the goal in the Grand Final is to beat two teams, not just one.

“The strategy is to be the odd boat out that avoids the fight,” Slingsby says. He describes Spithill and his squad as a team that’s exceptionally good at minimizing mistakes and chipping away at small gains, while Outteridge’s team is less predictable. “Nathan is more of a high-risk sailor and flamboyant,” Slingsby says. “He can do things that no one else can do on the water, but he might make a few more errors.”

Yet confidence can be an unreliable ally. Hours after our interview in San Francisco, the Australians capsize during practice, wrecking their wingsail, damaging platform fairings, soaking their electronics, and costing valuable training time ahead of the weekend’s fleet racing.

Radio chatter about “protecting the asset” persists ­during the Grand Prix, but Slingsby and crew decisively bounce back, claiming four top-three finishes—including one win—in the five fleet races. They’re sailing smart, but it’s clear they’re also pressing hard.

Spithill’s unpredictable shocker arrives in the fourth fleet race, when young and inexperienced helmsman Jordi Xammar—in his debut as the Spain SailGP Team’s driver—loses control during a windy leeward mark rounding, crashes into the American boat, and nearly knocks Spithill and company out of the regatta—just the thing for a confidence sailor foiling into a three-way boxing ring.

Playing cool as usual in a pre-Grand Final interview, Spithill says: “You need to be comfortable being uncomfortable. The only thing we’re trying to do is win. Second isn’t a good result.”

He’s not alone in this analysis.

“The main thing is that when you go around the first mark, [you want] to have options—you want to go straight or jibe,” Outteridge says. “If you’re overlapped with the lead boat but can’t jibe, it’s quite compromising. The third guy will probably jibe off and get the split.”

Outteridge is focusing on the first mark for good reason: Statistically speaking, the first boat around it has a strong chance of winning.

Fast-forward to the winner-takes-all final race. Spithill and the United States SailGP Team round the first mark in pole position in a breeze that’s oddly flowing from the south—a seldom-seen direction on San Francisco’s normally sea-breeze-dominated racecourse. The American team falls off its foils, handing the Australians the lead and giving fans the kind of leaderboard change that keeps them glued to the livestream.

That’s when spotters identify a whale in the racecourse. SailGP rules stipulate that racing shall halt for charismatic megafauna, so the race is abandoned.

The shiniest stone on display was that most ephemeral quality of competition.

The race committee then reconfigures the racecourse to suit the weakening conditions. The race broadcast window is closing, the whale swims off, and tension rebuilds as the game becomes a contest of first to foil.

At the start, the Australian’s green-and-black F50—dubbed the Flying Roo—is first to fly, and it’s game over as Slingsby rounds the first mark in command while Spithill and Outteridge are stuck to the water.

An 800-meter lead is hardly common play in one-design racing, but the Aussies enjoy this handsome positioning until the wind dwindles near the third mark and the boat’s hulls find the brine. The Americans and Japanese make short work of this last-gasp opportunity before finding the same soft stuff, but it’s too late: The Aussies hook into the stronger breeze first and reclaim flight. Precious little sand falls through the hourglass before the first celebratory cheers erupt aboard the Flying Roo.

Queue the Champagne.

“In the end, it came down to my call,” Slingsby says at the post-race press conference when asked why he and his team pushed hard in San Francisco’s final fleet races. “I said to the guys, ‘Look, I need to be at 100 percent in the lead-up races. I can’t go zero to 100; I can’t go from having fifth-, sixth-, ­seventh-place [finishes] and then expect to turn it on for the next one. I need to sail at a high level the whole way through.”

Proof positive that even amid SailGP’s clouds of data, the shiniest stone on display on San Francisco Bay was that oldest and most ephemeral quality of competition. The ­ultimate winner was supremely confident, and it’s as ­simple as that.

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SailGP Chicago Preview

When the all-new Canada SailGP Team took to the water in Bermuda last month for its first regatta in the international sailing league’s third season, it is fair to say that expectations from outside of the fledgling syndicate were not high.

Many will have been surprised then to see the Canadian squad led by Kiwi skipper Phil Robertson come out all guns blazing with a stellar performance that saw them clock up four top five results – including a second and a first in the opening two races – in the nine-boat fleet racing series.

That scorecard was good enough to earn them qualification for the final race, a three-way shootout against the highly fancied Australian and British crews. These Canadian newcomers ultimately finished that race in third place, but only after giving the more experienced teams a run for their money.

So just how did Robertson’s SailGP rookies get themselves on the podium at their very first event when they were racing an F50 in anger for the very first time? According to Robertson – who has in previous seasons trained up newcomer SailGP teams for both China and Spain – the most important factor was populating the new Canadian team with the right people.

A call for applications went out shortly after the Canadian team was announced back in October last year. This prompted an influx of CVs, which were all read by Robertson and followed up with 30-minute online interviews.

“We tested their knowledge base a bit and tried to understand what sort of person they were during the half hour interview time,” Robertson says. “Then we picked the best candidates out of that process. We then looked a lot at past experience – the boats they had sailed and also other skills – and then tried to work out which position on the boat they might be suited for.”

“The majority of our sailors had never foiled before so it’s been quite a big learning curve for everyone,” Robertson explained. “The key to our start-up phase was to focus on people’s understanding of the fundamentals of foiling, how it works and the physics of it.“

Those selected were brought to Portugal for a foiling training camp using a GC32 catamaran, as well as spending time on the F50 simulator at the Artemis Technologies facility in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

“The majority of our sailors had never foiled before so it’s been quite a big learning curve for everyone,” Robertson explained. “The key to our start-up phase was to focus on people’s understanding of the fundamentals of foiling, how it works and the physics of it.

“We tried to make sure that their core knowledge base was there before we tried to upskill them. We used the GC32 for that and then the simulator to work on the specific skills of sailing the F50.”

Smartly recognizing that this was a project that would require more SailGP-experienced people than just himself, Robertson drafted British Olympic bronze medallist Chris Draper as wing trimmer—on loan from Nathan Outteridge’s Japan SailGP Team.

“The wing trimmer on these boats has a huge amount of control over the team’s destiny, in terms of how the boat is sailed, the speed, and the safety of it all,” Robertson says. “We identified very early that we needed someone with experience in that role. Chris is a huge asset and it means that the rest of the team can be learning, safe in the knowledge that the wing trim is under control and the boat is going to be safe. That’s so important because it means we can learn the limits of sailing the F50 without the consequences.”

Robertson also brought in coaching support in the form of British double Olympic silver medalist Joe Glanfield who had previously worked with the Japanese team.

Glanfield’s first priority was to try to establish a team culture in which the sailors could learn quickly and feel comfortable asking questions and talking through problems together.

“It’s a challenge,” Glanfield says. “You need to try to empower them to take real ownership over their own development and to be able to make mistakes and learn from them. But equally, on boats like these it has to be safe. You can’t break equipment and you can’t break people, so it’s a real balance between giving instruction on what they should be doing and letting them find out for themselves.”

It is an approach which sat comfortably with wing trimmer Draper.

“I think the biggest thing for any team is to foster an atmosphere where people know that if they focus on their individual role and doing a really good job, then, when you bring it all together, the better the team performs,” Draper says. “That’s something that Phil and Joe continually reinforce.

“This is the third team that Phil has brought up and so he is obviously very experienced at how to do that. I think the team dynamic is very good – they have been very methodical and that seems to be working quite well.

Having the vast experience of Robertson and Draper in two of the three key roles at the back of the boat meant the Canadian squad could focus on training up a flight controller – the third highly critical role on the boat – from scratch.

The nod for that key position for the opening regatta in Bermuda went to triple 49er Canadian national champion Billy Gooderham – who seemingly took to the job like a duck to water.

According to Robertson, the key to the flight controller role is “a solid understanding of the physics of the boat when it’s foiling, and what affects the flight of the boat.”

Glanfield was full of praise for how quickly Gooderham had got to grips with the knife edge task of flying the F50. It is a role he says which comes with additional pressures to other roles on the boat.

“You need pretty thick skin as the flight controller,” Glanfield says. “You are very tunnel vision on the boards and it’s inevitable that you are going to crash the boat at times and probably mess up the odd race for your team – and maybe even hurt someone, or at least give them a few bruises. They need help with that so that when something happens they can just brush it off, carry on and quickly get their head back in the game. But also, you do need to be of a certain mentality as well.”

The two new teams for Season 3 – the Canadians and the Swiss – were allocated considerably more training time than the rest of the fleet prior to the season opening event in Bermuda in May.

Despite having to share a boat with the Swiss, the Canadian squad still managed to accumulate 15 days of vital training time. As Robertson explained, that training time was broken down into three distinct phases.

“Phase one was about stability and straight-line sailing,” he says. “That’s where we were focused on getting the boat locked in and stable before we moved on to the very basics of the manoeuvres – tacking, jibing and how to bear away and round up safely.”

A variety of wind conditions in their first week of training meant the crew had to learn quickly how to adapt to the F50s range of wing and foil configurations – each of which can dramatically change the boat’s handling characteristics.

“What you want is a stable wind at about 8-10 knots so you are using the light air boards and the AP [all-purpose] wing,” Glanfield says. “Then you can get in a lot of hours of finding stability, and getting the right control through the manoeuvres.”

Understandably, the new crew adopted a controlled and somewhat cautious approach to those early days of sailing the F50 for the first time.

“We were keen to not straight away put a lot of pressure on ourselves by doing everything quickly,” Glanfield recalled. “That way the sailors could get an understanding of what the boat should feel like when you are doing it properly.”

Robertson described phase two as being when: “we started to punch the basic manoeuvres and bring in the harder ones like jibe round-ups and tack bearaways.”

The third phase, Robertson said, was to pull everything together and sail the boat in race mode. The crew entered this phase only in the few days before racing in Bermuda began.

“That’s when we are looking at the whole package and actually pushing the boat to its limit on the ride height and everything else you do while racing,” Robertson says.

As part of their focus on achieving maximum efficiency aboard the Canadian F50 the team identified an opportunity to eliminate a potential weakness in their tacking and jibing.

Previously, the wing trimmer would be the first to cross the boat and once in place on the new side would then take the wheel to allow the helmsman to cross the boat. During that brief time the ability of the wing trimmer would be somewhat impaired, as Draper explained.

“You are always slightly compromised on your wing trim because you can’t really trim the twist while you are driving,” he said. “You can ease the twist with your foot, but if you need to bring it back on, then that’s a problem.”

Instead, the team’s female sailors – Georgia Lewin-Lafrance and Isabella Berthold – were pressed into service to steer the boat out of every manoeuvre. It is a solution, which Draper says made his life a lot easier, and enabled him to coordinate better with Gooderham on the flight controls to get the boat powered up and fast out of every tack and jibe.

On the eve of the Bermuda event, Robertson said he was comfortable that the crew were accomplished enough that he felt confident to put the boat into whatever scenario the racing demanded. Moreover, with a forecast of 10 knots and flat water for the opening day, even at that early stage he believed his new team was capable of winning races.

“The goal for us here will be to try to be consistent about it and actually do things well all the time,” he said at the time. “We set ourselves the goal of being competitive and I think we are at a stage where we can be. I will be frustrated if we make mistakes, but that has probably got to be expected.”

In fact, there were few, if any, mistakes from the Canadian team on the opening day. In the first two races Robertson was at his effervescent best on the start line and two first turn mark roundings in the top group were comfortably converted into a second and first.

A poorer start in the third race saw them struggle early on. Impressively though, they were able to claw their way back into the top five at the finish – a feat many of the more experienced teams could not achieve.

Remarkably, their 2,1,5 score line saw the newbies top the Bermuda event leaderboard overnight. Then, a seventh and a fifth on the second day was good enough to put them into the final winner-takes-all race against the Australians and the British to decide the Bermuda event.

Although in the mix throughout, ultimately the superior speed and technique of two more experienced teams shone through and the Canada crew had to settle for third overall.

It was, by any standard, a dream start for a brand new team competing at their first ever SailGP event.

“The whole team is thrilled,” Robertson said afterwards. The Canadian sailors are brand new to this style of sailing and they have done an incredible job of committing themselves to the learning process. It’s a great result but our goal is always to learn,” he cautioned. “Whether we are first, fifth or last we have been learning heaps out there on the water.”

Despite their remarkable opening result there were few indications that there would be any prospect of resting on laurels for the Canada syndicate. In the month leading up to the second SailGP event in Chicago in July Robertson said the crew would be clocking up valuable hours on the water aboard their GC32, as well spending time in the darkened room that houses the F50 simulator.

“We know it is very early days,” Robertson says. “We know we have plenty more to do to catch up to teams like the Australians and GBR. You can rest assured that we will be working very hard to prepare for the next event.”

That event is coming up this weekend in Chicago, not far from the Canadian border, where the team’s fast-growing fan base will look for another top performance Robertson and their native sailors. Having emerged near the top in their debute regatta Bermuda, the goal is simple: stay in the hunt and keep progressing.

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Tom Slingsby’s Australia SailGP Team appears to have lost none of the momentum from its Season 2 Grand Final victory in San Francisco in March, as it dominated the podium race of the Bermuda Sail Grand Prix presented by Hamilton Princess to claim the opening title of the season.

Racing on the second day of the season took place in perfect conditions. Bermuda’s Great Sound sparkled under clear skies with fans packing the shoreline and cramming onto boats to see the action on the glittering turquoise waters.

In a fantastic debut weekend, the Phil Robertson-led Canada SailGP Team finished in third place, while Sir Ben Ainslie and the British team narrowly missed out on back to back Bermuda titles to finish the weekend as runners-up.

After an indifferent day one performance, Australia once again delivered when it mattered, winning the second race of day two and then storming to victory in the final well ahead of Canada and Great Britain.

Slingsby said: “I’m getting a lot of questions about what the secret is to our success, but all I can say is we are definitely a confidence team, and when we are confident we are very hard to beat. I mean winning that last fleet race, we won that from start to finish, looked at each other and said ‘we are gonna smoke this final’ and that’s what happened.”

A great opening day performance – that included two first places – saw the British team secure its place in the final three-boat podium race. Shortly before the start, a bad tactical error cost Ainslie’s team any chance of victory, arriving at the start line behind Australia and Canada. Despite managing to work up to second place, the Aussies were too far in front to ever look at risk of losing their lead.

Ainslie said: “We just made an absolute mess of that last start which is so frustrating when you do all the hard work to get into the event final. We had a whole plan, then we messed it all up, we did a great job to fight back and overcome Canada but if you make a mistake like that you make it so hard to win.”

It was all smiles for the Canada SailGP Team after a spectacular debut, holding pace with Great Britain for much of the final race and delivering the weekend’s most eye-catching performances.

Driver Phil Robertson said: “I’m really proud of the team, obviously it’s a really cool achievement to come away with a podium finish in the first event, this is what we had dreamed of happening. Pretty pumped for the rest of the season now, it’s going to be a pretty cool year, but we won’t get ahead of ourselves, there’s a long way to go.”

It was a day to forget for France, who had a strong chance of making the final after a promising day one effort. Those chances immediately evaporated after an excessively aggressive start in the day’s first race from driver Quentin Delapierre. In a dangerous maneuver that saw Ainslie’s team have to take drastic action to avoid a serious crash, the umpires penalized the French with only the second black flag in SailGP history.

Delapierre said: “I fully understand the black flag, I took some risks today and it was just too much from me. I just have to learn from these experiences, but I think as a group we are still on a good learning curve.”

Elsewhere Nicolai Sehested’s Denmark SailGP Team presented by ROCKWOOL delivered one of the finer day two performances, just missing out on the podium race after finishing third and fourth in the fleet races and leading for much of the day’s opener.

Attention now turns to the United States Sail Grand Prix | Chicago at Navy Pier, the second stop of SailGP Season 3. Tickets are available here for what promises to be an unforgettable weekend of racing on the shores of Lake Michigan in front of the Chicago city skyline. Racing starts at 1500 local time both days on June 18 and 19. In the United States the event is on CBS Sports, and for details on how to watch go to sailgp.com/watch.

BERMUDA SAIL GRAND PRIX PRESENTED BY HAMILTON PRINCESS // FINAL STANDINGS

1 // Australia // 

2 // Great Britain //

3 // Canada //

SAILGP SEASON 3 CHAMPIONSHIP STANDINGS //

1 // Australia // 10 points  

2 // Great Britain // 9 points

3 // Canada // 8 points

4 // Denmark // 7 points

5 // United States // 6 points

6 // New Zealand // 5 points

7 // Spain // 4 points

8 // France // 3 points

9 // Switzerland // 2 points

*The Japan SailGP Team will sit out the first events of the season due to a series of external factors resulting in only nine F50s being available for the start of Season 3.

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Real change takes time, that much we know. Yet the rate at which the sport of competitive sailing has advanced over the past two decades is truly mind-blowing. In a blink, we’ve gone from displacement sailing to sportboat planing and now foiling crafts of all types and sizes. While our equipment evolves rapidly, however, our social initiatives seem to crawl at an agonizingly slow pace. What I’m referring to here is diversity, equity and inclusion in sailboat racing, and this is especially true in professional sailing.

Yes, there are more and greater opportunities for women at the Olympic level as new disciplines like kiting and coed classes continue to shift the gender balance. Never before have there been so many inspirational and talented female skippers and crew in the shorthanded and around-the-world racing scenes, and with certain one-design classes like the IC37 forcing change by requiring female crewmembers, we are indeed inching closer to being a better reflection of the real world. But we’re not there yet—not even close.

I’m regularly reminded of this when I see photos from awards ceremonies of the big-boat grand-prix events. Take the superyachts and maxis, for example, where there are big budgets, big crews and even bigger opportunities for women, but it’s still a big party of day-rate dudes. Gray-bearded grizzlies too, the lot of them. And what of other higher-­profile ­professional sailing circuits that claim to be progressive? Top of mind, the foiling GC32 class? More bros. The 44Cup? Same. The 52 Super Series? Yep.

SailGP? Well, sort of, but full credit to that circuit for committing to the effort. For the entirety of season two, all SailGP teams had females on their rosters as mandated by the league’s Women’s Pathway Program, but they barely sailed in actual races. Thankfully, for the one windy penultimate event of the season in Spain, the female sailor athletes got their debut in the main event; some were more active than others in the jump seat of the F50 foiling catamarans, chipping into the tactical comms. Others seemed, for the most part, along for the rip and ride.

“With the addition of a new crewmember as a new standard and light-wind configuration, WPP athletes are now able to gain the valuable experience needed to race the high-flying, high-speed F50s,” SailGP said ahead of the Spanish event, but in previous back-to-back light-wind regattas, teams raced with three crew instead of the regular five.

I never could get a straight answer as to why, but for 2022’s season three, we’re told the default light-wind crew configuration will now be four-up, including one female. I suppose that’s better, but really? Why only the light-air races? I don’t buy the experience cop-out because plenty of the “developing” teams over the first two seasons plugged male sailors into roles with now equal or less experience, and I’m pretty sure turning knobs on the foil controller does not require a whole lot of muscle mass. It takes experience. And experience in big breeze. Hopefully, by the time we get to season four, there will be a female or two on every boat, in every race, regardless of wind strength. [Editor’s Note: According to SailGP, for Season 3, all teams will now race with a four-person crew in light winds and a six-person crew in stronger winds, including one female.]

Access to the starting lineups of such big-league teams will be reserved for the boys for a while, and that’s especially true for the America’s Cup. The revised AC75 class rule defines eight sailors on board, and I’d bet that each afterguard trio (helmsman, main trimmer and flight controller) will be exclusively male in 2024. The other five crew will either be male champion cyclists with watermelon quads or world-caliber rowers with apelike arms. (No disrespect to any of these athletes; they put in the hard work too.)

So, to include females in sailing’s pinnacle event, they’ve instead put a Women’s America’s Cup regatta into the protocol (as well as one for youth), which will be sailed in the new AC40 class. This is great news, but even this event has a giant asterisk: It’s a requirement of entry for each challenger to sail in the women’s AC “if it is held.” That’s a big if, and as we saw with AC36, the highly anticipated Youth America’s Cup never happened, no thanks to COVID-19.

So, again, there is progress at the top of the sport—baby steps as they may be—but what is truly heartening is the changing landscape at the wider base of sailing, where the rest of us play. But here too there is much work to be done on the pro-sailing gender front, and even more so with the slow-moving diversity shift.

RELATED: Women’s Invitational Shines in San Diego

It’s impossible to say or to quantify how many more young adult women are sailing keelboats professionally after college. At every regatta I sailed in 2021 there were more women, but I’m quite sure none, if any, were getting paid. Professional sailor and multiple world champion Willem Van Waay came to the same conclusion after the most recent J/70 World Championship in California. Not only were there few women among hundreds of men, he says, but there were practically no paid females in a class chock full of pros. The reality, he says, is that only guys like him have the opportunity to learn all the tricks of the boat through experience and paychecks, while perfectly good female sailors are recruited not for their skills but because of their weight. Owners and fellow pros, Van Waay says, need to step up to get more women more paid gigs in the class.

“In the J/70 class especially, the main trimmer/tactician spot is taken by the guy pros, and those guys have always been given the opportunities that women haven’t been given,” Van Waay says. “Because of this, they’re now the stars and making great money.”

The best way to force change, he says, is for there to be a class where there are unlimited pros, but “you have to have two men and two women, and the owner has to drive. Then, all of a sudden, an owner who buys a boat has to find two women—not the lightest women, but the best women.”

Van Waay pitched us on trying his idea at the Helly Hansen NOOD St. Petersburg next February, and we happily accepted. To be eligible for the J/70 class’s Mixed-Plus trophy, the crew composition can only have two adult males (over 21), and only one adult male can be a pro. The Mixed-Plus division will be scored as a subdivision of the fleet.

“I’ve had so many women come up to me that want to do it, and I think it will be popular,” Van Waay adds. “Those [owners] who do this will get the top women, the right pros and be ready. They will beat the all-dude teams that just want to sail that way, and that’s what we want to happen. We want the women to do well and win. I think with that there will be some obvious results for potential change for women to get more opportunities.”

I’m with Willem and SailGP. Let’s stop talking about it and make it ­happen.

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