SailGP’s tagline, “Powered By Nature”, says plenty about both its practicalities and its philosophies, but walking away from its grand final last weekend, one couldn’t help but feel “Beholden To” might have told just as much of the story.
After all, how many other sports have ever had their season climax, a $1million winner-take-all race no less, delayed because of the presence on the course of a whale?
Having bobbed around on the not-especially-choppy waters of San Francisco Bay waiting for Moby Dick to clear off, the crews of Australia, Japan and the USA - littered with Olympic medalists and Americas Cup veterans - finally went racing.
Or rather, Australia did. They were the only one of the finalists to find any early pace and scampered clear, never to be reeled in as all three high-tech, supposedly high-speed F50 catamarans found helpful breeze hard to come by. The Americans, in particular, struggled in pursuit, crawling towards the far turning mark in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge like a toy car creeping its way across a floor only fractionally offset from level, very much the ailing cat in a slow-motion cat-and-mouse chase.
It was an anti-climactic - though still dramatic - conclusion to the second edition of a series that would be more accurately defined by the carnage of the fleet races earlier in the day.
The eight catamarans, capable of reaching speeds in excess of 50 knots (just shy of 60mph), are cramped into a relatively small course with penalties for exceeding its boundaries and compete in a series of fast and furious races, each little more than a quarter-of-an-hour long.
“I don’t think sailing had a product that was marketable and watchable prior to these high-speed foiling boats,” Sail GP’s CEO Russell Coutts, a 1984 Olympic gold medalist, says. “It used to be these boats tearing off in all different directions and it being a case of ‘What’s the ***** going on here?!’ It’s now more understandable to your general viewership.”
Overtakes, crashes and controversy abound. At one point our media boat is seconded to cross the bay to pick up Spanish pilot Jordi Xammar, so badly damaged is his F50 after a smash-up with the Americans. Xammar is only driving the boat after the team effectively mutinied against its previous leader, Phil Robertson, on Thursday, the New Zealander accused of referring to his Spanish teammates as “a bunch of kids”.
As he sits in the back of our boat, muttering away to himself while furiously chewing on a packed of jellied sweets, Xammar is being filmed for some Drive To Survive-style behind-the-scenes content, sailing, like so many fringe sports, seeking the kind of boon that has been delivered to Formula 1 by the Netflix hit.
The league has been influenced, too, by the way the NBA markets its fourth-quarters, knowing changing viewership habits mean fewer and fewer people are settling in to watch games in their entirety. As a result, each race weekend concludes with a one-off final between three teams that stands independent of whatever has gone before it, the earlier races existing primarily for the purpose of qualification.
And at the end of it, there is little doubt that the cream does rise; here, the age-old fantasy of putting every F1 driver on the grid in the same car is a reality, the eight boats built identically to one another. Innovation is encouraged, but at the end of each weekend the F50s are extensively audited and improvements rolled out across the entire fleet.
They are not only linked to performance, but also sustainability. The British crew, for instance, show us how they’ve come up with a velcro alternative to end the use of plastic cable-ties that has now been added to all of their rivals’ boats.
The advent of the Impact League, which ranks each team’s sustainability efforts and was won by New Zealand, has added a competitive element but the athletes themselves have needed little encouragement, particularly in supporting causes related to ocean conservation.
“It’s a fabulous environment and most people don’t get to see what we see,” Coutts says.
Many are either full-time vegans or adopt a meat-free diet at events (one of the New Zealand team tells us that he does occasionally eat meat, “but only when I kill it myself”.)
“We’re by no means perfect,” Coutts is quick to add. “There are a lot of things we need to improve.
“One of the things we’re not good at right now and one of our focuses in trying to accelerate is the transition to clean energy. One thing we haven’t solved yet, for example, is that the chase boats and safety boats that follow the F50s are driven by fossil fuel-powered engines.”
Significant steps have been made elsewhere, however. A broadcast operation that less than ten years ago saw 28 containers shipped around the world for the Americas Cup now relies on only one, the rest of the production managed remotely from Ealing Studios in London.
Similar strides will be needed to offset what the league hopes will be continued growth. Next year, the field will grow to ten teams with the addition of crews from Canada and Switzerland, and ten races.
Eventually, the plan is for SailGP to become a bi-weekly circuit during the season, more in tune with Formula 1’s regularity its than its current, slightly sporadic calendar.
That is, of course, if the world’s whales play ball.
