Sailing’s Olympic classes, SailGP, the America’s Cup and the Vendée Globe, all showcase our sport at its highest level. But they rarely interconnect. Is sailing missing a chance to dramatically grow its audience by failing to align its biggest competitions?
If you look closely at the landscape of Grand Prix sailing, one thing quickly becomes apparent: its keystone events rarely function as part of a coherent whole.
For a sport blessed with extraordinary athletes, spectacular equipment, and some of sport’s most challenging fields of play, top-flight sail racing often feels less like a unified ecosystem and more like a collection of parallel universes.
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Olympic sailing, the America’s Cup, SailGP, the Vendée Globe and the wider IMOCA Globe Series, and, perhaps even, the World Match Racing Tour – each of these competitions sits at the pinnacle of its own discipline. Each has its own heroes, commercial partners and audiences.
For sure there is some crossover between those audiences, but taken together they do not feel like parts of a coordinated sporting system. More often they resemble neighbouring territories separated by invisible borders.
The end result of which is that sailing’s biggest stages rarely reinforce one another. Instead they tend to operate independently, occasionally overlapping but rarely aligning.
I check-in with Tudor Team Alinghi’s director for technical and sailing, New Zealand America’s Cup veteran Dave Endean – the man in charge of making sure that in AC38 the Swiss syndicate improves on its somewhat lacklustre performance in the last Cup in Barcelona.
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