The America’s Cup is suffering an identity crisis.
While the grand dame of yachting holds its breath for last minute entries to appear for its next event in 2027 . . . sailings enfant terrible SailGP prepares to run its ninth event of 2025.
The America’s Cup has a 174 year development/competition history involving some of the world’s greatest yacht designers, creating stunning state of the art craft for owners, helms and crews to compete in a match-race event that has mesmerised the yachting world with races the stuff of legend.
The very antithesis of the legend-draped America’s Cup is the upstart SailGP, a brilliant spin-off from one of the less charismatic periods of the AC, as a multi-event series.
This child of the America’s Cup (2018/19) has grown to challenge its parent. Its success as a regular media event changing the professional yachting world and questioning the raison d’etre of the America’s Cup, with its complex, ever changing and expensive procedures, and its relevance in a very different sailing and social world to that which spawned it.
Two similar but very different events. Both currently involve fast foiling yachts, one mono hull and one multihull, racing on tight stadium style courses.
Dropping the combative and expensive development design period required for the America’s Cup, and developing identical F50 foiling catamarans – ironically with America’s Cup ancestry – SailGP League has developed a high-tech sailing package.
This franchised product made the team economics more affordable, with the transportable team-base/spectator structure providing venues with their own prepackaged Grand Prix event, and has attracted 12 national teams competing at global venues (13 at last count) for a total prize pot of USD $12.8 million.
With the high-tech charisma to attract a live event audience, the SailGP League circuit is also beginning to attract a regular on-line media audience, not enough to worry other worldwide major sports franchise, but for sailing a definite breakthrough.
In the face of this obvious conflict of limited resources, the latest Protocol document for the upcoming AC38 (in 2027) attempts to take on-board facets of SailGP. Particularly with the down-grading of the design process, the democratizing of decision making and not least a spending cap. Also the expansion of the pre-events to get more life from the hulls.
But in moving closer to the repetitive SailGP packaged format, is the America’s Cup in danger of undermining the very uniqueness that has made it the pinnacle of yachting competition.
Each America’s Cup is a unique event with a birth process stepped in ritual. Its very rarity and design individuality ensuring a status that has driven individuals to spend fortunes in the chase for the ‘Auld Mug’.
Remove or dumb-down that uniqueness – that SailGP can never match – and what remains?
Are we watching the final throes of this ‘grand event’ . . . with the classic matches to be revived as virtual avatars in some future sailing ‘ABBA Voyage’ in a custom-built arena.
Related Post . . .
America’s Cup – New Protocol moving the America’s Cup forward or into a cul-de-sac?
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