Marketing profiles will resume next week. For this week it is all SailGP all the time!
I am in San Francisco for the big show and the boats are here and practicing, the race village is under construction, and the wind… is never usually like this. (old sailboat racing joke)
After 146 years of operations, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus delivered its last “Greatest Show on Earth” in May of 2017. Maybe the spirit of the spectacle passed through the universe to Russell Coutts. Coutts had dreamed up the 2017 version of the Americas Cup, and then redeployed the boats and format as SailGP. Anyone dreaming about putting sailing on TV was going to need a little circus magic.
Building an entirely new sports league from nothing is a project of elephantine scale, so Coutts combined his newfound circus juju with Larry Ellison’s money and before we knew it, the first season kicked off in 2019.
This weekend’s grand finale of the third season is the 25th running of SailGP and I am San Francisco to see it myself. Having watched the SailGP team raise the big top today, the connection to the circus was undeniable. When out for lunch we heard the neighboring tables talking about SailGP. Walking along the waterfront, everyone was buzzing about SailGP. And when the helicopters went up over the bay, all eyes were on SailGP.
Without taking anything away from balancing elephants, or a tigers jumping through rings of fire, or waifish gymnasts flying through the air with the greatest of ease, the part of the circus I would have loved to see was the setting up. In just days the cirkeys would turn an empty field into everything needed from big top to bathrooms.
Sure, a sailing “stadium” is provided by nature. But SailGP set out to get people to WATCH the races. So in addition to the physical grandstands and grounds, camera copters, camera boats, course marks, race officials, virtual boundaries and let’s not forget the flying sailboats, must be deployed, AND must communicate everything about themselves back to land so the technical ringmasters can assemble the new greatest show on earth into a story told live by commentators.
And all of this must be assembled in just a few days.
All of this stuff was on a container ship from New Zealand moments prior. And then, as if the miracles unfolding from the containers are just every day occurrences, the most decorated sailors in the world sit down to talk about the races ahead.
Stay tuned, the real excitement starts at 2:30 tomorrow afternoon.
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