SailGP aims to increase events to 18-20 per season. Brazil nabs three season SailGP veteran
by SailGP/Sail-World 23 Oct 2024 10:32 AEDT
23 October 2024
Spain SailGP team celebrate their win - Race Day 2 - SailGP Season 4 Grand Final in San Francisco, USA - July 14, 2024 © Katelyn Mulcahy / SailGP
SailGP will aim to increase the number of events staged per season to around 18-20, as part of the League’s ongoing ambition to compete alongside top 20 sports properties, League managing director Andrew Thompson has revealed.
The upcoming 2025 Season currently timetables its most expansive season yet, with events across five continents. But increasing the total number of events is crucial in ensuring SailGP can ‘compete with some of the major championships,’ Thompson said.
Reducing the time between events to ‘around one week apart’ is also important, he said, in creating a cadence and regular generation of content’.
In the upcoming season, this fast turnaround will take place for the first time, with just one week separating Los Angeles on March 15-16 and San Francisco on March 22-23.
“We are focused on how we can deliver our logistics in a more efficient manner,” Thompson said. “We want to spend less time on site and deliver commercial value to partners in each of our destinations to be able to add more events and therefore more commercial value to our partners.”
He revealed the league had to ‘turn down quite a few great sailing venues’ for the upcoming season due to ‘not having the spots on the calendar’.
“We’re working on how we can get our logistics in a better place to have more events, more regularly,” he said, hinting at ‘one or two pretty cool ideas coming down the track’.
Another focus area is ensuring a familiar timetable of events and locations, cementing repeat SailGP events as tentpole moments on host city event calendars.
“We want our fans in certain cities to know we’re coming back at the same point each year,” he said. “I can certainly see it shaping up to be that we hit North America and do five events in very quick succession, and then move over to Europe and do something similar.”
In other SailGP news, the incoming Brazilian team has acquired Rockwool Denmark's grinder Richard Mason, signing him as strategist for the 2025 Season.
Mason is a SailGP veteran, having raced with the British, Swiss and Danish teams in Season 2, 3 and 4 respectively.
His appointment to the Brazilian team sees him take on the new role of strategist, pivoting away from his previous grinder positions. It comes after Mason was recently seen training with the fledgling team during an off-season training camp in Bermuda.
Before SailGP, Mason competed in numerous world championships, winning the Extreme Sailing Series in 2017, and competing as part of the British Challenger team for the 36th America’s Cup in Auckland, 2021.
Mason is the fourth member to Brazil’s crew line-up to be announced following the appointments of driver Martine Grael and grinding partnership Marco Grael and Mateus Isaac.
It comes after team CEO Alan Adler said he had secured ‘amazing, experienced athletes’ for Brazil’s first Championship campaign.