greenhedgehog

By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where it all started in Sydney this weekend and yogicentral.science six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees an intense future for the innovative international sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of the Oracle software company, to launch the series with 6 teams all owned by the league.

While the which kicked off in Sydney in February 2019 featured simply 5 rounds, this weekend's race will be the 3rd round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will contest on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's just remarkable, in fact, the uptake and number of events now," SailGP chief executive Coutts told Reuters at the Sydney Opera House on Friday.

"We're certainly sitting at 13, and aiming to increase that over the next seasons to somewhere around 20. If you compare that to Formula One that has 24, that's sort of where we want to get to. So yeah, the future appearances good."

The concept of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and the contrast is not far from the mark when the world's best sailors push the F50 foiling catamarans to their limits at what are awesome speeds for waterborne vessels.

"We didn't set out to just interest the passionate sailing fan, we attempt to make this sport reasonable and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts added.

"The majority of our fans are not avid sailors, and that is among the reasons why we've grown so quickly. We are appealing to people that similar to enjoying a race, they do not need to understand anything about sailboats."

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans turned out to see Tom Slingsby's Australia team win the second round of the series in Auckland last month.

"I believe you'll see several of our occasions this year now like that, maybe even topping that," said Coutts, trademarketclassifieds.com a 62-year-old New Zealander.

"The most essential thing is the fans watching on broadcast ... however the fan experience on website is also vitally important. We desire fans to come and have a good time and see some fantastic racing."

Technological innovation is integral to SailGP and hundreds of countless data points are communicated from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for making use of race organisers, teams and to help broadcasters enhance the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is delighted about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively used to work through the mountain of information.

"The big development for us going forward is the 360 degree view from on board the boat, with listening to the team comms," he said.

"The audience will be taken on board and trip together with the Australian group in a race, and be able to browse anywhere they want. That's the future."

There have, wavedream.wiki obviously, been challenges over the six years with the 2nd season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and bbarlock.com race days still in some cases at the mercy of wind conditions.

A lack of F50s indicated the French group was unable to contend at this year's season-opening race in Dubai and damage to the boat once they got it ruled them out of the Auckland leg.

The complete fleet of 12 boats will for that reason race for the very first time this weekend and suvenir51.ru one of the most pleasing aspects for Coutts is that all but one of the groups are, or soon will be, independently owned or run.

"These groups are now costing $50 million, I would never ever have actually anticipated that this early on," said Coutts, who plans to bring another number of groups on board next year.

"We understood that that was the entire way the model was established, that team owners would be able to trade their groups and ideally make money out of it, however I didn't think we 'd attain it this early. That's been a good surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Michael Perry)