The Year of Disruptors

SailGP was a big-city hit, the Super Smash has been a big-city miss, LIV strong, Aussie Open bantz and big calls in the EPL.

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They came from several corners of the country for a weekend on or near the water and the vote would seem to be unanimous: SailGP and the Waitemata Harbour are a match made in heaven.

For a start, neither Hector nor one of his dolphins showed up and as far as we’re aware, most of the marine life in the area made other arrangements for the weekend.

The full slate of racing set against a spectacular backdrop had everybody gushing and while there were a few palpitations over course conditions that made boat handling treacherous at times (and a couple of suggestions the fleet could have split into two for racing), everyone seems to agree that as an event, it was as spectacular as the price tags promised it would be. Certainly, a crew of friends who arrived in the city from places as far flung as Dunedin, New Plymouth, Rotorua and the sailing mecca of Cambridge seemed to think so and played their part in boosting the coffers of the local hospitality industry.

It led to a predictable slate of “SailGP must become a long-term event for Auckland” stories, with familiar voices wheeled out to support the hypothesis.

AUT sport and recreation professor Dr Mark Orams said the large crowds that turned out showed the growing popularity of sailing.

“I’m positive about the future. This weekend has shown Auckland can host an amazing on-water event and leverage all the benefits from that. If it becomes a regular fixture that everybody knows about in advance and can plan for, people overseas can travel down to Auckland for a New Zealand summer and piggyback off tours around the South Island.

“Superyachts will come down to do their refit and watch the event, and they’ll do the Millennium Cup and go over the Tasman and watch the Sydney event.”

As a cautionary note, it’s worth pointing out that the first year is never the problem. It’s keeping people coming back year after year when the first flushes of excitement have gone. But the signs are undoubtedly good. Auckland has a track record of supporting yachting — the clue is ion the city’s nickname. We can be a parochial bunch, yet it didn’t seem to matter that New Zealand, winners of the series’ opening event, couldn’t find a way of operating their boat effectively, especially in the start box, and missed the three-boat final.

“For us, it was a pretty frustrating day,” [skipper Peter] Burling said. “It felt like yesterday we were building really nicely, winning the last race and then today… half our build-up was cut out waiting for a sensor issue to be resolved in the wing, and then we had a big issue with the wing control system again in the first race, so we felt like we were just battling the whole way from there.

“I think the team did an amazing job getting the boat around the track in as good a shape as they did. It didn’t quite get resolved in time for us to actually make it to the start of race two, so we were off the back of that one, then race three was the first one we actually got to have a normal build-up.”

It seemed to matter even less that the Australians won the damn thing on “our” waters.

It will be inevitable that the event is compared to the America’s Cup but it is important to note that this is not an either/or equation. SailGP has been a great disruptor, but it’ll never be the world’s oldest international sporting competition.

There is plenty of room for both to flourish but it’s fair to say that if one keeps coming to these shores and the other doesn’t, it won’t take long for us to find more room in our hearts for the new kid on the sailing block.

It hasn’t all been good news for sport in the City of Sails…