Sir Russell Coutts is one of the greatest sailors of all time. He has an Olympic gold medal, five victories in the America’s Cup and multiple world titles. Yet, the 63-year-old doesn’t want his past successes to be his legacy.
His most lasting achievement, he hopes, will be one of his most recent: SailGP, the high-speed, dynamic championship that Coutts hopes will transform sailing.
It’s hard to think of anyone who has moved from high-performing athletes to remolding the sport in which they excelled quite the way Coutts has. Sure, there are plenty of examples of great athletes taking up powerful administrative roles. Sebastian Coe, the two-time 1500m Olympic gold medallist and president of World Athletics, and Kirsty Coventry, an Olympic swimming champion who this week was elected as the first woman president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), come to mind.
But Coutts is going much further than that. In SailGP, he has created a global entity from scratch. Six years on, he is on his way to not only reshaping the sport but changing public perceptions of it, too. While he would never want to belittle his past achievements on the water, Coutts believes SailGP will leave a much more lasting impact.
“I’m excited about SailGP because it has already changed the sport,” he told The Athletic.
“It has the potential to change the sport massively and take it mainstream. And it’s the sport I love, so obviously it’s a major goal. If, as a result of SailGP, the sport really grows to a different level, that would be way bigger than anything else I’ve done in the sport, by a huge margin.”
The New Zealander wants to make grand prix sailing commercially viable, to drag it from being almost purely reliant on the patronage of wealthy individuals to being able to wash its own face.
Ironically, Coutts could never have set out on this mission to make grand prix sailing commercially viable, to cut the sport free from the apron strings of private patronage, were it not for the unstinting support and enthusiasm of billionaire Larry Ellison, the fourth-richest man in the world, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List.
(L-R) Oracle’s helmsman James Spithill, Russell Coutts and Larry Ellison. (Manuel Queimadelos Alonso/Getty Images)
Having twice won the America’s Cup, the pre-eminent competition in sailing, as skipper of his home country and then doing the same for Swiss pharmaceutical billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli and his team Alinghi, Coutts joined Ellison and finally brought success for Oracle Team USA, in 2010 and 2013.
Coutts had long held a vision for developing a continuous grand prix race circuit. Its working title was the World Sailing League. While that never came to fruition, he saw an opportunity to make the America’s Cup more commercially viable, working hard to drag the the 174-year-old competition away from its reliance on private patronage.
But when the U.S. lost the 2017 Cup in Bermuda to his compatriots, it was game over for Coutts’ commercial ambitions. At least, where the Cup was concerned. Losing gave Coutts the freedom to think differently, to dust down his old idea of the World Sailing League. And so, SailGP was born, unencumbered by tradition and complications.
The first season took place in 2019 with six teams and, six years on, how is the competition faring in its fifth season (after a Covid-19-enforced hiatus in 2020) and with 12 teams making up the fleet?
Coutts wants to answer that by noting the level of competition. “Four different winners at the first four events,” he says of the 2024-25 campaign. “It’s extremely competitive. This is where the product stacks up. There’s a real exciting racing property, and it just happens to be racing on water.
“We’re engaging with racing and general sports fans, as well as avid sailing fans. But by far the biggest section of our audience is what I would describe as the general racing fan. People are following SailGP who have probably never stepped in a sailboat, and possibly never will.”
Coutts claims that 85 per cent of SailGP’s audience comes from a non-sailing background.
Denmark and New Zealand race past the finish line on race day 1. (Bob Martin for SailGP)
“When you look at the images from New Zealand where we had that huge audience in the grandstand. That’s a little snapshot into the future of SailGP, and we’ve designed a similar grandstand concept for New York (in June),” he adds.
“You didn’t need to be a sailing fan or even understand sailing to appreciate the closeness of the racing in Auckland. It looks frighteningly scary when you get 11 of these boats ripping along in high winds, on the edge of control.”
High winds always bring drama, excitement and unpredictability. They’re sailing’s equivalent of a rain-drenched Formula One track. But F1 has no equivalent of a no-wind day, traditionally the Achilles’ heel for anyone trying to turn sailing into a viable broadcast product.
Coutts answer? To commission an electric propulsion system to be fitted to the F50s, the lightweight catamarans used in competition; another example of just how little Coutts cares for tradition or the status quo.
“If we’ve got a weakness as a product right now, it’s in light wind sailing,” he says. “The avid sailor will still be interested in all the tactical and strategic situations, but the data shows that the general racing fan is not that interested (when the boats aren’t foiling, meaning above the water).
“So, the propulsion system is designed to get the boats up on the hydrofoils (which lift the F50s above the water) and then once they’re up, they don’t need the propulsion system anymore.”
Currently, the F50s need over six knots of wind speed to promote hydrofoiling but once they’re up, their forward motion is so efficient at generating their own so-called ‘apparent wind’ that they can keep on foiling in just four knots of wind. Coutts would love to have the propulsion system in play by the weekend of the New York GP in June. Typically, it’s a light wind event and if ever the propulsion system was needed, it’s in the shadow of Manhattan’s skyscrapers.
Even so, Coutts is already buoyed by the reaction he’s getting from mainstream TV networks. “After we got 1.78million watching on the CBS Network, our highest rating, I got a call from one of the top executives in CBS who told me, ‘This is a television sport.’ I’ve never been called by a top broadcast executive for them to say that. I’ve had to call them, and they probably wouldn’t have even answered my call.”
The fleet on race day 2 of the Los Angeles Grand Prix. (Simon Bruty for SailGP)
SailGP has been heavily courting support from outside sailing’s traditional boundaries. The backing of major sports stars — including four-time F1 world champion Sebastian Vettel, an investor in the Germany team, and World Cup-winning forward Kylian Mbappé into the French team — is helping create awareness.
“There’s the video of the German team narrowly avoiding a capsize that DJ Khaled (now appointed as SailGP’s ‘Chief Hype Officer’) put out and got 15million views,” says Coutts.
DJ Khaled, now also a board member of the U.S. SailGP team, admits he has never been on a sailing boat, although the American DJ and record producer does a good job of sounding like he cares. And maybe that’s enough.
Coutts is the ultimate disruptor. He will try anything to make SailGP commercially viable in his bid to appeal to a mass audience. Coutts has been heavily reliant on Ellison’s wealth to get the snowball rolling. The question is, could SailGP continue if Coutts and Ellison were to walk away?
“Yeah, it would, absolutely,” says Coutts. “We’ve built a really strong commercial team and now we’re attracting such strong people who are helping to deliver the property to a higher level.”
One example of the growing value of SailGP is how much it costs to buy a team franchise.
British sailing great Ben Ainslie was the first to buy a national team franchise three years ago and while he’s tight-lipped on how much it cost him, Coutts offers some clues.
“Five million dollars (£3.9m) would have been a good price in the early days of SailGP, then it jumped to $20m by the beginning of Season 3, then it jumped to 40-plus and now you have 50-plus. By the end of this season, we’ll be seeing $100m valuations for teams.”
A supreme athlete in his former life and now the supreme sports entrepreneur, Coutts is a phenomenon who is dragging his sport kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
(Top photo: Jason McCawley/Getty Images for SailGP)
