‘Now the enemy’: Australia out to defend SailGP Sydney title after losing star to rival
Australia’s all conquering SailGP team is out to win again on Sydney Harbour after a rival’s poaching raid that signals a change in the sport.
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Australia’s dominant SailGP team is aiming to win on home waters yet again this weekend, but they’ll have to do it without a key member of their championship three-peat after an off-season shake-up.
“Our off-season was a bit different to how we envisaged it going,” Australia’s champion driver Tom Slingsby told news.com.au.
Kyle Langford, the wing trimmer for Australia’s three championship wins, has left to join the new Italian team after he was poached by Australian sailing royalty Jimmy Spithill, who is team Italy’s CEO.
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“I believe the hardest position on the boat is the wing trimmer. I happen to know a good wing trimmer out there in the fleet, that’s won pretty much every SailGP title. So I picked up the phone and I called Kyle,” Spithill said on the latest episode of the Racing on the Edge documentary.
Spithill gave Langford a financial offer that was too good to refuse, and now the Aussie superstar is sailing for “the pizza boat”, as he tells his young son in the documentary.
“The offer from Italy, it’s not just financial and it was a big call and not only was it a sporting decision it was also a relationship decision as well because I’m definitely jeopardising that friendship that I’ve got with those guys,” Langford explains in Racing on the Edge.
“But when I saw the guys here for the first time, yeah, it was tough, I mean I’m wearing different colours to them now and they’re now the enemy.”
The defection means Slingsby has lost his wing-trimmer and the man who’s been his wingman for much of his successful sailing career.
“You go through that rollercoaster of emotions with someone, it’s emotional when they leave,” Slingsby said.
“Even starting this season off, I keep looking to my right and thinking, where’s Kyle? It takes a couple of seconds to go, ‘Oh he’s not with us anymore’.
“There’s no hard feelings between us and Kyle or any of the guys that have left our team.”
The driver-wing trimmer combination is arguably the most important relationship on SailGP’s F50 boats, with history showing the top teams always have a gun pairing behind the steering wheel and tinkering with the wings to control how fast the boat goes.
“What we’ve seen in these first two events is that in the F50, the telepathic combos form those rare relationships that we only see in era defining teams,” SailGP commentator Stevie Morrison said in Racing on the Edge.
“Tom Slingsby had it with Kyle Langford, of course Peter Burling and Blair Tuke, Diego Bottin and Florian Trittle, hopefully we’ll be adding to that group Ruggero Tito and Kyle Langford, and the Tom Slingsby and Chris Draper combo.”
Langford said: “Tom and I, we had such good chemistry sailing. I could say one word and he would know exactly what I was talking about. We kind of had that intuition with sailing with each other that we’d built up sailing together over many years.
“We spent a lot of time talking about it as well. How we can work better together. I think that’s pretty unique. A lot of hard work goes into it.
“I’m not expecting to have that with anyone else in sailing for a period of time. Any sort of relationship, it doesn’t just happen, it takes work. For Ruggi and I, our ambition is to develop that relationship. I’m not trying to recreate what I had with Tom because our relationship is different with Ruggi.”
SailGP has relaxed the nationality rules so each six-member team can now have as many of three foreign sailors on the boat. The move has opened the floodgates for a frantic off-season of team changes and transfers as the teams jostle to have the best sailors in the world on their boat.
Australia’s reserve sailor Ed Powys joined team Denmark, New Zealand’s Andy Maloney is now at team Brazil and Great Britain’s Giles Scott is replacing outspoken Kiwi Phil Robertson as Team Canada’s driver.
Teams desperate to break Australia and New Zealand’s stranglehold are now willing to pay a premium to steal their sailors.
Offers for a bumper pay rise mean Australia might struggle to hold on to flight controller Jason Waterhouse and grinder Kinley Fowler next season.
The spread of talent should also make for more competitive sailing as SailGP heads into its fifth season with Olympic gold medallists scattered all over SailGP’s star-studded fleet.
Slingsby has a gold from London 2012, Kiwi pair Peter Burling and Blair Tuke have a gold from Rio 2016 and Spain’s Diego Bottin and Florian Trittel won gold in Paris fresh after leading Spain to a stunning victory over Australia and New Zealand in SailGP’s season four grand final.
That’s not to mention Brazil’s Martine Grael, the only female driver in the fleet, and Italy’s Ruggero Tita, who have both won two Olympic gold medals in sailing.
“The quality of the SailGP fleet is second to none in sailing,” Slingsby told news.com.au.
“It’s literally the who’s who of yachting over a 20-plus year age range. It’s unbelievably high quality and you can’t get past anyone easily. Everyone is a challenge. You’ve got people in the last couple of positions that are Olympic medallists, world champions.
“It’s very satisfying when you can come out on top of these athletes but it’s a huge process.
“Even though we’ve been successful before, we use every day as an opportunity to be better than we were the day before. We’ve just got to keep that mindset. If you stand still in this type of fleet, you’ll get passed pretty quickly.”
Speaking to news.com.au at an event in Sydney for the Brazilian team’s partnership with Oakberry Acai, Grael said it was the quality of racing that drew her to SailGP.
“When there’s really good racing, there’s really good sailors,” she said. “Getting out there in the best racing there is, is definitely what attracts the sailors to come.”
SailGP has been likened to “Formula One on water” and the sailing league wants to grow the fleet to as many as 20 boats and increase the calendar to 20 events to mirror F1’s jam packed schedule.
Season five of SailGP will feature 14 events, concluding at the grand final in Abu Dhabi in late November.
As the depth and strength of SailGP grows, Australia’s three-time champions have quickly become the hunted. But Slingsby is determined to stay on top.
“I want to see Australia back on top and regarded as the top sailing nation in the world,” he said.
“For me it’s super important to have that happen and the way you do that is by winning in SailGP.”
British veteran Chris Draper has joined Australia in Langford’s place as the first non-Aussie ever on the team.
He is fitting in well so far and celebrated his first victory with Australia when they won in gusty conditions in Auckland, a sweet victory for Slingsby who always likes to get one over rivals New Zealand and their skipper Peter Burling.
“It was great to really prove to ourselves that we still are a top team, even with all the changes that have been made throughout the team,” Slingsby said.
“We’ve still got that chemistry and spice that will allow us to win events and win pretty cleanly. If we do things well, we’re a pretty hard team to stop.”
SailGP season five heads to Sydney Harbour this weekend, where the Australians are looking to repeat the success of last year when they won on home waters and popped the champagne in front of fans on Shark Island.
“The Sydney racetrack historically has a bit more wind and more intense conditions, is a place where you’ve got to monitor that throttle,” Slingsby said.
Grael added: “New Zealand and Australia, I knew it was going to be more spicy winds. Whenever you have spicy winds, it definitely makes for a more interesting event.”
It will be a bumper weekend of sport in Sydney with SailGP and UFC 312 also in the Harbour City as Dricus du Plessis defends his middleweight title against Sean Strickland.
Australia’s own Tai ‘Bam Bam’ Tuivasa and Brazil’s No. 3 ranked featherweight Diego Lopes visited the team’s tech site base, trying their hand steering the boat on the simulator and giving their shoulders a workout on the grinding machine that powers the F50 boat.
“I don’t know too much about sailing, so it was good to get a bit of knowledge,” said Tuivasa, who you can watch on the tools in the video above.
“I’d jump on but I don’t know how long I’d stay on for.
“The big fella on the grinder (Kinley Fowler), he was going pretty hard. I think he can throw ‘em alright.”
Watch every race at SailGP Sydney from 3pm AEDT on Saturday and Sunday live on Kayo Sports.
Originally published as ‘Now the enemy’: Australia out to defend SailGP Sydney title after losing star to rival
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