SailGP makes sure teams share their data. Is the push for transparency working?

Editor’s note: This story is part of The Athletic’s coverage of SailGP, an international sailing competition that has been likened to Formula 1 on water. Follow SailGP here.

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Gathering data and inside knowledge on your competitors is a precious commodity in professional sport.

Some teams can take it too far. English soccer team Southampton, for example, or the 2007 ‘Spygate’ controversy between Formula 1 teams Ferrari and McLaren.

But in SailGP, spying of this kind is encouraged.

Around 35,000 unique data points per second flow out of each 13 foiling F50s as they sail around the race track. But unlike F1, for example, all the data is owned and centrally managed by the SailGP organisation.

Over the span of a typical race weekend, the computing platform Oracle Cloud Infrastructure delivers and tracks around 80 billion individual pieces of information. This firehose of data — which offers stats on all performance aspects of the boat, from speed and number of manoeuvres to positioning on the race track — is freely available for all the teams to analyse to their heart’s content.

The aim is to help the lower order, less experienced teams to grasp and understand the performance gap to the top of the fleet much more quickly than if they had to do it all themselves.

Australia has been the dominant force in the league since it launched in 2019. Driver Tom Slingsby and his crew won the first three seasons and while the Aussies were pipped to the post in the three-boat, winner-takes-all final race of the season in 2024 to Spain and 2025 to Great Britain, the Bonds Flying Roos have rarely been off the podium.

Last month, on the Sunday of the Brazil Grand Prix in Rio de Janeiro, Slingsby and his crew racked up four wins from four races, a perfect score that has never been achieved before in five seasons of the league.

All the boats were kitted out with the big 27.5m wing sail, which turned out to be far too powerful when the wind came in stronger than had been forecast. But where other teams were complaining about the boat feeling out of sorts, Slingsby said he and the Australian team were operating in some kind of flow state, where they felt in sync with the F50 despite its oversized sail.

Since then the other teams will have been digging hard into the data from Rio to work out what the Australians were doing differently.

It’s the kind of hard information F1 teams would kill for. Closer to home in the sailing world, the America’s Cup is also a game of closely guarded secrets.

Finding a small performance edge can cost millions of dollars, so why would you give away that intellectual property to the people trying to beat you? It’s such an intrinsic part of professional sport, yet when Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison and five-time America’s Cup winner Russell Coutts co-founded SailGP seven years ago, they decided to take their new league in a completely different direction.

“Making the data completely transparent to everyone was one of the early themes of SailGP,” Alex Reid, SailGP’s director of performance engineering, told The Athletic. “It was one of the founding principles of SailGP, really, to have everything open.”

“Whenever people come into the data container or go and have a look at the boat, half the people will always say, ‘Oh, can I take a picture?’ expecting us to say ‘no’,” added Reid. “And the opposite is true. We encourage it.”

Despite the ongoing dominance of Australia, overall there are strong signs that SailGP’s push for data transparency is working. Across the 12 events of the 2025 season, all 12 teams won races at some point in the year and there were seven different winners of Grand Prix events.

Coutts is encouraged by what he sees. “The data being in an open forum allows teams to be competitive, which of course makes the racing more compelling,” said SailGP’s CEO.

He compared the concept to the draft systems used in American sports, designed to prevent structural stagnation and ensure that no single franchise dominates to the point of turning the sport dull. “We don’t want a team finishing at the back of the league every season,” said Coutts. “When I look at even some of the biggest sports properties in the world, there’s a lot of secrecy around their particular performance data and so forth, and they can’t storytell. Some of those teams just dominate on and on and on. I think that’s one of the things that we might have got right in SailGP.”

Reid recalled hosting a group of F1 engineers who experienced a mild form of culture shock when they walked into the SailGP data nerve center. “The open data is certainly a surprise to them, and you talk about it and then you kind of do comparisons between the sports,” said Reid. “A good example of openness versus individuality is before the start of every race, we give a strategy guide for the race course, in terms of: this is how many maneuvers, this gate is favored, etc. We provide that to the teams.

“The equivalent for motorsport is how they go and measure the track accurately. Each team will go and do that themselves, and it’s pretty expensive to do that, so you’ll probably get 10 very, very similar answers.

“When you take one step back, it would make a lot more sense if just one group did it and shared the results with all the teams. They [the F1 engineers] were also quite surprised how technical set-up information was available so easily to everybody.”

“I think it’s really leveled the playing field,” said Reid. “We see a lot more of teams that are struggling, and then when they are on the way up, we hear less and less of them. Spain was a great example. Today, it’s the teams that are struggling [in the current season] that we see a lot more of.”

With the mechanical and aerodynamic variables effectively neutralized, the burden shifts entirely to the humans in the cockpit. “If the boats are the same, everything’s open, then it’s down to the skill of the athlete,” said Reid. “When there’s nowhere to hide, it’s whoever gets across that finish line first.”

Professional sailing teams have long relied on coaches, often high achievers in their own right, winners of Olympic medals and the America’s Cup, for example. But with the proliferation of data in SailGP, teams are increasingly recruiting specialists in data analysis, to help the sailors understand what’s important.

“Two years ago, it was a bit of a struggle to drag the coach out of the support boat,” Reid said. “In a lot of typical sailing, you get the report in the evening a few hours after racing, rather than in real time. But now, having the data analyst and the coach with the data in real time in communication to the F50, they’re really kind of virtual sailors. They’re talking to the sailors all the time while racing is happening, making calls [from the coaches’ booth].”

Effectively the coach and data analyst become the seventh and eighth crew members, helping the six sailors operating in the heat of battle.

Aside from the tactical calls and helping the overloaded sailors make smart decisions around the race track, the analyst will also be keeping an eye on key telemetry coming off the boat.

As the F50 catamarans have evolved to handle more advanced and higher-speed T-foils which drive the boat harder and faster, the physical demands on the boats’ internal systems have sky-rocketed. Almost everything on an F50 is driven by hydraulic power, generated by internal pumps. If a team over-maneuvers the boat, the hydraulic system overheats.

“As you sail the boat hard, the pumps are running a lot of the time and they generate heat,” explained Reid, who studied naval architecture at Newcastle University in the north east of England before transitioning into elite motorsport electronics.

“If they get hotter and hotter, above 75 degrees Celsius, they start to produce a little bit less power. Above 85C, it’s noticeable. How you sail the boat is directly linked to the pumps.”

Shore-side analysts also become a tactical accountant, warning the helmsman through his headset how much hydraulic budget they have in the bank before they commit to a critical maneuver.

The infrastructure required to move this amount of digital information from ship to shore is staggeringly complex. Each F50 acts as a floating server, packed with multiple modems leaning on local 4G and 5G cellular networks and specialized radio mesh systems. Every packet of data is sent down every available pathway simultaneously. Whichever packet reaches the central servers first is accepted; if one link drops, another instantly fills the void.

These high levels of backup and redundancy are what gives SailGP the confidence to run its entire race management and umpiring system remotely from a production broadcast center in Ealing, in west London, often thousands of miles from the race venue.

When the fleet is racing in Europe, the data latency to London is 10 milliseconds; even when racing in New Zealand, the round-trip lag is still only 300 milliseconds. So wherever the fleet is in the world, chief umpire Craig Mitchell and his remote team can pass on instant judgements and penalties to the sailors without fear of not being heard on time.

Because the boats travel at speeds approaching 60 mph in close proximity, the data stream is not just an officiating tool, it also acts as a critical safety system. The F50s run an automated tactical avoidance system driven by the shared cloud telemetry.

Every boat knows exactly where its rivals are, calculating trajectory vectors seconds into the future to trigger audio and visual alarms in the sailors’ helmets before any serious incident occurs. “When you’ve got 12 or 13 boats in close proximity, you really need everything to be working to make sure that there’s no collisions,” said Reid.

But if the first phase of SailGP’s digital experiment was about establishing competitive balance and operational safety, the next frontier belongs to the audience.

Sailing has always struggled to establish itself as a reliable product for broadcast entertainment. It’s not always easy to appreciate the skill of the sailors or the high-speed tactical decision-making on board the boat. Understanding the patterns of play — with all the zigzagging of the tacks and jibes — is not easy for the lay viewer.

SailGP plans to bridge the broadcast gap by turning raw telemetry into immersive entertainment, borrowing a page from F1’s broadcast playbook but pushing it significantly further. While F1 treats its live graphics as a curated, limited broadcast graphic, SailGP aims to hand the keys of the database directly to the viewer.

“Imagine being able to sit on the back of the boat, like virtually, right?” Coutts said, painting a vivid picture of the upcoming broadcast ecosystem.

“You’re a fan and you’ve got the option of switching on the TV and watching your team, or you could actually virtually sit on the back of the boat, be clicked into the crew communications. If you’re a New Zealand team fan, you’re listening to Peter Burling and Blair Tuke talking about the tactics live. You can look up at the wing sail and see exactly how they are twisting the wing and moving the sheet in real time.”

For a generation of young sports fans raised on the customizable, multi-angle interfaces of modern video games, this level of access could accelerate SailGP to a new level of fandom.

By dismantling the knowledge gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ on the starting grid, SailGP has discovered a counter-intuitive truth that other more established sporting properties have yet to embrace: sharing your data doesn’t necessarily diminish the sport. It can raise it to a higher level.