New York SailGP: From bottom of the table to contenders. America’s unexpected revival

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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It appears America’s SailGP team has finally managed to turn the tide.

Compared with a calamitous season in 2025, where the Americans finished bottom of the table, they have been competing with the very best so far in 2026. Coming into their home event this weekend in New York, it’s not out of the question that driver Taylor Canfield and his crew might even win. A year ago, that would have seemed like fantasy.

Last season, there was a consistent theme among online critics, and even some fans: Why did team boss Mike Buckley insist on recruiting only U.S. passport holders when there was no obligation to do so? When three internationals are allowed on the six-person race team, why not take the opportunity to recruit the world’s very best sailors?

With the U.S. team languishing at the bottom of the grid for most of the 2025 season, these seemed like valid questions.

Something was not right with the team make-up, and the most obvious problem appeared to be a lack of high-speed foiling experience. Except in sub-foiling light air conditions, there was also generally a low level of performance around the race track and there had been some high-profile accidents: a capsize while being towed out to the start of practice racing on Sydney Harbour, and then, at the German Grand Prix, a high-speed, boat-busting collision with the British where the onus to keep clear was all on the Americans.

Changes did take place midway through last season, although the improvements weren’t immediate. New York in May 2025 was the last time Buckley raced on the boat. Buckley had been the strategist, a role now filled by America’s Cup veteran Andrew Campbell.

It was also a year ago in New York that SailGP premiered a three-part documentary, Uncharted, focusing on Jimmy Spithill. The Australian two-time winner of the America’s Cup, for Larry Ellison and Russell Coutts’s Oracle Team USA, had been the team boss and skipper of the U.S. SailGP team.

The documentary records how Spithill was pushed aside as Buckley and his wealthy co-partner, Ryan McKillen, the founding engineer and employee #3 at Uber, took over the reins in November 2023 and opted for their All-American strategy, in which there would be no place for Spithill.

The documentary was tough on Buckley’s approach, appearing to cast the ejected Spithill as the wronged party. That said, Buckley mostly takes the criticism on the chin. “Do I agree with everything that was in that docu? No, of course not. It would have been nice to be invited to the premiere of it, which was next to our office building,” Buckley said, smiling wryly.

“It’s great to open the hood to the people that make this thing tick. It is our biggest void right now in our sport, doing more of that. I think we’ve all kind of kept our heads down for the last 20 years and there hasn’t been a lot of press about our sport, and there hasn’t been a lot of storytelling. SailGP is changing that, but only scratching at the surface.”

As for hanging up his sailing boots a year ago, the 38-year-old said he had no regrets. “I miss being one of the guys and girls in the locker room for those few minutes. I miss putting my cell phone away once you’re on the boat and knowing that nobody in the world can get in touch. There’s not a care in the world in an athlete’s mind once they go into race mode. I miss those moments.

“But I was never going to sail on the boat for a long period of time. I’m old, you know! But it allowed me to sit in a room with them and, yeah, be one of them, be embedded for a year and a half. That’s invaluable. But as team principal I get to compete in other areas, and I get to drink from a firehose from people who are way smarter than me.”

Aside from Buckley stepping off the boat, there were calls for Canfield to be removed from the driver’s role, which is essentially the team’s de facto leader, steering the boat and making the final tactical decisions. There was a perception by some he didn’t have the necessary background in high-speed foiling.

But Buckley kept the faith with his long-time friend and Canfield has grounded away.

Canfield feels more comfortable deflecting the conversation away from himself and towards the collective group. “We’ve now introduced three new athletes to the team from a year ago,” Canfield said. “Guys that have had a lot of experience sailing at high speeds in these boats, in the America’s Cup, in the AC75s, and in the F50s, too.

“It’s been awesome having these guys: Harry Melges, Andrew Campbell, and Michael Menninger. Michael is stepping into a really key role trimming the wing, which is probably one of the harder roles on the F50. He hopped right in, and I think his first day was in Portsmouth [last August], which was a pretty windy day. It felt very comfortable with Michael on board, and he just picked it up quickly. It was pretty natural right from the beginning.”

This season, the U.S. boat has been particularly quick and consistent in its acceleration out of the rolling start, the single most critical part of the race track. Even so, Canfield said there was room for improvement.

“I’m pretty hard on myself for my starting and getting the boat off the line,” he said. “But yeah, we do it relatively consistently as a group. There’s so much information and precision that needs to go into every role on board to get this boat in the right spot, get it accelerated properly, get it onto the foils. So it’s just this massive, long lead-up process. My job is just trying to get us in a position that’s not near any other boats and control our own destiny for those final few seconds. That is kind of my job.”

The first two events of the season — in Perth, Australia, and Auckland, New Zealand — were both high-wind, high-adrenaline weekends where it was all about taming the beast, controlling the runaway instincts of the F50 catamaran.

Traditionally, this has been the U.S. team’s weak spot, yet Canfield and Co. acquitted themselves well with a fifth in Perth and a seventh in Auckland. Then to Sydney Harbour, the very scene of that embarrassing capsize exactly a year earlier, and the Americans won the event outright for a first win since October 2023.

While the team wasn’t quite so convincing at the most recent event in Bermuda, finishing seventh, the points to third place were very close and all weekend they were within touching distance of qualifying for the three-race final.

So Buckley’s mission — to prove that All-American can win — appears to be on the right track.

“I’ve done everything I said that I’ve done since I came in,” he said. “I said that we could win with an All-American team. Nobody can ever take that away, right? That happened. I never said it was going to be easy to win. These are the best athletes that race sailboats in the world, and we were under no illusion how hard it was going to be to come in here and be competitive. We knew there were going to be tough days, and there were tough days. There are still going to be tough days. And we’re nowhere near where we want to be.”

But, why does this all-American mission matter so much to Buckley anyway?

“We have a giant flag at the top of our boat,” he explained. “Ours happens to be red, white, and blue, and represent the United States of America. I think that authenticity is very important.

“I used to say to the group when people would write bad comments: ‘Head down. Keep working. Once we start to show progress, the comments will flip.’ And they have. And we’re nowhere near done. We’re not even close to where we want to be. We’ve had a moment of progress. We need to do this consistently for years and years, and that’s going to be really, really hard.

“But yeah, that’s why it matters to me, because I think when you see these other teams in our country, the message is that there’s not enough talent in America to win. I find that to be obscene.”

If ever Buckley needed more motivation to prove his American dream, it’s in the lead-up to the home event in New York.

“There’s not too many things more iconic on Earth for an American than the Statue of Liberty, the skyline of New York City; and, on a personal level, I live there, it’s home,” he said. “If you can’t be inspired in New York, you can’t be inspired. It’s also the home of many of the largest corporations in the world, and putting on a show there is really important. If you can compete from a media and entertainment standpoint in New York City with a sports team, then you can compete anywhere.”

Buckley thinks as hard about competing commercially as he does against his rivals on the water. “When we go to New York, we’re going to be competing for a share of voice with the most iconic sports franchises in the world: the New York Knicks, the Yankees, the Mets, the Liberty, Broadway, the US Open, and so on and so forth. To be able to have a share of voice there is really, really difficult. It’s hard enough to make it in New York as a person, it’s really hard to make it as a business, and it’s exponentially harder to make it in the world of sports and entertainment there.”

But what of the team’s chances this weekend? “This year, I can sit here and say we believe that we can compete in New York at the top of the fleet,” he added. “I don’t think I would have said that last year.

“Last year I would have said that I believe we were going to make progress and we’re improving, but I never showed up and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to win this race.’ It takes time to get the experience to be in a position to be able to truly look somebody in the eyes and say, ‘We’re going to compete in New York.’ But this year in New York, that’s what I believe we can do.”