Kiwis find new wind in their sails
With a new coach and no Olympic distractions, expectations for the SailGP season starting in Bermuda are high
Former Olympic sailor Steve Morrison believes New Zealand's SailGP team admitted a mistake at the end of their debut campaign in the series, but one that will set them up in 2022.
Things didn't go to plan for New Zealand's first campaign in SailGP. With a team full of talent — including America's Cup winners Peter Burling, Blair Tuke, Andy Maloney and Josh Junior — there was a weight of expectation on the team before they had even launched their boat.
As Morrison put it in on SailGP's Deep Dive podcast: “They're the guys who come glittered in gold. It seems to me, if you get these guys wet, they win.”
The Kiwis' season was complicated from the outset, with the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics to 2021 causing early season logistical issues as five of the eight sailors in the team were involved with the Games. They also struggled in the Sail GP one-design F50 catamaran with crew changes between events.
While time in the boat was a vital component of mastering the vessel and performance on the circuit, Morrison said choosing to go into the competition without a coach might have cost them.
“They've made mistakes this year. Without saying it publicly, they perhaps admitted it when we saw Ray Davies in the coach boat in San Francisco,” Morrison said.
“For me, visually that was one of the biggest admissions of mistake I saw.”
Davies, a long-time member of Team New Zealand, was brought on as coach for the final event of the Kiwis' debut campaign (the second season of Sail GP), and New Zealand sailor Liv Mackay said he was a massive addition at the event.
Now settled with no Olympic commitments and the first event of the new season kicking off in Bermuda next week, there are again expectations on the Kiwi crew to succeed.
Speaking on the podcast, fivetime America's Cup sailor David ‘Freddie' Carr said he felt Burling and Tuke narrowly missing out on the Olympic gold medal probably affected their performance at the back end of the year. However, starting anew, he expected massive improvements from the team.
"The disappointment for those guys to have lost an Olympic gold medal on the final downwind on the line is way more than I can comprehend in terms of getting your head around and trying to focus on sailing,” Carr said.
“I imagine that would devastate you for a good few months; it's going to take a while to bounce back from that, and maybe the second half of their season was a little bit tainted by that.
“More than any team in Sail GP, talking about fresh starts, a new season, these guys will be looking forward to Bermuda the most. A reset, a fresh start, the talent on paper, the group they have around them that have effectively won the last two America's Cups — they will be really looking forward to Bermuda. They're going back to waters they know, they've modified their playbook through this year, they're surrounded by a tight group.
“I am expecting big things, and I am expecting them to be in the grand final this year. They will be the team that makes the significant jump.”
Sail GP's third season will see the inclusion of two new teams — Canada and Switzerland — lining up alongside New Zealand, Australia, the US, Japan, Denmark, Spain, Great Britain and France in a 10-team expanded fleet, with as many events on the calendar.
The season starts in Bermuda next weekend, and runs throughout the year — including its first event in New Zealand in March 2023 — before the grand final in San Francisco in early May.