The Outcasts of the Yacht Club Are Changing Sailing’s Image

Long dismissed by traditionalists, catamarans are now at the center of the sport's reinvention.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The outcasts of the yacht club are changing sailing's image,
written and read by Chavonne Wagner. Ask an each child
to draw a sailboat, and chances are you'll see the
same design, an upside down semicircle for the whole, with
a triangle perched on top as the sail. But back
in nineteen eighty eight, my five year old self would

(00:20):
have had a harder time sketching what I knew a
sailboat to be, something more like a triangle balanced over
two floating bananas. I grew up in a multihole family.
My dad was obsessed with his Hobi Cat sixteen, a
sixteen foot roughly five meter catamaran ubiquitous on American shorelines
in the eighties and unmistakable for its technicolor sales. These

(00:44):
affordable beach boats could be found in almost any chorist
brochure for New Jersey. Yet every time my dad suggested
adding Hoby Cat racing to local yacht club's annual regatta programs,
he was met with the same refrain, catamarans aren't real sailboats.
Four decades later, the same debate still rages, but today's

(01:05):
biggest catamaran supporter also happens to be a billionaire. Over
the past few years, Oracle co founder Larry Ellison has
funneled millions into sale GP, a racing league whose multi
holes lift out of the water on hydrofoils and travel
at top speeds exceeding sixty miles per hour. Sail GP's

(01:26):
cutting edge approach is pushing boat innovation and eroding the
deference to stuffy yacht clubs that has long defined elite sailing.
In the process, the once snubbed catamaran is becoming the
avatar of a new version of the sport, one that's
more fun, informal, and accessible the nineteen eighty eight Surprise.

(01:47):
There is no more prestigious event in the world of
sailing than the America's Cup, name for the boat that
won the inaugural regatta in eighteen fifty one. It's the
sport's longest running competition, but for most of its one
hundred and seventy four years, the Cup was essentially unwatchable.
Races were held so far from shore that you'd be

(02:08):
lucky if you could see the boats at all. When
the Cup finally entered its televise era, slow wind conditions
and zoomed out camera angles could make it about as
exciting as watching toy boats in a bathtub. As a kid,
I'd sometimes catch my dad napping to it on ESPN. Occasionally, however,
the America's Cup delivered a sensational moment. One of those

(02:30):
occurred in nineteen eighty eight with the arrival of the
first multi hole. The rules for each competitor in the
Cup racecourses, dates, and boat parameters are typically mutually agreed
upon by two yacht clubs, the defender, current holder of
the trophy and the first Vallid challenger, an eligible foreign
yacht club. Through much of the twentieth century, defenders and

(02:52):
challengers agreed to build in race boats from defined classes,
such as the twelve meters sailboats that lasted for nearly
three decades to nineteen eighty. While the number of competitors
varies from Cup to Cup, a club can also issue
a challenge for a one on one match under the
strict rules of the Deed of Gift, a nineteenth century
document that still governs the regatta today. Under a dog challenge,

(03:15):
the challenger must provide ten months notice and the dimensions
of the boat they'll bring. The deed is sparse on
other details, but specifies that boats cannot exceed ninety feet
along the waterline if there's only one mast. After the
San Diego Yacht Club won the America's Cup in nineteen
eighty seven, New Zealand's Mercury Bay Boating Club challenged the

(03:35):
Americans under the deed of gift and said it would
sail a ninety foot mono hal with a view to
raising the following year. Needing a fast defender and quickly,
the US club identified a loophole and the deed, which
doesn't say anything about how many holes a boat can have.
On September seventh, nineteen eighty eight, the US arrived at
the regatta with a sixty foot catamaran. Physics wise, the

(03:58):
Americans are pretty much desac than to win. Twin holes
mean less water resistance, which makes catamaran significantly faster. The
American Stars and Stripes, described by the Los Angeles Times
as two skinny canoes propelled by an airplane wing, trounced
New Zealand's KZ one, winning each of two races in
a best of three series by about twenty minutes. Sports

(04:21):
Illustrated called it one of the most lopsided matches ever
to call itself a sporting event. Many in the sailing
community cried foul, and the deed of gift Loopole turned
into a lengthy legal battle. An appeals Corps ultimately sided
with the Americans, but it would be decades until a
multi hole was seen in the America's Cup again. Following
the fiasco, defenders and challengers agreed to sail a new

(04:43):
International America's Cup class of yachts, faster mono halls than
the previous twelve meter class NASCAR on the water. It's
ironic that it took one of the richest people in
the world to bring elite sailing closer to the humble
idea of the sport that I grew up with. The
sailors I knew as a child. My father and his
South Jersey friends listened more to Jimmy Buffett than Warren Buffett,

(05:07):
but like Ellison, they wanted sailing to be accessible and
thrilling for everyone. For twenty seven years, my dad ran
an annual Hoby regatta near the southern tip of New Jersey,
which drew in locals and vacationers to watch the rainbow
of sails. Bob and weave as they launched into the water. Allison,
a competitive Maxi yacht sailor in the nineties, was never

(05:29):
a particularly clubby person, As Julian Guthrie notes in her
book The Billionaire and the Mechanic, He only joined San
Francisco's Blue Bud Saint Francis Yacht Club around nineteen ninety
five after learning to his dismay that he had to
belong to a club to be able to race a
major regattas in his quest to build a team for
the America's Cup in the early two thousands, Allison butted

(05:52):
heads with the old guard at Saint Francis and eventually
found a more accommodating club nearby, The Golden Gate Yacht Club.
Book tells the unlikely tale of how this working men's
sailing club ended up sponsoring the Oracle racing team and
its America's Cup debut in two thousand and three. The
team didn't win that year, but Allison publicly established his

(06:13):
vision of making the Cup more easy to understand and
exciting and enjoyable to watch in person and on TV.
Guthrie writes Allison solidified this plan in two thousand and
seven by hiring skipper Russell Coots, a three time America's
Cup winner, as his team's chief executive, the New Zealand
yachtsman would become a key proponent of a new class

(06:34):
of America's Cup catamarans that use hydrofoils, essentially underwater wings
that generate lyft when boats gain speed. The traditionalists may
have preferred old school mono holes that sit in the water,
but foiling catamarans can achieve an astonishing pace, and their
ability to basically skate on the surface means they could
be raced in shallower water closer to shore. All of

(06:57):
that makes them more compelling for spectators, but in order
for Ellison and Coots to realize their dream, they'd have
to get multi holes back into the Cup. After the
two thousand and seven regatta, Switzerland's victorious Alinghi Club announced
Spain's Club Notico Espanol de Vella would be the next challenger,
but the Golden Gate Yacht Club, representing Ellison's team, contested

(07:20):
cnev's challenging court, arguing the club was ineligible because it
hadn't held an annual regatta as required by the deed
of gift. The court sided with GGYC which set things
up for another dog match in twenty ten, now between
Alini and GGYC. This time both clubs brought multi holes.

(07:40):
Ggyc's team sailed a three hold trimaran to beat Alini's
dual hold catamaran, bringing the US its first win in
eighteen years. Afterwards, Allison and Coots introduced a new America's
Cup boat class, the AC seventy two, a seventy two
foot catamaran with foils and a rigid airplane wing like sail.

(08:01):
The Ellison era of elite sailing debuted on the San
Francisco waterfront in twenty thirteen, with more than seven hundred
thousand visitors to the preliminary Louis Vuitton Cup in July
and August and the America's Cup in September. Watching those
races via live feed from my office in London, I
felt a strange mix of pride and nostalgia. Finally, multi

(08:22):
holes were having their moment in the spotlight, and finally
spectators were seeing how fun sailing can be. But this
made for TV moment didn't sit well with traditionalists. The
regatta was dubbed by many in the process Nascar on
the water, a phrase that captured both the thrill and
the safety concerns surrounding the boat's extreme speed. The criticism

(08:42):
wasn't entirely without merit Olympic Sailing medal, as Andrew Simpson
had drowned at May after his catamaran capsized, but the
subtext was that Ellison was turning an elite gentleman sport
into average joe entertainment. No one was more frustrated with
Ellison than the backer of Italy's team, billionaire and Prada
chairman Patrizio Bertelli. After the US won the America's Cup

(09:05):
again in twenty thirteen, Italy pulled out of the next
competition and protests over proposed design changes to the catamarants. Instead,
Bertelli threw his resources behind New Zealand, but that support
reportedly came with a condition. According to America's Cup historian
Magnus Wheatley, if New Zealand won, it would push for
a return to mona Hol's. New Zealand did indeed win

(09:29):
it the next regard in twenty seventeen, and Bertelli was
able to get his way. The end result was a
new monohol class for the America's Cup that blends tradition
and innovation. The seventy five foot AC seventy five still
sailed for the Cup today, has a single hull and foils.
Its gecko like design almost defies physics and cemented foiling

(09:50):
as something even traditionalists could get behind. Wheatley, whose book
There Is No Second details the origins of the competition,
says foiling marked a turning point. The days of agreements
to raise basic displacement boats that merely float on the
water will never happen now in the America's Cup, he says.
But this massive technological change alone wasn't enough for Allison, who,

(10:12):
after more than a decade of run ins with the
gate keepers of elite sailing, was ready to move on
and make his own rules. This is serious. In twenty eighteen,
Allison and Coots co founded sale GP, of which Coots
is now chief executive. The league sales one design of
fifty foot foiling catamarants for competition and specializes in short

(10:34):
format races and iconic locations. Unlike the Cup, which pops
up every few years, sale GP is year round. It
held five events in twenty nineteen and has more than
a dozen in the twenty twenty four to twenty five season. Today,
sale GP has teams representing twelve countries and says its
races on YouTube last season had more than one hundred

(10:56):
and fifty million views, up from thirty seven million a
year earlier. High profile investors are also piling in Arias
management and French football are Achillean and Bappe are among
those with a stake in France's SALEGP team, and Hathaway
recently invested in Red Bull Italy, and Ryan Reynolds and
Hugh Jackman are backers of Australia's Bonds Flying Ruse. The

(11:19):
average sale GP event is more Atbitha Beach Club than
Blazers and boat shoes. Tickets are a reasonable eighty five
dollars apiece, forty three dollars for children, and the league's
announcers tend to avoid nautical jargon like tack or jibe.
At a New York series in June, sale GP chief
hype officer Dj Khaled popped up to spin tracks for

(11:41):
a crowd of ten thousand. Inclusivity is also a goal
on the water. While the physical requirements of a lead
sailing have traditionally made it mostly a man's world, sale
GP requires every team to have at least one woman.
Rolls vary. There are muscular grinders who must cycle their
arms to turn the main chief winch, wing trimmers who

(12:02):
control the shape of the rigid sale and flight controllers
who adjust the angles of the hydrofoils for lift. Sale
GP's first female driver, Brazil's Martin Grayle, says the highly
technical boats open up more roles to sailors who specialize
in strategic thinking over physical strength, which levels a playing
field between men and women. If you look at the

(12:23):
story behind the design of boats, they have always been
designed by men for men, she says. When sale GP
debuted in Australia in twenty nineteen, British sailor and olympium
Ben Ainsley was one of the viewers at home. I
remember watching the first race in Sydney and I was like,
this is serious, he says. Straight away, I picked up

(12:44):
the phone to Russell Coots and said, look, congratulations, that's amazing.
I would love to get involved in some way. Today,
Ainsley owns a majority stake in sale GP's Emirates GBR
team and has also skippered the British team in the
America's Cup, two Worlds He's a complimentary versus competitive. When
I spoke to Ainsley a couple of months ago, I

(13:05):
mentioned that I saw him in October, or rather I
saw a speck of him. My family and I had
traveled to Barcelona for the America's Cup, but even with binoculars,
the races were almost impossible to make out from the shore.
The America's Cup media department did not respond to email
requests for comment. A sale GP Regott in England last
month couldn't have felt more different. The boats were close,

(13:28):
the binoculars unnecessary, and the specter of reinvention ever present.
Race presenters touted wingfoilers essentially windsurfers on foils, as possible
future sailors of foiling boats, citing their understanding of flight dynamics.
Between races, a group of champion wingfoilers performed flips and
jumps in front of ten thousand people. My dad and

(13:51):
I were two of the many faces in the stands,
and as the regatta kicked off, he admitted to having
a soft spot for salegp's newest team, Mubadala Brazil ill
He thought the thirty four year old Grail delivered some
true moments of glory I could see what he meant.
Round the final mark of one race, the British boat
looked in position to block Brazil's wind, but Grayle's team

(14:13):
made a smooth rounding, keeping up on the foils and
cleverly used the right of way position to hold the
Brits off and cross the finish line first, with his
eyes on the Catmaran. My dad said something I hoped
to hear more often. Man, she's a good sailor.