spelplakkers

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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP to where everything began in Sydney this weekend and sitiosecuador.com six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees a bright future for wiki.rolandradio.net the innovative global sailing league.

An Olympic champion and skipper of 3 Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of the Oracle software application company, to introduce the series with six groups all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which began in Sydney in February 2019 featured simply five rounds, it-viking.ch this weekend's race will be the third round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will contest on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's simply fantastic, really, the uptake and variety of occasions now," SailGP chief executive Coutts informed Reuters at the Sydney Opera House on Friday.

"We're certainly sitting at 13, and aiming to increase that over the next seasons to someplace around 20. If you compare that to Formula One that has 24, that's sort of where we desire to get to. So yeah, the future looks good."

The idea of Formula One on water is implicit in the league's name and the comparison is not far from the mark when the world's finest sailors press the F50 foiling catamarans to their limitations at what are breathtaking speeds for waterborne vessels.

"We didn't set out to simply attract the avid sailing fan, we attempt to make this sport reasonable and explainable for all sports fans," Coutts included.

"Most of our fans are not devoted sailors, which is among the reasons we've grown so rapidly. We are interesting individuals that much like watching a race, they don't need to comprehend anything about sailboats."

A bumper crowd of 25,000 ticketed fans ended up to view Tom Slingsby's Australia team win the second round of the series in Auckland last month.

"I think you'll see several of our events this year now like that, maybe even topping that," said Coutts, a 62-year-old New Zealander.

"The most important thing is the fans watching on broadcast ... but the fan experience on site is likewise essential. We desire fans to come and have a good time and see some terrific racing."

Technological innovation is important to SailGP and numerous countless data points are passed on from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for wiki-tb-service.com the usage of race organisers, groups and to help broadcasters improve the audience experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is delighted about some more developments coming online as Artificial Intelligence is increasingly employed to work through the mountain of data.

"The huge advancement for us moving forward is the 360 degree view from on board the boat, with listening to the team comms," he said.

"The viewer will be taken on board and ride together with the Australian team in a race, and have the ability to browse anywhere they want. That's the future."

There have, naturally, been challenges over the 6 years with the 2nd season interrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still sometimes at the mercy of wind conditions.

A lack of F50s implied the French group was unable to compete at this year's season-opening race in Dubai and damage to the boat once they got it ruled them out of the Auckland leg.

The complete fleet of 12 boats will for that reason race for the very first time this weekend and among the most pleasing elements for Coutts is that all however among the teams are, or quickly will be, privately owned or run.

"These teams are now selling for $50 million, I would never have forecasted that this early," said Coutts, who plans to bring another number of groups on board next year.

"We understood that that was the entire way the design was set up, that team owners would be able to trade their groups and hopefully make money out of it, however I didn't believe we 'd attain it this early. That's been a good surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)