Page 84 - Sharp September 2023

MAKING WAVES
ROLEX-SPONSORED SAILGP IS BRINGING NEW LEVELS OF SUSTAINABILITY TO THE WORLD OF PROFESSIONAL SAILING
By Justin Mastine-Frost
F ROM FASHION AND ARCHITECTURE TO TRAVEL AND HAUTE
cuisine, sustainability is a leading watchword. After all, the world is on fire — in some cases literally — and society is more aware than ever that the planet has seen better days. That said, the world of sport and competition remains alive and well, and international organizations such as SailGP are taking their terrestrial impacts incredibly seriously.
By now, we’ve all encountered varying shades of eco-based
marketing, but for SailGP’s sustainability and impact project manager, Rosie Gosling, eco-friendly initiatives are quite literally a full-time job. From ensuring access to biofuels for site generators and calculating the resource burn for transporting fuels across the globe to mapping out the transport logistics of the mobile SailGP event setup, every drop of fuel and watt of power is accounted for. “For transport to qualify for a low carbon qualification according to internationally accepted standard, that means a 10 per cent decrease in carbon emissions. For SailGP, our target is to reduce it by 50 per cent.”
Even SailGP’s relatively recent beginnings — they took to the water for their first race in late 2018 — were significant for their sustainability because the boats used in this global series weren’t actually built for these races. At the end of the America’s Cup 2017 season, the boats built for that competition were due to be retired for an entirely new design and Oracle founder Larry Ellison saw an opportunity. Rather than letting individual teams make adjustments to better their overall performance, as is the practice in Formula One, all of the boats would be owned and maintained by SailGP. And aside from their respective liveries, sponsor branding, and the ability to program certain buttons and controls, the competition’s F50 boats are all identical. The skills, strategy, and planning of each
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