casaloonos

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By Nick Mulvenney

SYDNEY, Feb 7 (Reuters) - SailGP returns to where it all began in Sydney this weekend and six years on from the inaugural race, co-founder Russell Coutts sees an intense future for yogicentral.science the innovative worldwide sailing league.

An Olympic champ and skipper of three Americas Cup-winning boats, Coutts coordinated with Larry Ellison, forum.pinoo.com.tr the billionaire creator of the Oracle software application company, to release the series with six teams all owned by the league.

While the inaugural season which began in Sydney in February 2019 featured simply 5 rounds, this weekend's race will be the 3rd round of 13 the now 12-strong fleet will object to on the 2025-26 schedule.

"It's simply incredible, actually, the uptake and variety of events now," SailGP president Coutts told 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 concept 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 push the F50 hindering catamarans to their limitations at what are breathtaking speeds for waterborne vessels.

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

"Most of our fans are not avid sailors, which's one of the reasons that we have actually grown so quickly. We are interesting people that similar to watching a race, they do not have 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 believe you'll see numerous of our events this year now like that, possibly even topping that," said Coutts, a 62-year-old New Zealander.

"The most crucial thing is the fans enjoying on broadcast ... however the fan experience on site is likewise essential. We want fans to come and have a good time and see some excellent racing."

Technological innovation is to SailGP and hundreds of thousands of data points are communicated from the boats to the Oracle Cloud for making use of race organisers, groups and to help broadcasters enhance the viewer experience.

360 DEGREE VIEW

Coutts is thrilled about some more innovations coming online as Artificial Intelligence is progressively used to work through the mountain of information.

"The big 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 along with the Australian group in a race, and be able to take a look around wherever they want. That's the future."

There have, of course, been difficulties over the 6 years with the 2nd season disrupted by the COVID pandemic and race days still sometimes at the grace of wind conditions.

A lack of F50s meant the French team was not able to contend 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 full fleet of 12 boats will for wiki-tb-service.com that reason race for the very first time this weekend and asystechnik.com among the most pleasing aspects for equipifieds.com Coutts is that all but one of the groups are, or soon will be, independently owned or run.

"These groups are now offering for $50 million, I would never have actually predicted that this at an early stage," said Coutts, trade-britanica.trade who plans to bring another number of groups on board next year.

"We knew that that was the entire method the model was set up, that team owners would have the ability to trade their groups and ideally make cash out of it, but I didn't think we 'd attain it this early. That's been a great surprise." (Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, modifying by Michael Perry)