The narrow, tide-tortured body of water between the south coast of England and the Isle of Wight, the Solent, is a cradle of yachting tradition.
However, when SailGP’s catamarans race there Saturday and Sunday, that will be steps beyond tradition. Baby steps, not.
The Emirates Great Britain Sail Grand Prix at Portsmouth is the seventh of 12 stops for SailGP in 2025, and the Solent stands out for its challenges and its lore.
Of the Solent and its relevance to sport, Ben Ainslie, the chief executive of the British SailGP Team, offered a succinct thought: “The Solent is to sailing what the Old Course at St. Andrews is to golf,” he said.
And add Wimbledon to tennis, and Silverstone to Formula 1.
In an interview in June, Ainslie recalled his introduction to the Solent “as a 10-year-old at a kids’ regatta, when I somehow won a ride on an ocean racer.”
“I was starry-eyed,” he said, “amazed to be on these waters surrounded by sailing heroes.”
Ainslie fits that hero category now, with medals in five Olympics and a win in the America’s Cup. His SailGP team ranks fourth in the championship.
The Solent has its sailing history. Queen Victoria watched a yachting race on its waters from Cowes on the Isle of Wight in 1851 that is in the DNA of the America’s Cup.
Back then, England’s aristocrats commissioned yachts as experiments in speed. The empire that ruled the waves was always looking for the next fast thing. Members of the Royal Yacht Squadron, a club with a commanding presence on the Solent, were allowed to fly the colors of the Royal Navy.
In the spirit of the 1851 Great Exhibition of industry and innovation in London, the club announced a race open to all nations. A new schooner from the United States took up the challenge. Could the upstart be the next fast thing?
It was the twilight of the age of sail, but sailing technology still ruled. The schooner was built on the lines of a New England pilot boat, with a sharp entry to the water compared with the blunt British construction.
Horace Greeley, editor of The New-York Tribune, said at the time about the new boat’s prospects, “You will be beaten, and the country will be abused.”
Near the end of the race, the queen saw a sail come into view. It was the American schooner, far out in front.
As it closed in, Victoria, by many accounts, asked who was in second. With no other boats sighted, the reply has endured: “There is no second.”
Or something like that. But it happened here, and because the schooner was named America, its trophy became the America’s Cup.
Russell Coutts, the chief executive of SailGP, knows all about winning that exalted, complicated, irresistible prize. He won the America’s Cup as skipper for New Zealand, twice, then once for Switzerland and twice as chief executive of the U.S. team, Oracle Racing.
Since before joining Oracle in 2007, he had been proselytizing for an alternative, a recurring international catamaran circuit.
When Oracle Racing lost the cup in 2021, Coutts and the team were freed of cup obligations. Organizing the SailGP racing circuit came next.
SailGP’s first F50 catamarans were modified, standardized leftovers from the cup. Today’s boats are technologically advanced, but SailGP is also about how the races are staged.
For most of the 1851 race, the fleet was out of sight. SailGP provides viewing from shore.
Ocean racing has a home there, too. As Blair Tuke, the wing trimmer of the New Zealand team, pointed out: “So many of our biggest races start in the Solent, often in a lot of wind.”
Or too much wind. This is remembered also as the scene, 46 years ago, of ocean racing’s greatest disaster: 24 boats abandoned and five sunk, with 15 sailors killed, during the Fastnet Race, beginning and ending that year in the Solent after rounding Ireland’s Fastnet Rock. A fast-moving storm caught the fleet by surprise.
As with misadventures on Mount Everest, disaster has allure. That 1979 race added the Fastnet to the bucket list of many sailors.
A world away from the Solent, a young Jimmy Spithill’s imagination fed on books about these waters, about the America’s Cup, even the Fastnet tragedy. He grew up among fellow Australians who had survived that race.
“I was fascinated,” Spithill said in an interview in June. “The legends grew in my mind.”
At 20, he began his America’s Cup career, driving for Oracle Racing’s wins in 2010 and 2013 and the loss in 2017. He later was Team USA’s SailGP driver, but came to Portsmouth as chief executive of Red Bull Italy. He is the team’s reserve driver.
When Spithill came as a young man “to this place I’d read about, it kind of lived up to the hype,” he said.
“So many iconic landmarks, but difficult with wind, currents. The Solent is different every time. You have to be on your game.”
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