As women\u2019s sports surge in popularity, professional leagues are increasingly touting the value of female athletes. New professional leagues like SailGP are launching with the advantage of building from the ground up, with gender diversity as part of their DNA.<\/p>\n
Noncontact and noncollision sports are leading the way. Formula 1\u2032s\u00a0F1 Academy has created a pipeline for women into motorsports, with a goal of increasing female participation and representation on and off the racetrack. At the same time, it\u2019s drawing a\u00a0more diverse fanbase. Roughly 41% of F1 fans now are female, with\u00a0women aged 16 to 24 years old making up the fastest-growing fan group, according to Nielsen Sports.<\/p>\n
Professional male and female athletes are already competing alongside and against each other in the\u00a0United Pickleball Association\u2019s unified league, the\u00a0Global Mixed Gender Basketball league\u00a0and in\u00a0SailGP, the international sailing league\u00a0co-founded by Oracle founder Larry Ellison and champion yachtsman Russell Coutts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Founded in 2018, the upstart sailing league involves 12 international teams racing on high-speed, 50-foot catamarans known as F50s. At speeds of more than 60 mph, SailGP is gaining a reputation as a sort of\u00a0Formula 1 on the water.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole goal is to train athletes to be capable of racing on an F50, which is one of the more complex boats in the world \u2014 maybe the most difficult boat to race in the world right now,\u201d said Coutts, who is also SailGP\u2019s chief executive officer.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The league didn\u2019t set out with gender equity goals in mind, Coutts said, but simply sought to create the most compelling competition.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe that male and female athletes can compete at the top of our sport against each other and with each other, so when we we saw that there was a difference in participation levels \u2014 and didn\u2019t really see any logical reason for that \u2014 we took some steps to address that and we\u2019ll take further steps in the future,\u201d said Coutts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To bridge the experience gap most female sailors face, SailGP created programs to draw and train talent. In December, its Women\u2019s Performance Camp in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, marked its largest on-the-water women\u2019s athlete training camp to date.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The league also requires each team to have at least one female athlete onboard during races and has set targets to have at least two female athletes per race crew in key positions within the next five years. Those key positions are the driver, who steers the boat; the strategist, who advises on tactics; the wing trimmer, who adjusts the 85- to 90-foot carbon-fiber wing sail; and the flight controller, who dictates how high or low the boat flies over the water.<\/p>\n
The next SailGP races take place Saturday and Sunday in San Francisco, the second in back-to-back U.S. weekend races.\u00a0<\/p>\n
SailGP has embedded inclusivity and sustainability into the competition via an\u00a0Impact League that runs parallel to the on-the-water championship. Teams earn points for taking action to make sailing more accessible and to protect the environment in order to reach the podium. Winning teams earn cash prize donations to their partners. The Canadian team is in the lead in the Impact League thanks to its work to offer training opportunities, sailing camps and demo days to introduce foiling to new Canadian athletes.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat changes the mindframe of very competitive people to care, and to compete, in a world of impact and sustainability as well,\u201d said SailGP Chief Marketing Officer Leah Davis. \u201cWhen you challenge the world\u2019s most competitive people to be good at something else, they will turn their eyes to that pretty quickly, and in a pretty impactful way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Off the water, 43% of SailGP\u2019s C-suite is female, up from just 14% in 2021. For comparison, 29% of C-suite roles at Fortune 500 companies are held by women, according to\u00a0McKinsey\u2019s Women in the Workplace 2024 report. The league last year introduced Apex Group\u2019s\u00a0accelerator program, aimed at increasing female representation\u00a0at senior levels of the company.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It has also introduced initiatives to train more women on the operations, technology and boat-building side of the business. For example, SailGP Technologies based in Southampton, U.K., offers an\u00a0apprenticeship training scheme\u00a0\u2014 eight participants join the program each year, four male and four female. Today, 33% of directors at SailGP and 52% of heads of departments are female.<\/p>\n
The overall business strategy is helping to grow the league\u2019s appeal to a new set of fans. For the first time in its history, more than half of the ticket holders in attendance at last season\u2019s New Zealand Championships in March were female, a trend that has held steady this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis demographic has been underserved in sports,\u201d said SailGP Chief Purpose Officer Fiona Morgan. \u201cA huge part of our headroom in fans is young fans \u2014 and actually they\u2019re female fans \u2014 who probably didn\u2019t think about sailing, but they like extreme sports or sustainability, or they like sports that have gender equity at the heart.\u201d<\/p>\n
In June, Tommy Hilfiger was announced as the\u00a0United States SailGP team\u2019s official lifestyle apparel partner, joining brands such as Red Bull, Emirates, Mubadala, Rockwool and Deutsche Bank in sponsoring individual teams. In November,\u00a0SailGP announced it had signed Rolex as its first title sponsor.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think many brands nowadays will go into sponsorship that doesn\u2019t have diversity or equity at some point in it,\u201d said Morgan. \u201cTheir consumers and their investors will ensure they do that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
In September, the league achieved a major milestone, announcing its first female driver. Two-time Olympic sailing champion Martine Grael joined for the 2024-25 season to skipper the new Mubadala Brazil SailGP Team, making history and immediately climbing the leaderboard.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After championships in Dubai, Auckland, New Zealand, Sydney and Los Angeles, teams from the UK, Australia and New Zealand are leading the league. Grael has steered her team ahead of the Germany SailGP team, and is proving competitive against the more experienced United States team.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the past \u2014 and still nowadays \u2014 you see a lot of people say, \u2018Girls shouldn\u2019t do that,\u2019\u201d Grael said. Her response is to call out that old way of thinking: \u201cShouldn\u2019t do what?\u201d<\/p>\n
Grael credits much of her early success to familiarizing herself with the boats using SailGP\u2019s simulator, developing muscle memory before even getting on the water. Unlike traditional boats built with male sailors in mind, SailGP\u2019s modern foiling boats open opportunities for women in roles that do not require as much physical strength, she said. Knowing when to push a button and developing a good feel for the boat are equally important to the more physical functions, said Grael.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cSome guys have failed to understand that a girl is very much capable of doing the same role they\u2019re doing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Grael is among a number of top female athletes competing in key positions in SailGP \u2014 including\u00a0Emirates Great Britain Team\u2019s strategist Hannah Mills\u00a0and\u00a0the U.S. team\u2019s Anna Weis\u00a0\u2014 and says though women are still in the minority, things are changing.<\/p>\n
Together with women competing in marquee races \u2014 like Switzerland\u2019s Justine Mettraux, who took eighth place in the Vend\u00e9e Globe single-handed, nonstop, nonassisted round-the-world race this year \u2014 they are carving a path for a new cohort of women to gain opportunities and make their mark.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have been less limited \u2014 I grew up never being told I shouldn\u2019t do something,\u201d said Grael. \u201cThere\u2019s a big generation of others looking at us, and they\u2019re going to come out strong.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
As women\u2019s sports surge in popularity, professional leagues are increasingly touting the value of female athletes. New professional leagues like SailGP are launching with the advantage of building from the ground up, with gender diversity as part of their DNA. Noncontact and noncollision sports are leading the way. Formula 1\u2032s\u00a0F1 Academy has created a pipeline […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":16101,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16100"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16100\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}