SYDNEY, Australia — For a self-confessed introvert, Tom Slingsby finds himself in some uncomfortable places. Not least when he’s stripped down to just his undies in front of a professional photographer or camera crew.
Australia’s SailGP skipper is becoming more accustomed to making such personal sacrifices, his newfound fame the byproduct of being the co-owner of a team with Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds and having to feature in social media videos as the Hollywood stars ham it up with the team.
As he leads his six-person crew into this weekend’s home Grand Prix in Sydney, the reluctant hero — an Olympic gold medalist and an America’s Cup winner before he joined SailGP — finds himself cast into the limelight more than ever.
“Having Hugh and Ryan as owners of the team is unbelievable,” Slingsby told The Athletic. “I mean, just the exposure that SailGP, and especially our team, have gotten since they came on board. They just opened so many doors for us.
“When SailGP started, I often felt like I was door-knocking trying to get partnerships on board and sponsors to come join us. Now, it’s almost the other way, where we have big brands coming to us and saying, ‘We want to partner with your team, how can we make that happen?’ So that’s a huge thing they’ve brought to us, just the commercial viability of our team.”
The 13-team close-to-shore sailing championship is in its sixth season and is keen to shed preconceptions about sailing. Its sailors are called athletes and the boats are F50s, hydrofoiling catamarans which launch above the water and can reach speeds of more than 60 miles per hour.
In the last 12 months, the championship has had a number of high-profile investors, from Anne Hathaway’s involvement in the Italian team to France and Real Madrid star Kylian Mbappé buying a stake in the French team. And, of course, Jackman and Reynolds.
Reynolds has previous given his success with Wrexham, the Welsh soccer team he co-owns with fellow actor Rob Mac. The club is now a global brand thanks to the hit Disney+ documentary “Welcome to Wrexham,” and on-pitch success that resulted in successive promotions from the fifth-tier of English football to the second, leaving Wrexham currently just one promotion away from the Premier League.
“The way they explain it to me, especially Ryan, was, ‘A lot of people don’t often think of us this way as actors, but we’re actually storytellers. We love telling stories of people that the public don’t know much about,’” Slingsby, who won the Championship with Australia during the first three SailGP seasons, said.
“He managed to do that with Wrexham really well and tells an amazing story of the small Welsh soccer club. The amount of support that’s gotten has been unbelievable. He said, ‘We want to do something similar for SailGP and for the Bonds Flying Roos.’ That stuff just gets so much more exposure for our sport and puts it in a great light. We’re just happy to be a part of that journey with them.”
But what about those photoshoots to promote the team’s title sponsor, the Australian underwear brand Bonds.
“Doing underwear photoshoots is something that I’m generally not comfortable with,” the 41-year-old said. “I’ve done a few of them now and the Bonds team are amazing; they make you feel really comfortable. It’s only when you go away from it that you go, ‘I just can’t believe those photos are going to go around the world soon,’ and my anxiety kicks in a bit. But at the same time, we’ve got amazing partners who allow us to do something we love doing.”
Logically, it would seem a fly-on-the-wall series must be next on the agenda. “We’re definitely talking about content series,” Slingsby confirmed. “Content series are a big part of why they [Jackman and Reynolds] wanted to take over the team. Plans aren’t totally finalized yet but there are definitely plans happening about what that would look like. I think it’s a real level of trust with whatever production team you’re working with. You’ve got to trust them that they’re going to do right by you and vice versa.
“Historically, I haven’t been opening my doors too easily to show the family and stuff like that. But at the same time, if that’s what people want and my wife is comfortable, we might have to do that in the future. We’ll cross that bridge when it comes.”
The Flying Roos, helmed by Tom Slingsby, in action during a practice session last November. (Ricardo Pinto for SailGP)
Slingsby has to pinch himself when he thinks how sailing has moved from a sport that the world barely noticed to one where Hollywood A-listers, Formula 1 world champions (Sebastian Vettel with the German team) and Mbappé are now investing.
The Australian, five world titles and an Olympic gold medal in the singlehanded Laser dinghy to his name, was one of SailGP’s early adopters among a sea of doubters.
After racing with Oracle Team USA in the 2013 America’s Cup, where Slingsby was part of the winning team, and again in Bermuda at the 2017 Cup when Slingsby was part of the losing team, the ambitious Australian decided to switch from the America’s Cup, a 174-year-old international competition traditionally regarded as the pinnacle of the sport, to the new league being created by Russell Coutts, SailGP’s CEO, and American billionaire Larry Ellison.
“I took quite a risk to go with Russell on a start-up league. Historically, sailing start-up leagues don’t last too long,” Slingsby said.
“It could have all tumbled down, but SailGP is continuing to grow and the racing’s getting better. The teams are getting better. The broadcast is getting better. Everything with all these events we’re doing, we keep learning and putting on a better show for the public every time.”
Well, perhaps not quite every time. The big crash between New Zealand and France on Feb. 14 at the Auckland Grand Prix was a watershed moment for the league. Since the accident, and significant injuries to two of the sailors, there have been calls from some fans and parts of the sailing media to make big changes to the boats, the racing format and the safety equipment. But Slingsby is holding firm.
“After the crash, there’s been a lot of investigations into how that happened and how we can prevent that in the future,” he said. “These boats do come with a level of risk. There’s always going to be a level of risk involved in racing high-performance sailing boats. With SailGP, I think they’re trying to push what will be done and in doing that, it promoted the sport to levels never seen before. But, at times, we’ve got to go, ‘OK, maybe this risk level is too high for this.’”
New Zealand and France were involved in a horrific crash during the Auckland Sail Grand Prix earlier this month. (Simon Bruty for SailGP)
In a statement, SailGP said Tuesday that initial findings had found no evidence of “abnormal system behavior or structural failure prior to the incident.” Instead, Alex Reid, SailGP’s director of performance engineering, said “the combination of speed, gust conditions and foil ventilation created a highly dynamic sequence which developed within seconds.”
For Slingsby, it was a “racing incident.”
“It’s kind of like in F1 when two cars collide; no one was really at fault,” he said. “When you look at other sports, I think the risk we take is not as high as many other sports. SailGP has got to walk a fine line between what’s exciting racing, and exciting racing is racing really close on exciting race courses. For us to do that, there’s going to be a level of risk that we have to take.
“I can tell you if it’s not a 100 percent of the sailors out there, it’s very close to it, that say: ‘Look, we’re OK with this risk that we’re taking.’ Yes, they’re high-performance boats, yes, we’re pushing the limits, but we feel like we’ve got the skills to do this safely and to compete at the highest level.
“People who don’t have that comfort level, there’s absolutely no hard feelings. Everyone has a different amount of acceptable risk. It’s going to be up to each person. Same as in F1: you want to compete at the highest level of the sport? You’ve got to be comfortable with the level of acceptable risk.”
Last March, Slingsby said he chose to hit a race mark to “keep people safe,” while last April he was on board Australia’s F50 when the wingsail shattered into pieces in a moment the Australian later called a “scary situation.”
But despite the crash in Auckland and his own experiences last season, Slingsby said he felt “in a pretty safe racing league.”
“I look at some other areas of the sport of sailing and see people sail around the world by themselves down in the Southern Ocean with icebergs and submerged containers and 50-foot waves, and I look at that as much more dangerous compared to what we’re doing in SailGP,” he said.
“We still have to take the learnings from this crash. Whether there’s software help put into the boats to try to stop those side skids, whether it’s some sort of alarms that trigger, which help the boats steady out. We don’t want big crashes, we want tight racing. I think SailGP’s been doing a really good job with that. I have full faith in their safety team.”
For the coming days, Slingsby’s focus will be on racing around Shark Island in the middle of Sydney Harbour. After being beaten in Sydney by the old enemy Great Britain last season, Slingsby is looking to build on his win from Auckland two weeks ago and take the Flying Roos to victory in front of a home crowd.