I’ll be upfront: I’m tired and a little grumpy as I write this. It’s been a long weekend, working through the week and then giving up sleep-ins to cover SailGP Halifax with live articles online, the way Boating NZ always does. We watch the races as they happen, write them up, and get coverage live for the people who follow along with us, and we’re grateful that a good many of you do. I am proud of our coverage. While New Zealand sleeps, most of the SailGP events happen: we let you wake up to full coverage!
This morning, we set up the same way we always do. Computers are open, the TV on in the background, SailGP Media Insights running for the live alerts and data feed ready to go. And we sat there for five minutes wondering why the broadcast hadn’t started. Then after a moment, we went looking and found that sometime overnight, SailGP had moved the entire start time forward by two hours.
I understand why. Yesterday’s racing in Halifax was painfully slow, light and shifty wind all day, barely a breath of pressure on the course. Today was clearly shaping up the same way, and someone in a position to make that call decided to bring the start forward to catch better breeze. Fair enough, as far as the racing goes.
But here’s my problem. You cannot build an international broadcast audience, ask people to follow teams and storylines across a season, schedule TV windows around your published start times, and then move the goalposts overnight without warning. We missed our normal real-time coverage today because of it. Broadcasters who’d allocated a TV slot around the published time will have missed the racing entirely. And I keep thinking back to Auckland, where tickets were not cheap, and wondering how many paying spectators turned up expecting a normal start, only to find the final already finishing, or already finished, by the time they walked in.
I understand SailGP runs on the wind, it’s in the name, the boats are powered by nature, and anyone who’s owned a yacht knows you don’t control the breeze. But this can’t keep happening. We’ve had several events now where the wind has caused real disruption, and at some point the league needs to think seriously about how it manages that, whether that’s contingency days, clearer protocols, or simply more notice when a call like this gets made. A press release that goes out sometime in the night (5 hours before the start line, plus/minus) ahead of the broadcast but with no real warning to the people relying on the published schedule isn’t good enough for an event of this scale.
For us, it means today’s coverage won’t be the real-time reporting we’d normally bring you. Our usual insights data won’t be available for twenty-four hours, so we’ll be piecing together what happened from the broadcast replay instead. It won’t be as rich as our usual coverage, but we’ll bring you a digest of the day’s racing as soon as we can.
Stay tuned.
