Black Foils grinder Louis Sincliar has undergone surgery on his right leg after a crash on the opening day of SailGP’s return to Auckland left him with compound fractures.
Sinclair was transported to Auckland Hospital in a stable condition on Saturday afternoon after the New Zealand boat collided with that of the French.
French driver Quentin Delapierre reacted fast enough to limit the impact, but the team’s F50 ended up on top of the Kiwi boat close to where Sinclair was positioned at the grinding pedestal and both boats were badly damaged in the collision.
As well as Sinclair, who had both legs injured, French strategist Manon Audinet was also transported to hospital with concerns of an abdominal injury.
In a statement, the Black Foils confirmed Sincliar had undergone successful surgery on his right leg overnight and was now recovering.
“The medical team involved in Sinclair’s treatment have been fantastic and are pleased with the results of the surgery and are positive about his ongoing recovery,” the team said.
“Sinclair has the support of family and teammates in Auckland and is doing well post his operation.
“He and the team wish to again thank all of the professionals involved in his care and treatment and to thank fans for their messages of support.
“A comprehensive review of yesterday’s incident will be conducted in coordination with SailGP.”
The crash saw SailGP move to a split-fleet format for Sunday’s action, with Australia retaining their Auckland championship when they beat Spain and Great Britain in the final.
The split-fleet saw groups of five and six on the course in a similar set up to how SailGP approaches practice racing.
“The decision has been taken with stronger wind conditions forecast for Sunday – on the tight, stadium-style racetrack. Following Saturday’s on-water incident involving New Zealand and France, 11 F50s will compete on Sunday," a league statement said.
The weekend continued an unfortunate run in Auckland for the French team, who were unable to race in Auckland last year because their boat was not ready for sailing.
With the next event on the SailGP calendar being in Sydney in two weeks, Australian driver Tom Slingsby expected it would most likely be an 11-boat event given the damage to the two vessels.
“I don’t know the official answer to that, but I think there’s no chance that either of those boats are there,” Slingsby said.
“From me and my knowledge of the technical and structural knowledge of these boats, neither of those boats will be there, but I don’t know, they might be able to send a new boat out in time.”
The move to split the fleet in Auckland for the second day of racing was well received by the sailors, particularly with the wind forecast to be stronger than it was on Saturday.
Switzerland driver Sebastian Scheniter, who was involved in a crash with the Black Foils in Perth last month, said it was something they should consider for smaller, breezy venues moving forward.
“I think it’s tough when you change from the Saturday to the Sunday into split fleets because then you can score a lot less points in the split fleets,” Schneiter said.
“Overall I think it’s not a bad format. If we have more boats in the future, I think it’s definitely something that is quite good because the racing is, from a sailor’s point of view, almost more interesting because you’ve got a bit more space to play the shifts rather than just the traffic.”
The Swiss had an eventful day on the water themselves on Sunday, with Kiwi Jo Aleh a late replacement in their strategist role.
“It was a tough day to jump in with also our warm up being shortened because we had some jib issues, so we did probably like five or six minutes of warm up instead of the 30 minutes. It was good fun and she’s definitely a good sailor,” Schneiter said.
Super-subs seemed to be a theme of the weekend, with former Emirates Team New Zealand skipper Glenn Ashby again replacing Australian wing trimmer Iain Jensen due to a knee injury.
Ashby, who retired from professional sailing in 2023, was called up in Perth when Jensen was injured in practice racing and has now had a second and a first in two regattas this year.
“We’re so fortunate to think that we can call on Glenn Ashby as a sub in Australia. I mean, no other country can do that where they call in someone with Glenn’s experience and his expertise and he’s the very best sailor not in SailGP and that’s because he retired from the sport,” Slingsby said.
“It’s not like he was pushed out, it’s not like people don’t want him, it’s just he made the choice. But we’re lucky that, whether it’s an Australian thing or whether he was itching to come back, he wanted to come back and sail with us and so we’re so lucky that he came with us and to think we’ve had a wing trimmer fill in for the last two events, we’ve got a second and a first in the first two events of the year, we’re indebted to him for a long time.”
Christopher Reive joined the Herald sports team in 2017, bringing the same versatility to his coverage as he does to his sports viewing habits.