From the water, one sensed the mood of the crowd – 11,000 strong, banked above Naval Point, Lyttelton – souring, and then turning against an unlikely villain. A Hector’s dolphin/upokohue had been sighted by the dolphin spotters, leading to a delay to the start of the first day’s New Zealand Sail Grand Prix racing. Two young women in SailGP T-shirts and shorts in front of the “Ultimate Fan Zone” were doing their best to keep the crowd looking forward, but even the bursts of singalong staples from the Exponents – with individuals picked out by the “Dance Cam” and projected onto big screens – weren’t going to keep spectators happy for ever.
The 10 F50 catamarans milled around the harbour, their foils mostly hidden. Occasionally, they sailed close to the fans to give them something to cheer about, even if it was only the sight of these sleek boats – capable in the right conditions of approaching 100km/h – dawdling by at the pace of a human jog. Later that day, as the chance of racing grew ever more remote, some of the teams – the athletes attired as if for combat, helmets stuffed full of communications technology, their lifejackets resembling bullet-proof vests – draped themselves in puffer jackets as the easterly’s presence grew in the weakening autumn sun. Sailors raised their hands in apologetic greeting as our boat passed near.
Still, the dolphin refused to budge, and eventually word was transmitted that the day’s racing had been cancelled. That same news soon came over the loudspeakers, and the booze that had been fuelling the party atmosphere since the race village opened four hours earlier now began to curdle it. “I’m going home for dolphin soup,” one man with a sun-and booze-reddened face said with real anger as the crowd slowly funnelled towards the waiting buses. On the trip back through Lyttelton Tunnel and into the city, many similarly ill-tempered mutterings passed among the passengers.
Calving season
In some respects, all had gone to plan – at least to the Marine Mammal Management Plan. SailGP, now in its fourth season, had returned to Lyttelton after Auckland – originally scheduled to host the New Zealand leg of the 2024 season – pulled out late last year. It left the Canterbury port town, which held the event in season three, as the single viable option. The only complication was that March is calving season for the Hector’s dolphin, a species of which an estimated 15,000 remain, predominantly around Banks Peninsula.
Lyttelton Harbour sits within the Banks Peninsula Marine Mammal Sanctuary, established in 1988 to protect the dolphins, officially listed as “nationally vulnerable” by the Department of Conservation.
A 1980s study found the Hector’s dolphin population was on the brink of collapse, with only a 7% chance of recovery. In 2020, the author of that study, University of Otago zoologist Liz Slooten, who has been cataloguing Hector’s dolphins around the peninsula since 1984, told RNZ that estimate had increased to 41% due to the sanctuary. The sheer speed, she told 1News, of the F50s slicing through the harbour made them dangerous to the dolphins – in spite of the intelligence of the animals.
“These boats going at 100km an hour, these aren’t something that these dolphins have ever encountered in their lives before.” She said SailGP had been repeatedly told that Lyttelton was “a really bad place to choose” for a regatta.
However, the management plan, developed by SailGP and Te Hapū o Ngāti Wheke, with input from DoC, was devised to minimise the risk. If dolphins were sighted in the race area – as had happened last year when the race controller ignored a directive to pause the final despite two dolphins being spotted near the finish line – their safety would take precedence and an independent decision-maker would have the authority to delay or cancel the sailing.
At the time of the plan’s release, SailGP managing director Andrew Thompson said it was “an industry-leading example of SailGP’s commitment to the environments in which we operate”.
Sharks circle
Yet even before Saturday’s dolphin delay, New Zealand sailing legend and SailGP chief executive Sir Russell Coutts had publicly complained the extra “red tape” represented by the more stringent management plan meant it was unlikely SailGP would ever return to Lyttelton.
The morning after the cancellation, Coutts, speaking to NewstalkZB’s Jason Pine in the onsite SailGP media centre, launched a broadside against the authorities he said were responsible for the plan’s extra stringency, citing it as an example of “New Zealand being handcuffed by unprecedented layers of bureaucracy” and “the amount of influence the iwi have over authorities here in New Zealand”.
The statement connected with the strain of blood coursing through the nation’s body politic. In a written media statement, Deputy Prime Minister and NZ First leader Winston Peters called it “a debacle” that has “spotlighted the overly influential bureaucratic processes, power-drunk government departments, and some decision-makers who clearly care more about their fiefdoms than our country’s economic development and international reputation”. It branded those decision-makers as “pearl-clutching extremists” with a “dizzying sense of self-worth”. His coalition partners, National and Act, both made similar points – that this was an example of red tape ensnaring the country’s economy.
Questioned by Pine following his prepared statement, Coutts extended the threat of Lyttelton missing out on next year’s event – the 2023 event’s economic benefit to the Christchurch regional economy has been independently assessed at $13.9 million – to include the whole country.
“We’re going to have to have a pretty in-depth discussion about the viability [of New Zealand hosting] going forwards,” he said.
That Coutts would impugn something his organisation had previously described as “industry-leading” as soon as its contingencies were triggered led others to decry SailGP for what they said was cynical insincerity in light of its stated environmental priorities. “So much for all the greenwash that SailGP cares about the environment,” wrote Greenpeace executive director Russel Norman in the NZ Herald.
Carbon neutral
Sustainability has been key to SailGP’s conception of itself over the four seasons of its existence. The jacket Coutts was wearing when he made his statement was branded with the competition’s motto, “Powered By Nature”, while the screens in the vegan-catered media centre periodically flashed reminders of the peril in which humanity has placed the planet: the amount of the world’s plastic that is not recycled (91%) or the annual cost of environmental damage to marine ecosystems ($13 billion). SailGP evidently sees itself as part of the cure, a torchlight for other sports to follow into what appears an increasingly gloomy future.
Blair Tuke, the co-chief executive and wing trimmer of the New Zealand team, rebranded as the Black Foils in the lead up to Lyttelton, looks towards a future where high-profile sportspeople from across the athletic spectrum will use their platforms to promote sustainability and other important causes. As time goes on, and as climate change continues to alter the world, he doesn’t “think a sports team will exist just purely for whatever its given sport is. I think they’ll always do something else with that platform because it is so big, it is so powerful.”
In the case of SailGP, which describes itself as “one of the world’s fastest-growing sport leagues”, that power is only increasing: 117 million broadcast viewers tuned in to SailGP’s third season, a 183% increase on season two; season four’s Spain Sail Grand Prix attracted the largest US television audience in the league’s history, with 1.784 million viewers, making it the most-watched sailing event in the US since 1992; Lyttelton represented the biggest ever crowd for a ticketed sailing event, as the invited media were often reminded, with some 22,000 spectators filing through the village over the two days it was open.
It’s something Tuke says is “super exciting” to be part of. “The growth across social media has been very steep; broadcast numbers are increasing all over the globe. It’s pretty phenomenal. Absolutely one of the fastest-growing sports in the world,” he says.
With that increasing reach comes the opportunity to speak out more effectively on the environmental issues – especially those pertaining to the ocean – that the athletes witness firsthand. The Black Foils’ strategist, Liv Mackay, told the Listener a life spent largely on the water fosters a commitment to the environment. “We experience and see the changes over time. And that really drives us to want to make change,” she says.
The Black Foils’ vehicle for doing so is Live Ocean – in SailGP corporate parlance, the New Zealand team’s “Purpose Partner”, the charitable entity with which each team works closely. The Live Ocean Foundation is the brainchild of Tuke and Peter Burling – his great friend, fellow sailing legend and co-chief executive of the New Zealand team. They set up the foundation in 2019 hoping it could help “connect new audiences to the ocean, and to try to change practices, change attitudes,” says Tuke. When the pair were approached about a New Zealand SailGP team, they instantly knew they’d want it closely linked with Live Ocean.
Sailors seem natural spokespeople for the environment, a fact made much of by the marketing propelling the league. Running alongside the sailing competition is the Impact League – described in the SailGP literature as “the podium for the planet” – which measures each team’s efforts to reduce their carbon footprint as the SailGP carnival moves across the globe – Lyttelton was preceded by the Sydney round, and will be followed by a regatta in Bermuda. (SailGP itself has ambitions to be carbon neutral by 2040.)
The Black Foils won the inaugural Impact League in SailGP’s second season, were narrowly beaten the next year by the Danish team, and sit fourth in the current season. All its prize money collected over seasons two and three – $303,848 – has gone into projects overseen by Live Ocean, including $50,000 towards kelp restoration in the marine ecosystem over which Coutts made his statement.
For Tuke, being so intimately connected with the water gives him and his fellow sailors what he calls both “an authority and a responsibility … It’s hard for people to connect to what’s below the surface, what’s happening over the horizon. So, it’s important that people like us, and teams like us, who are out there most days living and breathing it, can share our experiences to try to connect more people to them.”
Best venue
From the water – F50s careening past, lurching on their foils, sailors scampering across the netting between their hulls – the racing is an intense spectacle: multimillion-dollar machines in a close battle whose progress is hard to follow, at least until a few markers have been rounded, the best racing lines have been found and dominated, the field thinned, and the leaders established.
The machines, tethered to the water by their bow-shaped foils, fly across its surface, with the fastest recorded at 99.4km/h. As a sport, it is undeniably “good product”, full of subtlety and scope for the intelligence of its athletes to express itself, but with enough kinetic action to keep the uninitiated happy.
Early in the first race, the champion Australian team suffered a regatta-ending crash, impaling their boat on a finish-line marker. In the hurly burly of the weekend, they were one of three teams – the others were Denmark and Great Britain – who were docked points for the collisions they caused.
The first day was lost, but the second made up for it in intensity. The Black Foils claimed just enough points from the three fleet races to sneak into the final, which they then clinically dominated against the French and last season’s Lyttelton winners, Canada. Burling called the day the “absolute best in SailGP history”.
For Mackay, even before a day that ended in victory, as Shapeshifter warmed up on the adjacent stage, the Lyttelton event was her favourite “by far”, an attitude shared by her colleagues across the league who voted it season three’s best venue. Mackay and Tuke both spoke of the intimacy of the harbour’s natural amphitheatre, which gives them a fleeting sense of what it might be like to star in a stadium-friendly code, the cheering crowd sometimes audible over the babble in their earpieces and the whirr of the foils slicing through the water. Burling thinks it “crazy” New Zealand could be omitted from future SailGP calendars.
Something fishy
When Coutts was offered the chance to further clarify his views, SailGP issued a statement to the Listener, attributable to managing director Andrew Thompson, that read, in part: “We delivered a safe event with exceptional racing on the second day, and implemented the Marine Mammal Management Plan as was required throughout the weekend.” The statement went on to call SailGP a “global leader in purpose-driven sport”, mentioning the Impact League, and the fact it was the first sport league to achieve the Carbon Neutral International Standard, and the three gold medals it was awarded in the UN’s Climate Neutral Now Initiative.
It was, of course, a commitment to the environment that was tempered – at least in the view of a segment of the public – by the reaction of the organisation’s chief executive to the consequences of what had been agreed to in the management plan.
It remains to be seen whether SailGP’s presence in Aotearoa is truly under threat, if the Black Foils will ever again have the chance to compete before a home crowd, or whether Coutts was merely adding the same kind of rhetorical flourish that would later permeate NZ First’s response.
For many, the controversy left a fishy taste, with any natural environmental authority that SailGP – and its sailors – might have had being undermined by the issues brought to light in the wake of a small dolphin.
James Borrowdale visited Lyttelton as a guest of SailGP.