SUMMER 2019
SW
082
AFTER
hours of morning press
interviews, coach’s
briefings, and failed
systems tests, the
U.S. SailGP team is about to cut the towline for their first romp
in the fresh breeze o San Francisco’s City Front when all sup-
port boats lose radio communication with each other. The team’s
chase boat driver, Pete Balash, is livid. “You’d think, with a 7-million-
dollar budget, we could aord some radios that worked,” he vents.
Moments later, he receives a phone call from the SailGP base in
Alameda. Sailing is halted, indefinitely.
“Unbelievable,” skipper Rome Kirby says as Balash’s RIB pulls
alongside the team’s F50 catamaran. “They need to get their shit
together. We don’t have time for this.”
The day before, practice was halted for nearly three hours
because of failed systems tests on a new hydraulic-pump manifold.
Add that to weeks of hype surrounding the U.S. debut of profes-
sional sailing’s new global racing circuit, and it’s easy to understand
why Kirby and his teammates are itching to fly their F50, the most
technical one-design sailboat ever created. A last-place finish at
the first SailGP event in Sydney has the American team eager to
prove themselves better than their last result, but one botched
radio signal has the whole operation on hold.
“Everyone, take a breath,” says their coach, Tom Burnham. “Let’s
use this time to regroup.”
Having coached Artemis Racing in the 35th America’s Cup, he is
no stranger to high-stakes hang-ups.
“At the end of the day, we’re not going
to risk someone’s life by cutting cor-
ners,” he says. “There’s just no room
for error here.”
Back at base, SailGP’s IT team
scrambles to fix the radio signal
while an army in hard hats and high-
visibility vests assemble and launch
the rest of the boats to be used by
teams from England, Japan, France,
China and Australia. Over the past
week, the 10-man shore team for the
U.S. squad has combed every inch ofthe F50 catamaran—greasing gear components, inspecting
electrical circuits, and using ultrasound to scan foils for micro-
scopic cracks. Since the first event a few weeks earlier, both
the wing and flight-control systems have been reengineered.
Out on the water, safety protocol is strictly followed, which
poses a problem when radio communications break down.
As the breeze howls and the tide floods through the
Golden Gate, the U.S. team clings to what little patience they
have left, but at the end of the day, they’ve been hired to race
the coolest cats on the planet without having to fundraise a
nickel, so they just roll with it, even if they have to wait.
Kirby, 29, is soft-spoken and surprisingly humble
considering his sailing resume. He’s bagged two Volvo
Ocean Races and two America’s Cup campaigns with
Oracle Team USA, and now leads a young campaign of seri-
ous magnitude. He had a rare front-row seat for the rapid
development of high-performance foiling and a behind-the-
scenes perspective of a Cup juggernaut. When SailGP visionaries
Larry Ellison and Russell Coutts came to him to lead the U.S. team,
Kirby handpicked his own cast of star-studded characters.
The youngest—22-year-old wing trimmer Riley Gibbs, of Long
Beach, California—is a product of the Southern California youth
dinghy scene. His flushed cheeks and tousled hair earned him the
nickname “squirrel” from his teammates. Between SailGP gigs, he’s
campaigning a Nacra 17 for the 2020 Olympics, and at the moment,
seems to manage both demands.
“I just want to do as much cool stu as I can, while I can,” he says.
“This is an opportunity a lot of older sailors don’t get, so I want to
take advantage.”
Though every position on the F50 is crucial to the performance
of the boat, the wing trimmer has the narrowest margin of error.
“It’s a huge responsibility,” Gibbs says. “The stability of the boat is
very much at my fingertips. One little mistake can turn into a full-on
major, so it’s intense at times.”
Another Olympic hopeful on the team is grinder Hans Henken.
He sails the 49er, and as a jet-setting young sailor as well, he
applies a similar methodology on and o the water.
“I have a routine for flying now,” Henken says. “From the way
I pack my bags to the way I go through security lines, I’ve devel-
oped a procedure to make it as seamless as possible. This team
is all about making things e£cient and repeatable because that’s
what gets results.”
The 26-year-old Henken graduated from Stanford University with
a master’s degree in aeronautical and
astronautical engineering—a fitting
degree for understanding the physics
of flying the F50.
“Everything we do on our boat is
driven toward improving the technol-
ogy,” he says, “improving the board
dynamics and the wing functions to
make the boats not only faster but
easier to sail and more reliable.”
Mac Agnese, another of the team’s
three grinders, is spending most of
his morning texting a girl he met a
few days earlier, who is, to his dismay,U.S. SailGP skipper Rome Kirby (left)
has been a pro sailor his entire
adult life and now leads a young
team that includes flight controller
Taylor Canfield (below) and wing
trimmer Riley Gibbs (opposite) who’s
responsible for the F50’s stable flight.