Editor’s note: This story is part of The Athletic’s coverage of SailGP, an international sailing competition that has been likened to Formula 1 on water. Follow SailGP here.
This weekend, the Hudson River will transform into the most unlikely of theaters.
Twelve hydrofoiling F50 catamarans will scream across the water at nearly 60 miles per hour in the shadow of Manhattan’s skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty as Sail GP comes to town.
For fans lining the waterfront, the spectacle will feel seamless; a digitized, futuristic sailboat race that appears for a weekend and disappears just as quickly.
Behind the scenes, it is a choreography of spreadsheets, heavy cranes, container ships, and a strict timeline that leaves little room for error.
The SailGP season is held throughout the year at 12 different venues around the world. Moving the SailGP bandwagon from one host venue to another is a complex web of global logistics. It requires packing up the fleet of 50-foot carbon-fiber catamarans, mobile workshops, and specialized safety gear into roughly 100 shipping containers, loading them onto a chartered cargo vessel, and steaming across oceans to the next destination, all within a tight timeline. The last Grand Prix, held in Bermuda, was just three weeks ago, for example.
This logistical puzzle is there to be solved by the league’s Chief Operating Officer, Julien di Biase, and his team. While he’s been doing this job in some form for a long time, he admits he’s still learning every day because the game is changing so quickly, and he’s doing his best to dodge a few global curveballs along the way.
“SailGP was actually born from the ashes of Team USA losing the America’s Cup in 2017,” said di Biase, who’s constantly on the move but hails from Switzerland.
Di Biase is one of the foundational pillars of the organization. When tech billionaire Larry Ellison and New Zealand racing great Sir Russell Coutts first dreamed up the concept, Di Biase was one of only four employees in the room.
To launch a global circuit by 2019, they needed assets fast. They turned to the discarded fleet of AC50 catamarans left behind by the defeated America’s Cup syndicates. “We paid peanuts for them,” said di Biase. “Nobody wanted these boats. As soon as somebody calls a different design, with the AC75 coming online for the 2021 America’s Cup, the AC50 essentially had no value.”
The hydrofoiling F50 catamarans can be rebuilt every fortnight. (Jonathan Nackstrand for SailGP.)
Initially, the goal wasn’t to make the AC50 catamarans, now renamed F50s, faster — it was making them transportable.
The original America’s Cup platforms were meant to be assembled once and never to be dismantled. SailGP’s tech team spent months redesigning the platforms into modular components that could be broken down, packed into standard 40-foot shipping containers, and rebuilt every fortnight.
Today, that original concept has grown into a highly specialized logistics machine consisting of 105 to 108 containers. “It sounds like a lot, but it’s actually only specialist gear,” di Biase said as the tech team begins operations on the New York docks.
“It’s the F50s, the team bases, and workshop containers for electronics and boat building. We transport the stuff that we would not be able to source at a city that we visit. All the rest — grandstands, hospitality lounges, fencing, food — we source locally.”
The operational tempo is relentless. The league spends a maximum of two weeks at any given venue. The ‘tech team,’ a well-drilled crew of roughly 80 boat builders, riggers, and electronics experts, spends the first week unloading the boxes, assembling the complex platforms, and supporting the sailing teams to make the most of a brief training window on the water. Within an hour of the weekend’s racing concluding, the hard slog of dismantling the boats and team bases is already underway, the race once again on to meet tight shipping deadlines.
To pull this off — without falling victim to the delays that plague global commercial shipping — SailGP abandoned traditional ‘steamship’ container vessels a few years ago.
Standard container ships are simply too slow and unreliable. Instead, the league charters its own dedicated cargo vessel, operating a bespoke, door-to-door transit service where SailGP is the sole client.
“We need to be able to pack up our kit, put it on the cargo ship, and leave immediately,” di Biase explained. “We have direct comms with the captain. If they are running into weather, they talk with us, they try to avoid that weather or pause where they can. It’s a custom service.”
A F50 catamaran is moved across the technical area in Sydney in March. (Felix Diemer for SailGP)
The absolute authority over their vessel proved crucial last season when the league made the agonizing and highly disruptive decision to cancel its event in Rio de Janeiro.
At the San Francisco Sail Grand Prix last March, the Australian team suffered a catastrophic wing failure. By the time engineers realized the issue was a systemic structural fault across the entire fleet, the cargo ship was already halfway across the Atlantic, steaming toward Brazil. “Canceling that and managing our reputation around that was probably the biggest challenge we had then,” di Biase said. “But it was the right decision. You take an early hit for a long-term benefit.”
As the 2026 season marches toward its grand finale later this year in Abu Dhabi, di Biase’s logistics team is staring down its most geopolitically complex puzzle yet: the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. With major commercial shipping corridors highly compromised, planning a multi-million-dollar marine transit through the region has been causing significant headaches in SailGP’s London headquarters.
“It’s very tough, honestly,” said Biase. “Nobody has a crystal ball that tells us whether this conflict is going to be solved next week, or in six months, or in three years. At the same time, we have a number of partners in the UAE, all extremely well-connected with what’s happening now and cautiously confident that it’ll resolve on time.”
The clock is ticking loudly. Because SailGP’s calendar is an unbroken, interconnected chain, an alternative plan cannot be drawn up at the eleventh hour. “Decision time is getting closer. If we wanted to commit to an alternative, we would have to do that in the next few weeks. It’s a very tricky situation.”
Whatever is thrown in its path, SailGP will streamline the logistical process wherever possible. Di Biase said Russell Coutts wants 20 races in a season. The current fleet configuration cannot handle that spin cycle, there is simply no more fat left in the shipping schedule.
SailGP is attacking the conundrum on two fronts: re-engineering existing infrastructure and exploring alternative approaches to conventional maritime transport.
General view of the team hangars in the technical area last March. (Simon Bruty for SailGP.)
The first major casualty of this optimization drive is the custom-built SailGP team bases. Previously, the team areas featured a cleverly engineered, pop-out fabric roof system that converted the shipping containers into elaborate bases that sheltered the shore crew and the boats from the worst of the elements. While visually impressive and popular with the teams, it created a massive logistical bottleneck.
“We can’t build the base until the containers have arrived, and we can’t leave with the F50 until the base has been packed down,” di Biase pointed out. “We’ve recently gone for a different model of base, which we call ‘Team Base Light’. It’s just a little bit of a hut for the teams, and the F50 is out in the open. We’re trying to move towards these more efficient logistics by removing weight where we can.”
The new, more nimble setup is not popular with the teams, but needs must in the relentless drive for efficiency.
However, the holy grail for SailGP’s next logistical leap is the concept of a ‘mothership’; a massive, custom-engineered vessel capable of transporting the F50 fleet completely assembled.
Currently, the tech team spends days carefully dismantling the giant wing sails, dropping the massive carbon platforms off their foils, and separating the hulls just to fit them inside the 40-foot containers. If the league can eliminate the teardown and rebuild phases entirely, the transition time between international ports could drop from weeks to days.
“With the model that we have now, we cannot go to 20 races or even 20 teams,” di Biase said.
“The timeline of racing, packing up, moving containers, and being at sea has reached a ceiling. The big benefit of a vessel would be to keep the boats assembled for transport. But it has downsides: you have to build it, it’s a massive capital investment, and you need to find the right location to berth in each city so you can offload the F50s offboard.
“We’re exploring those various models, including duplicating equipment, or even running two different fleets in two different hemispheres.”
F50s being prepared ahead of the France Sail Grand Prix last September. (Jason Ludlow for SailGP)
One option that has already been evaluated and rejected is air freight. While Formula 1 can fly its grid around the world in the bellies of air transporters, the outsized, awkward dimensions of a foiling catamaran hull make aviation a non-starter. “Flying would not be an option for us, unfortunately, so we need to find solutions at sea,” he said.
For di Biase, the obsession with modularity dates back to the wild, unrestrained days of the 2010 America’s Cup in Valencia, where he managed the training program for Oracle’s gargantuan 90-foot trimaran. That boat featured a staggering 68-meter rigid wing sail that could not be disassembled.
“The logistics around that were just horrendous,” said di Biase, laughing. “We had to charter a vessel just for that cargo, or charter a barge just to go from the port to the racing venue. I think that’s where we realized early on that, if we want to move boats around in the future, they’ll need to be small and fast, and they need to be like a Lego kit, essentially. Otherwise, it doesn’t work.”
Di Biase’s relentless drive to simplify the kit continues.
