During sea trials in January ahead of the inaugural SailGP season, Olympic champion Tom Slingsby and his Australia crew set a record of 49.7 knots in their F50 catamaran, a 15-meter sailboat that is powered by a 24-meter wingsail and a hydrofoil that lifts much of the boat’s surface area out of the water so it slices through waves like a shark’s dorsal fin. Seven months later, Slingsby’s crew set a new record off the southern coast of England—and touched the much-anticipated 50-knot threshold—in conditions so extreme that three other boats violently nosedived and the U.S. boat capsized.
Last weekend in Marseille, France, Slingsby’s crew put the finishing touches on a championship season, winning $1 million in prize money and celebrating by spraying champagne on their deck as they hoisted the trophy skyward. Their record-setting performances aside, victory was no sure thing. After falling behind at the beginning of the final race, they executed a tight maneuver around Japan’s boat at the fourth and final gate that looked like a possible crash to people watching from the shore.
But give the athletes their due: Since all the F50 catamarans in SailGP are exactly the same, the races are a reflection of skill in the five-person crews rather than any differences in equipment or technology. That’s not to say technology isn’t a vital part of the equation. Each boat is equipped with 1,200 sensors that collect metrics such as wind speed, ride height (the distance at which the boat “flies” above the water), pitch and roll, and all of that data is fed into an Oracle cloud platform almost instantly. The data is shared with all the crews, allowing them to make adjustments between each of the five races that comprise a SailGP event. The insights from the data include a metric called Velocity Made Good (a boat’s speed on water as affected by wind speed and angle), True Wind Speed (wind speed and direction as measured by a stationary observer) and boat speed.
The second season of SailGP will start in Slingsby’s home waters in Sydney, Australia, on Feb. 28. Going forward, Edwin Upson, Oracle’s vice president of enterprise cloud architects, says the goal is to layer additional analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning over the sensor data to better serve teams so they can improve performance and speeds. (The boats have an estimated max velocity of 53 knots.)
CHANGEOVER: Tennis Catapults Into the Future With Embrace of Technology
“Each team now has a data scientist to help them look at all the different sensors and motions that a driver or an athlete made on the boat, and see how they performed,” Upson says. “What was the optimal path through the course? Where was the wind on the water? After the race, they’ll sit down as a team, look at this information, and talk about the adjustments they need to make in order to perform better. What you’ve seen is that the time between first and last place has reduced significantly. And I think it’s because all the athletes are learning from each other.”
Two months ago, Oracle and SailGP hosted a three-day hackathon around the race in England to seek out innovation. One product that emerged from that event—and was tested in Marseille—was a prototype that gave crews access to live data about wind conditions across the course so they could make more informed decisions about their positioning to maximize speed. Teams were able to glance at a digital map on a mobile device to see a real-time visualization of shifting winds. High-gust zones were shaded red, with the scale reducing to orange and then yellow as the winds lessened.
ATHLETE VOICES: Smart Takes on Success, Entrepreneurship, and Their Lives Beyond Sports
The wind data was provided in real time, or within a few hundred milliseconds, just like all the data being collected from the boat sensors that is shared with crews, broadcast partners, and fans who are engaging with the SailGP app. This is all possible, Upson says, because of an extensive backend network that includes a 100-Mbps (Megabits per second) proprietary wireless network that connects with Oracle’s onshore data storage. Data first makes its way from the boats to the onshore pop-up storage facility, and then it’s transmitted via fiber optic to the Oracle Cloud at a London data center for analysis and global distribution—all within 150 milliseconds.
These efforts are supported by what race organizers call “IoT in the sky,” which refers to the Internet of Things, a technology buzzword defined by a network of connected devices that can exchange information with one another (think of an Amazon Echo interacting with your connected refrigerator). At SailGP races, helicopters hover above the course to provide an aerial LTE network that helps facilitate data exchanges from sensors, live video and audio feeds. Collected from three cameras and three microphones on each boat, video and audio are uploaded via a 2-Gbps (Gigabits per second) link to the aircraft. “What we built was basically an extreme IOT network: a smart city on the water,” says Upson.
This network also powers a second-screen experience that brings onshore fans closer to the action. On the SailGP app, fans can select up to two teams to follow and receive key performance data from. They can watch and listen to onboard action during races, hearing tactical calls while seeing waves crash onto the decks of boats that nosedive into the sea. They can also switch camera views and see side-by-side comparisons of two teams (say, Slingby’s Aussie boat next to the Japanese boat at Marseille). On the final turn heading into the homestretch at Marseille, Slingsby missed hitting the Japanese boat by mere inches to gain the edge that clinched the title.
Tension is high in this Championship Final with a near crash between @SailGPAUS and @SailGPJPN #SailGP #SailingRedefined #GrandFinal pic.twitter.com/cNSChV6via
— SailGP (@SailGP) September 22, 2019
Boosting fan engagement is a priority for upcoming seasons. Oracle and SailGP have been in talks about introducing a “ghost boat” that would digitally compete against actual crews by using artificial intelligence to analyze environmental and aquatic conditions. “It’d be traversing the race in a simulation,” says Upson. “Happening at the same time that the real boats are out there. We’d be able to see whether the AI can outperform real athletes.”
Another potential add-on for next season will be augmented reality. Fans might be able to point the lens finder on their phones at a boat to receive live data, such as speed or direction of travel, or watch a boat’s live stream feed. “So you’re not head down in the app,” Upson says. “You’re really looking at the race.”
Question? Comment? Story idea? Let us know at talkback@sporttechie.com