Season 2 of SailGP kicks off with race in Sydney, Feb. 28-29
January 31, 2020
SYDNEY, Australia (LOG NEWS SERVICE)—Teams from France, Great Britain, Japan, Denmark, Spain and the United States return to Sydney Harbor on Feb. 28 and 29 to take on Australia in the first race of Season 2 of SailGP.
SailGP ﹘ which was founded by tech billionaire Larry Ellison and five-time America’s Cup winner Russell Coutts ﹘ announced in December 2019 a team from Denmark would join the six other national teams competing in Season 2 of the event, which it said would be held in some of the world’s most iconic cities.
The Denmark SailGP Team presented by ROCKWOOL one of the world’s largest manufacturer of insulation materials, will have around-the-world sailor Nicolai Sehested at the helm and Olympic silver medalist Jonas Høgh-Christensen as team manager.
Sehested, 30, has had significant success across a variety of major sailing events, highlighted by two Ocean Race campaigns as a helmsman. He’s also been the skipper and founder of Ewii Racing (formerly TREFOR Racing) in the World Match Racing Tour since 2010.
Høgh-Christensen is a four-time Olympian in the singlehanded Finn class (2004-16) – including in 2012, when he took the silver medal – and a five-time world championship medalist. On the business side, he spent seven years in marketing, commercial and operations with entertainment company Live Nation, and co-founded peer-to-peer boat rental platform Boatflex.
SailGP CEO Sir Russell Coutts, said: “The addition of the Danish team adds a lot of excitement heading into SailGP Season 2, which is shaping up to be another super competitive sporting championship. Denmark has achieved remarkable success in Olympic sailing and will now compete at the top level against the best sailors from six other nations in incredibly high tech, foiling, wingsailed catamarans.”
Unlike the America’s Cup, all the boats are identical and crews are not allowed to make changes without approval.
Following the Sydney event, the global championship returns to the U.S. for events in San Francisco (May 2-3) and New York (June 12-13), before returning to Cowes on the Isle of Wright (Aug. 14-15) for the first European event of the season.
