Rolex SailGP 2025: Speed on the Water

These vessels can reach 100 kilometers an hour, faster than most cars in city traffic, and they do it meters from the shoreline. Each stage plays out over two days, a string of short races building towards a three-boat final that decides the weekend in minutes. With Rolex as title partner, the series carries the prestige of tradition while delivering the spectacle of speed.

This summer the travelling fleet left two of its strongest impressions so far. In July, Portsmouth turned its historic harbour into an arena. Crowds stacked along the seawall and rooftops, ferries idled offshore, and the Solent bristled with sound: starter’s guns, sails cracking, commentary rolling across the water.

The Emirates Great Britain SailGP Team, with Olympic champion Hannah Mills in the strategist’s role, carried the home hopes, and every surge forward brought a wave of cheers. Switzerland SailGP Team created their own headline by reaching a Final – and a podium – for the first time in the league’s history, a breakthrough celebrated almost as loudly as a win. When the last race came, the New Zealand SailGP Team – the Black Foils – crossed ahead of the home boat. The shoreline roared anyway, celebrating the closeness, the noise, the sight of sailboats flying where ferries usually crawl.

Weeks later the show moved north to Sassnitz, on Germany’s Baltic island of Rügen, where SailGP had never raced before. The chalk cliffs became natural terraces, the harbourfront filled with grandstands, and the first home crowd arrived curious and left wide-eyed.

The Germany SailGP Team presented by Deutsche Bank lit the fuse with victory in the opening race, and the sound that followed rolled across the bay – flags rising, horns blaring, strangers grinning at strangers. Then ROCKWOOL Denmark SailGP Team pushed through the spray until the numbers on the screen stopped conversation: 103.93 kilometers an hour, a new record for the league. France SailGP Team closed the weekend by winning the Final, but by then Sassnitz had already made its mark – Germany’s debut delivered noise, theatre, and a speed no one expected to see under sail.

Put together, Portsmouth and Sassnitz show why SailGP has momentum. One coast packed its shoreline and handed the spotlight to a rising team, the other turned its harbour into a stadium and produced a number that became a season’s shorthand. Both weekends are the freshest entries in a championship that will keep moving – to Saint-Tropez, Geneva, Cádiz, Abu Dhabi – but for now the echo remains: the roar of the Solent, the gasp of the Baltic, and the image of sailing remade as flight.