Expensive, Elitist, Ridiculous — and Still Bloody Magnificent
Can ocean racing still turn money and ego into courage, competence and trust?
I have been involved in yacht racing, one way or another, since 1974, which is long enough to have made a few mistakes, owned a few boats, written a few cheques I probably should not have written, and been lucky enough to sail on programmes far grander than anything I could ever have put together myself. After fifty years around yacht racing, the question I keep coming back to is this: is it still one of sports great tests of courage, competence and trust, or has it become just another expensive arena for money, ego and status and does it matter anyway?
I think the question is worth asking because yacht racing exists in a very different world from the one I first knew. Money is different in many ways. Time pressure is everywhere. Crew expectations are different. Technology is different. The old club mentality is changing for the better. France has turned ocean racing into something public, professional and commercially understood, while in Britain parts of the middle ground feel as if they are quietly thinning out.
At the same time, the top end is still spectacular. The TP52s, Maxis, Swans and grand-prix programmes prove that serious money has not left the sport. Double-handed racing is growing because it fits modern life better than trying to organise ten people, five diaries, three excuses and one missing bowman. The Fastnet still pulls in extraordinary fleets. The Admiral’s Cup has returned. There is still magic in it.
I have seen the sport at its best: generous owners, brave crews, serious campaigns, wonderful boats and moments offshore that stay with you for life. I have also seen the other side, where the boat becomes less a racing machine and more a floating monument to ego, status and cheque-book optimism. Same old stories, but is there a sea change?
So when people ask whether yacht racing is an extreme sport or simply an extremely expensive ego trip with deck shoes, I find it hard to give a neat answer.
The uncomfortable truth is that it can be both.
Sometimes magnificent. Sometimes ridiculous.
Quite often, the two are only a watch change apart.
And that is why it is so fascinating.
Yacht racing, especially offshore yacht racing, is not extreme because someone has launched a drone to film it in ways we could never had imaged 20 years ago. It is extreme because the sea has no respect for money. The tide does not care who owns the boat. The squall does not care who paid for the carbon rig. The dark does not care if the owner sold his company, inherited well, floated something, bought something, or merely persuaded a bank manager to believe in him for longer than was sensible.
At some point offshore, the whole game becomes brutally simple. Can you keep the boat moving? Can you keep the people functioning? Can you keep making decisions when you are cold, wet, tired, frightened, irritated, seasick, hungry, over-caffeinated and beginning to hate the sound of your own voice.
That is the bit the shore never really sees. The shore sees the start line, the drone shot, the flags, the matching kit, the club lawn, the big watch, the rib with the photographer, the dinner, and the owner looking relaxed while quietly wondering how the new mainsail ended up costing the same as a decent car. The shore does not see 0300. The shore does not see the owner below, head in hands, finally understanding that unlike a racehorse, football club or Formula One team, this particular vanity project expects him to participate.
That is the great difference. If you own a racehorse, somebody else rides it. If you own a football club, somebody else runs around. If you own an F1 team, no one sane asks you to put a helmet on and actully drive it. But if you own a racing yacht, sooner or later, and it most cases, you have to go sailing.
The owner is not just paying. He is exposed.
Yacht racing is not like most rich people’s sports. You do not merely own the asset. You become part of it. That is its genius. That is also the problem.
A serious racing yacht is not just a boat. It is a floating argument between money, skill, courage, vanity, fear, engineering, fatigue, weather, friendship, hierarchy, status and the very basic human need not to be made to look useless in front of people you slightly admire.
That is why owners are, perhaps, drawn to it. Not just because they want to win. Not just because they enjoy standing on the dock while people in branded fleeces call them “boss”. They are drawn to it because, unlike so many other expensive sports, yacht racing still allows the owner to be tested.
Not symbolically tested. Not tested by whether his people produce a good quarterly report. Not tested by whether the horse runs well. Not tested by whether the striker scores. Tested by whether he can stand his watch, take a knock, listen to someone younger, shut up when necessary, make a call when it matters, and still be worth having aboard when the boat is wet, dark and properly alive.
That is intoxicating. It is also dangerous, because ego gets aboard early. Anyone who says there is no ego in yacht racing has not spent time near a starting line, a protest room, an IRC certificate, a dockside debrief or a yacht club bar after a result that did not go quite as the owner had hoped.
There is owner ego. There is skipper ego. There is navigator ego. There is trimmer ego. There is bowman ego, which frankly deserves its own medical classification. There is even quiet crew ego, the person who says nothing for 36 hours and then casually mentions they were right about the tide all along.
But ego is not the whole story. If yacht racing were only ego, it would be much easier to buy a Bentley, a shooting estate, a racehorse, a younger girlfriend, or a distressed football club and get the same result.
People keep coming back because offshore racing gives them something modern life rarely gives them: consequences. Real consequences. Not corporate workshop consequences. Not “lessons learned” consequences. Not a whiteboard full of action points nobody will read again. Actual consequences.
You chose the wrong routing. You were late changing sails. You did not feed the crew properly. You trusted the GRIB too much. You failed to brief the watch. You tolerated the wrong behaviour. You confused enthusiasm with competence. You had an argument.
The boat tells you. The race tells you. The sea tells you. And unlike business, it tells you quickly and you can’t stop and go home.
That is why yacht racing should be one of the greatest schools of leadership in the world. Not because it is noble. Not because sailors are better people. But because the environment is brutally good at exposing weakness.
A boat is a company with nowhere to hide. The owner is the founder. The skipper is the chief executive. The navigator is strategy. The trimmers are performance management. The bow is operations. The watch system is culture. The galley is morale. The heads are governance. And the sea is the market, except less forgiving and better dressed.
The crew make the owner’s dream real
The cheap shot is to call yacht racing a rich man’s sport and leave it there. That is emotionally satisfying, especially if you have just looked at the price of a new sail, but it is too easy. It misses the most important thing about the sport: a racing yacht is never really an individual possession once it goes offshore. It becomes a crewed system.
Even double-handed, the owner needs one other person who is prepared to share the work, the fear, the risk, the watch system, the mistakes and the smell. In fully crewed racing, he may need six, eight, ten, fifteen, twenty or more. On the biggest boats, the numbers become almost absurd. But the principle is the same. Without crew, a racing boat is an inanimate object. With crew, they own a living machine and powered by people who may never have such an opportunity without them.
That is where the sport becomes interesting. A rich owner can buy carbon. He cannot buy courage at 0300. He can buy a navigator. He cannot buy belief after three bad calls. He can buy a sail wardrobe. He cannot buy a crew culture where the youngest person on board feels able to say, “I think that’s badly trimmed”.
The good owner understands this. The bad owner thinks the crew are there to animate his fantasy. The good owner knows the boat is only as strong as the people who will still perform when the fun has gone. The bad owner assumes the invoice has already solved the problem. That’s all part of the draw for owners and crew.
The best crews are not built by money alone. They are built by standards, trust, repetition, humour, honesty, fitness, humility and the ability to have difficult conversations before the race on equal terms. They are built by people who understand that offshore racing is not a passenger activity. Everyone affects the result. Everyone affects morale. Everyone affects safety. Even the quiet person.
This is the point people outside the sport rarely understand. Offshore racing is not just about boats. It is about people using boats to discover things they would rather not discover in an office and on a level playing field with older, younger and people with totally different back grounds. (Ok rarely level on a boat but you know what I mean).
The good owner learns that money is useful but insufficient. The good skipper learns that command is not shouting. The good navigator learns that certainty iis fleeting. The good crew learn that trust is built before it is needed. The weak crew member learns that offshore racing has a wonderful way of finding passengers. The arrogant person learns that the sea has a better sense of timing than any critic. The frightened person learns that fear is manageable. The quiet person learns they may be stronger than the loud one. And sometimes the rich man learns he is not the hero of the story.
France made offshore racing public. Britain missed the boat!
This is where Britain should start feeling uncomfortable.
France took offshore sailing and made it public, corporate, professional and emotionally understandable. They turned the lone sailor in an IMOCA into a national hero. They turned sponsors into patrons of adventure. They turned ocean racing into a visible, investable story.
The Vendée Globe is not just a yacht race in France. It is a national cultural event. The 2024/25 edition recorded 160 million website and app visits, 18 million unique visitors, and 9.2 billion social media impressions. That is not three blokes in a yacht club arguing about sail numbers. That is mainstream reach.
The French also built pathways. The Figaro system and offshore training centres at places like Port-la-Forêt, La Rochelle, Lorient and La Trinité-sur-Mer are part of a real machine for developing offshore sailors.
Then the corporates joined in properly. Banque Populaire, Paprec, Sodebo, Charal, MACIF and others did not just put stickers on boats. They built long-term stories around performance, technology, resilience, geography, youth, environment, regional pride and human endeavour. This is not charity. It is not a chairman’s hobby hidden in the sponsorship budget. It is corporate storytelling attached to human performance.
Britain, meanwhile, has often done what Britain does best. We kept it slightly private, slightly clubby, slightly embarrassed, and slightly impossible to explain to anyone who was not already in the room.
We had the history. We had the Fastnet. We had the Admiral’s Cup. We had Cowes. We had the Solent. We had the clubs, the sailors, the navigators, the boatbuilders, the designers, the weather, the tide, the pain and the stories. And still, somehow, we let France make offshore racing look more modern, more commercial, more professional and more emotionally relevant.
British offshore racing has not failed because we lack talent. It has failed, where it has failed, because too often we sold the wrong thing. We sold exclusivity when we should have sold intensity. We sold tradition when we should have sold transformation. We sold club life when we should have sold leadership under pressure. We sold out when we should have sold the night watch.
And now we are seeing the consequences.
The Fastnet is huge. The middle is not healthy.
Firstly let’s be clear. British offshore racing is not dead. The Rolex Fastnet Race remains enormous. The 2025 centenary edition had 451 yachts entered from 34 countries, with crew from 57 countries, and included 80 double-handed yachts. That is extraordinary, and it proves offshore racing still has enormous pull, even if the race nows ends in Cherbourg!
Nor should we ignore the return of the Admiral’s Cup. The 2025 event brought the Cup back after more than two decades away, with 15 international teams racing from Cowes and the Fastnet Race forming the climax of the series. Reuters described the revived event as drawing the world’s elite back to Cowes, and Monaco went on to win the Cup in its return year.
That matters. It was a proper moment. Anyone who loves offshore racing should be pleased it happened.
But one huge Fastnet and one revived Admiral’s Cup do not automatically mean the middle of British crewed offshore racing is healthy. That is the dangerous bit.
Because from where I sit, the middle is hollowing out.
Not the grand-prix top end. There is still money there. There are still very rich owners. There are still people who can run a TP52, a Maxi, a Swan, a custom IRC boat, or a programme with coaches, sailmakers, pros, logistics and enough branded clothing to clothe a small dictatorship.
The TP52 Super Series continues to operate as a serious grand-prix circuit, with events in places such as Puerto Portals and Porto Cervo. Swan is doing what Swan has always done brilliantly: selling not just boats, but belonging. The 2025 Swan One Design Worlds brought together 35 yachts from 30 nations across four classes in Porto Cervo.
So no, wealthy sailing has not died. It has become more polished, more global, more curated, more Mediterranean, more owner-driver with professionals, more lifestyle attached to excellence. More “festival of performance” than “come down to the club and see if we can scrape eight people together for the Cherbourg Race.”
At the other end, double-handed racing has grown because it solves some obvious problems. Fewer crew. Less organisation. Less politics. Less catering. Less need to find ten people who all claim they are available until Friday afternoon, when three of them suddenly remember a wedding, a back problem and a child’s birthday.
Double-handed racing also has purity. It is hard. It is exposing. It is efficient. It fits modern life. It gives serious sailors a way to keep racing without running a floating HR department.
But the traditional middle, the decent owner with a 35 to 45-foot boat, a mixed amateur crew, some ambition, some budget and a desire to do proper offshore racing, that world feels under pressure.
Cost has gone up. Time has gone down. Crew reliability has got harder. The regulatory and safety burden is heavier. Marina costs are painful. Insurance is not getting friendlier. Sails are absurdly expensive. Younger people have less disposable time and less access. The old club pathways are weaker ye the RORC is trying to built their pathway back for youngsters but many owners, frankly, are moving away.
They do not want to spend half the week begging people to show up, only to discover that the person who promised to do bow “used to sail a lot at university” and now gets nervous every time the pole goes near the forestay.
So they stop. Or they go double-handed. Or they sell. Or they charter. Or they join a one-design circuit where the rules are clearer, the social product is better and the owner gets to feel part of something with momentum.
And this is where British yacht racing needs to be honest with itself. The problem is not that there are no sailors. The problem is that we have made the proposition too vague.
Why should an ambitious owner run a middle-level crewed offshore campaign in the UK? What exactly is he buying? A chance to be cold, poor, irritated and occasionally beaten on corrected time by a boat he thinks is slower? A crew-management problem? A rating argument? A winter maintenance bill? A Tuesday night email chain about who has done sea survival? A club prizegiving attended by people who already know each other?
That is not enough. Not anymore.
If we want big crewed offshore racing to survive at the middle level, we have to make it mean something again. Not just “come racing”. That is too weak. We have to sell the real thing.
Come and learn how to lead under pressure. Come and build a team. Come and find out what you are like when comfort has gone. Come and race a boat properly offshore. Come and be judged by something that does not care how successful you are ashore. Come and do one of the last difficult, beautiful, ridiculous things left.
So back to the question we started with.
Is offshore yacht racing still one of sport’s great tests of courage, competence and trust, or has it become an expensive arena for money, ego and status?
Both. It always has been. The test is the part that matters, and the test is the part we are at risk of losing.
Joseph Conrad, who spent two decades in the merchant marine before he ever wrote a paragraph about it, put it without sentiment in The Mirror of the Sea:
“The cruel sea... has no generosity. No display of manly qualities ,courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness, has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.” The Mirror of the Sea, Methuen, 1906,
The sea has not become more forgiving since the cheques got bigger. It is not impressed by the foils, the carbon, the satellite weather or the drones. It still asks the same questions at 0300 that it asked Slocum off Cape Pillar in 1896, Knox-Johnston deep in the Southern Ocean in 1969, and Tabarly the night he went over the side of Pen Duick in the Irish Sea in 1998.
Money does not answer those questions. People do. That is the sport’s gift, and its only real defence against irrelevance.
Which brings us, finally, to British offshore racing. The Fastnet is huge. The Admiral’s Cup is back. The top end is in good order. Stop using that as cover. The middle is hollowing out, and the middle is where the next generation of skippers, navigators, owners and tacticians is supposed to come from.
France saw what offshore racing could be, public, professional, commercially understood, emotionally legible and built the machine to deliver it. We saw the same thing and quietly hoped people would catch on by osmosis. They will not. Sell the real product. Not the lawn at Cowes. Not the matching fleeces. Not the prizegiving. Sell the night watch, the long beat, the moment the GRIB lies and the crew has to think for itself. Sell the consequence. There is still no other sport that will put the owner, the youngest crewman, the navigator and the bowman through the same fatigue, the same weather and the same fear, and judge them on the same scale. That is worth far more than we have been asking for it.
Stuart Greenfield
FirstBeat - Offshore racing intelligence
