Opinion: There’s a lot to like about SailGP.
The racing is spectacular, and without knowing a thing about the sport it’s easy to get behind the national team (even if they’ve adopted the obligatory, formulaic monicker, Black Foils).
It’s deliberately not an all-male endeavour.
The marketing is slick. Blair Tuke and Peter Burling’s charity Live Ocean Foundation is involved in projects around Lyttelton Harbour.
But, then, Sir Russell Coutts…
The SailGP CEO’s spray, over successive days, came across as a rich man’s tantrum, and must have undermined goodwill built up for the event over several years.
On Friday, he told 1News Lyttleton was unlikely to host SailGP again, bemoaning the fact it can’t get its favoured February dates – presumably because it’s when dolphins are present in higher numbers with their calves.
He used the racially charged term “minority groups”, but somehow resisted the urge to say “woke”.
“Like a lot of things in New Zealand these days there’s a few minority groups that have a huge say in what happens and that’s the way it works.”
Then, after the presence of dolphins caused the cancellation of Saturday’s racing, Coutts issued a combative statement about having an “extreme” marine mammal management plan “forced upon us”. It was an example of the country being “handcuffed by unprecedented layers of bureaucracy and red tape”.
“I find it astonishing the amount of influence iwi have over the authorities here in New Zealand,” he said, despite the event embracing the cultural aspects of being in Whakaraupō this past week by having sailors welcomed at a pōwhiri at Rāpāki.
Suddenly, Coutts was also a marine mammal expert, calling out University of Otago professor Liz Slooten for a “lie” the Hector’s dolphin/Upokohue were endangered. (It wasn’t her classification, she said, but that of the International Union for Conservation of Nature.)
He also had a crack at harbourmaster Guy Harris for being “extremely restrictive”.
(Mishele Radford, chair of Te Hapū o Ngāti Wheke said on Sunday: “SailGP knew what they signed up for when they decided to hold the event within a marine mammal sanctuary.”)
This hasn’t always been the event’s tone.
In October 2022, before the inaugural event on Whakaraupō, event director Karl Budge said: “SailGP is firmly committed to minimising impacts on the local environment and has comprehensive protocols in place to mitigate risk to marine wildlife in every city we visit, including Ōtautahi, Christchurch.”
It had also “engaged the foremost local experts in marine mammal management to develop a plan bespoke to Whakaraupō, Lyttelton Harbour, Hector’s dolphins and our style of racing”.
“We are confident in the efficacy of this plan and the measures laid out.”
(More recently, SailGP’s managing director Andrew Thompson called the plan “industry-leading” and an example of the event’s “commitment to the environments in which we operate”.)
The plan, owned by SailGP, wasn’t followed this past year. The race controller ignored instructions to halt the final race because dolphins were spotted too close to the boats.
The Department of Conservation initiated two probes but they were eventually dropped. SailGP refused to provide GPS data to authorities.
Was SailGP “committed to minimising impacts”, as it said? Or, as others have put it, was the plan a necessary evil in the pursuit of “dollars over dolphins”?
Now, Coutts appears to have said the quiet bit out loud.
Trusting his own, limited experience, Coutts said dolphins were extremely intelligent and “are inherently aware of boats around them”. What chance would they have if hit by a boat moving at 100kph? Scientists say any collision would likely be fatal.
But that doesn’t seem to faze Coutts.
He made the analogy about people not being allowed to drive because there’s a chance of being killed on the roads. “Inherently, as a society we accept an element of risk in our daily lives.”
The comparison is a weak one – even before you realise roads have traffic lights and speed limits to protect people.
SailGP is operating, with a fragile social licence, in a marine mammal sanctuary. A better analogy would be allowing Formula One cars to race within a national park, near kiwi.
Coutts sees a world full of obstacles. Unfortunately, he can’t see the benefit to his SailGP brand of caring for dolphins, and being aligned with protecting the natural world, despite his “long career connected with the ocean”.
We can’t pave everywhere. Not every place is a playground for the elite, and commercially powerful, to be marvelled at on live television. Other creatures have the inherent right to enjoy their home – a home humans have decided to protect – unmolested by foiling catamarans.
Imagine a world where Sir Russell celebrated the privilege of being able to run a commercial event in a marine mammal sanctuary. Instead, he reveals to the public his own privilege – inhabiting a world in which, if he stamps his feet loudly enough, he might get his way.
