SailGP will remain suspended for the rest of this year and its second season has now been rescheduled for 2021.
In a news release sailing’s global racing championship announced that two of the four impacted events have been allocated new dates for 2021. The event in San Francisco will be held on 17-18 April and New York will be on 4-5 June.
Season two will be expanded from five events to a minimum of seven during the year-long period beginning in April 2021. Results from 2020 Sydney SailGP – the first and only completed event of the year – will be null and void.
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SailGP CEO Sir Russell Coutts said: “This terrible pandemic has led to the tragic and ongoing loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, and first and foremost, our thoughts go out to those victims, and their grieving families and friends.
“The global nature of our league is one of our strongest characteristics, as we bring together top talent from all over the world to both organise and compete in a new form of professional racing. As we face this health emergency, our geographic diversity unfortunately becomes a potential liability both to ourselves and those around us.
“Our focus must necessarily shift to returning at a time when our events do not present undue internal or external risk.
“We’ll use the coming months to focus on important initiatives to make both our racing and broadcast even more attractive – including through further development of our F50 catamarans, simulator and gaming platform, as well as enhanced data integration via artificial intelligence – while continuing to work toward our ambitious target of carbon neutrality by 2025.
“I’m confident that our rescheduled second season will go beyond what we would have been able to deliver this year.”
Image: sailgp.com