The real deal
Hot on the tail of the brilliantly successful (and important) Star Sailors League comes another zinger of a concept – the Nations Gold Cup
Star Sailors League Nations Gold Cup
The idea for the SSL Nations Gold Cup is one of those ideas that once you have it explained, you wonder why it hasn’t already happened. It’s a keelboat regatta in identical one- designs, with a strict nationality rule. The plan is for a maximum of 40 national teams to contest the first ever SSL Nations Gold Cup at a European venue in 2021. Since the concept was announced in November, the SSL phones have been ringing hot with applications and enquiries from around the world. The SSL stands for Star Sailors League, and the Nations Gold Cup is the latest and grandest vision yet from the people who have delivered the successful Star Sailors League competition over the past five years. You may well have seen the live online coverage of the world’s greatest skippers going up against each other in Star class keelboats in the azure blue waters and sunny skies of the Bahamas.
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The “Star” in SSL stands not for the Star boat, by the way, but for the stars of our sport: the sailors. The aim of all SSL competitions is to make the athletes the most important element of the race. Whereas the America’s Cup is primarily a design contest, the Nations Gold Cup is all about the people. The Gold Cup’s ambassador and one of the chief architects of the concept is himself a great sailor, Poland’s 1996 Olympic Champion in the Finn class dinghy, Mateusz Kusznierewicz. ‘We’ve had an unbelievable response to the concept since we launched the SSL Nations Gold Cup to the world,’ he says. ‘Some of the names are very impressive and we can’t wait to start announcing them in March.’
The format
Set to take place every other year from 2021 onwards, the competition will be open to all 140 countries whose national federations are recognised by World Sailing. The final phase of the SSL Nations Gold Cup
Above: the stars in the Star Sailors League are the sailors, not the boats (although the eponymous keelboats are indeed used in the series). Broadcast live online, the SSL pits the world’s great sailors against each other in the glorious blue waters of the Bahamas. For the first edition of the brand new SSL Nations Gold Cup, however, the organisers plan to use a European venue and a bigger boat
will host a maximum of 40 teams, with a specific rule to ensure the presence of some of the “emerging sailing nations”. Borrowing from the tried-and-tested format used in major tennis and football tournaments, after the round-robin phase the top 16 teams will proceed to a thrilling knock-out phase. All scores up to that point will be wiped clean, so it will be a simple battle to qualify through to the next round. This format has already been well tested and widely enjoyed by some of the best sailors in the world at the SSL Finals in Nassau, every December since 2013. The most thrilling finale to date was Paul Goodison’s one- second victory over Robert Scheidt in December 2017.
National pride
Kusznierewicz explains the appeal of the Nations Gold Cup: ‘it uses the same nationality principle as the Olympic Games to provide a country- against-country championship. By mixing the use of one-design big
STAR SAILORS LEAGUE/MARC ROULLIER
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