Ellie Aldridge, from making Olympic history to trying to break into SailGP: ‘The stakes are very different’

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Feel the fear and do it anyway. Ellie Aldridge has long since overcome the anxieties that come with crashing on the water at high speed. Last summer in Paris, she even conquered the world and made history, becoming the first Olympic gold medalist in kiteboarding.

The 28-year-old should be the ideal fit for SailGP, the close-to-shore sailing competition where the foiling catamarans can hit peak speeds of 50 knots (almost 100 kilometers an hour — 60mph) while racing close to each other.

Twelve national teams, comprising six crew members, race in identical carbon-fiber catamarans head-to-head over a 12-month season, which runs from November to November. The high-tech catamarans, known as F50s, travel at a pace so rapid that even the petrol-powered chase boats can’t keep up.

The difference is, in kiteboarding if something goes wrong, she’s only got herself to worry about. In SailGP, a bad decision or poor maneuver can put teammates at risk.

“I’m used to standing on a 1.4m board that weighs 2.5kg and being in control of everything,” she told The Athletic. “Whereas the F50, it’s faster, it’s bigger, it’s just so wide and you’ve got all these other boats around you. We’re used to big fleets in kiteboarding, too, but with these reaching starts in SailGP, things can change very quickly. You have to be very, very aware of what’s going on around you.”

Aldridge, from Poole on England’s south coast, is a reserve strategist for the British team that lies fourth in the standings and will soon experience the thrill of competing on home waters when the championship heads to Portsmouth, 60 miles or so along the coast from her home town, this weekend for the seventh leg of the 12-round championship.

She is effectively the understudy to current strategist Hannah Mills, the 37-year-old double Olympic gold medalist who also happens to live in Poole. Clarity of decision-making is essential to the role of strategist, as it is they who plot a weaving path through the high-speed traffic for the driver steering the F50.

But for Mills, and even the rest of the regular race crew, time on the F50s to hone such skills is precious, with opportunities to train and race on these specialized catamarans in short supply given the boats themselves need to be transported from venue to venue for the Grands Prix, meaning the only opportunity to be on the F50s themselves is during the Friday practice before race weekends.

Britain’s wing trimmer Iain Jensen, driver Dylan Fletcher, and Ellie Aldridge before the Australia Sail Grand Prix in Sydney in February. (Felix Diemer for SailGP)

So for a reserve sailor such as Aldridge, her access to the boat is limited. She managed to grab an hour on Britain’s F50 during the build-up to last month’s New York Grand Prix, a precious and rare opportunity. Still, she’s biding her time in the belief that one day her chance to race will come.

The problem for the next generation of potential SailGP athletes is gaining experience. Sometimes opportunity only arises through someone else’s misfortune, and that very nearly happened at the Auckland SailGP event in January.

“The team got in touch to ask what I was doing and if I was interested in seeing what SailGP was all about,” she said. “I was planning to spend the winter down south in New Zealand anyway, so the timing worked out perfectly. I was in Auckland during the event when the Canadians had a crash and their flight controller (Billy Gooderham) got injured and couldn’t race.

“There was a message sent out to see if there were any spare flight controllers anywhere and there was none in the whole of SailGP. There was not a single spare flight controller.

“There are a lot of good people who are trained up but they’re already on boats and there’s no spare. There’s no one that’s up and coming that can be there, just in case. And when all these new teams come up (in future seasons), like, who’s gonna sail them?”

Next season, two new teams will enter the championship, a sign of the growth of a sport that is just six years old but with that comes teething problems. Gooderham’s injury meant Canada had to sit on the sidelines for day two of the Auckland event. Aldridge would have loved to leap into the breach, but without the necessary experience, knows it would have been a fool’s errand.

“I just thought, ‘I’ve been given this opportunity to come, see what it’s like,’ and yes, everyone expects me to train up to be a strategist, which is really cool, and I am really enjoying learning that role, especially in the GBR team. But it has motivated me to train up in the other roles as well,” she said. “So I’ve been on the simulator as much as possible, and on the boat whenever we’ve got the time.”

One job she’d really like to try is flight controller, responsible for maintaining the F50 in steady flight above the water. The higher the boat rides, the faster it goes, but the closer it is to crashing off the foils.

Each SailGP team has six crew members. (Drew Jordan / The Athletic)

Running that fine line between top speed and wipeout is what Aldridge has been perfecting for the past six and a half years of her Olympic kitefoiling campaign. “We’ve only got one foil when you’re kiting, it’s underneath you and you’re controlling it all by your toes, and your feet, and tiny, little movements,” she explained.

“When you break it down to the basics, it’s exactly the same thing as what you’re trying to achieve from the F50.”

Except, it could be argued, she has already mastered the art of riding foiling’s equivalent of a unicycle; so learning to ride a bike should be a simpler learning curve for her compared with most sailors from a more traditional background in conventional sailing boats.

Each team in SailGP needs at least one female crew member. While there hasn’t yet been a female flight controller, there are no barriers to entry for this role. With Anna Weis already operating in the highly physical grinder’s role for the U.S. team and Martine Grael recently driving the Brazilian team to its first race victory in New York last month, it seems only a matter of time before SailGP will have its first female flight controller.

Aldridge said she would jump at the opportunity, although she was mindful of the responsibility that came with the role.

“Riding high is what makes the boat go fast, but obviously you’re close to losing control and the stakes are very different. It’s not just you and your board, which is maybe bad enough, but now you’re carrying the safety of everybody with you,” she said.

Reserve strategist Aldridge (second left), with her SailGP teammates. (Brett Phibbs for SailGP).

Still, if you’re looking for someone with nerves of steel, you couldn’t do better than Aldridge. Going into the final day of the Olympic sailing competition, the British sailing team was facing the prospect of departing a Games without a gold medal for the first time since Atlanta 1996.

It was all on Aldridge’s shoulders to bring home a gold from the one remaining opportunity — women’s kiteboarding. This would require her to beat the clear favourite, Lauriane Nolot, France’s reigning world champion, on home waters. Unfazed by external pressures or expectations, ice-cold Aldridge duly delivered. Team GB’s blushes were spared.

Double Olympian and former 49er skiff world champion Stevie Morrison coached Aldridge to her gold, so he knows her mental and technical strengths better than most. He is also one of the commentators for SailGP’s live broadcast team.

“Ellie’s certainly got the right temperament for the flight controller’s job,” Morrison told The Athletic.

“Her ability to stay calm in the moment, when going really, really fast, and knowing where the edge is, it’s pretty unique. Racing at the Olympic Games, the fact that she could stay totally in the moment, totally on the edge and knowing where that limit was, that was the defining factor between her winning or not winning gold. That makes her the perfect candidate to take on a flight controller role in SailGP.”

Having etched her name in Olympic history, you wouldn’t rule her out of creating SailGP history, either.

(Top photo: Jason Ludlow for SailGP) 

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