“This would mean the world to us.”

After last year’s breakthrough in Sassnitz, Germany return with more pace, more consistency and a genuine shot at the podium. Erik Kosegarten-Heil and Anna Barth at the Sassnitz press conference. Photo credit: SailGP Sassnitz does not behave like a normal sailing venue. The Baltic resort has discovered a second identity: for one weekend, the shoreline fills up, the grandstand gets loud enough for sailors to hear it through their in-ear comms, and 50-foot catamarans start behaving like badly supervised aircraft. Last year’s debut brought more than 13,000 spectators, a German race win and Nicolai Sehested’s 103.93 km/h SailGP speed record. SailGP liked the experiment enough to commit to returning to Germany through 2027. Now the fleet is back. And underneath all the talk about wind, speed and split fleets, the more revealing subject at the pre-race press conference was pressure: the pressure of a home crowd, of recent success, of being the new team suddenly expected to contend, and of travelling at roughly motorway speeds while six people try not to make one another’s mistakes worse. The Lowdown Germany have become quick enough to overtake. Their problem is getting off the line quickly enough to matter. The home crowd is an advantage until it becomes expectation. Erik Kosegarten-Heil admitted there is “a bit more pressure” when friends, family and the German sailing world are watching. Split fleets remove traffic, not jeopardy. Fewer boats give strategists more room to read the wind, but also remove excuses. Sassnitz’s speed record is almost treated as a side quest. Nicolai Sehested thinks 105 km/h is there, but only if the race situation happens to provide the right angle, gust and timing. Momentum makes teams nervous. Florian Trittel has just won two events with Spain and is already thinking about what happened the last time his team won twice in succession: the next event went badly. For a new Artemis team, finishing second twice is encouraging. Staying second would eventually become irritating. “It still feels like we’re not getting off the line quick enough.” Germany no longer have the comforting problem of simply trying to keep up. Kosegarten-Heil’s assessment is more awkward: the boat is now fast enough to pass people, but the team is still spending too much of the race repairing what happened at the start. “We had a lot of progress, especially on speed, and we are now able to overtake people on the course.” That changes the psychology. When the boat is slow, the explanation is obvious. When the boat is fast but the results are inconsistent, the uncomfortable questions move inside the team. Last year, Sassnitz became a reset. Germany arrived after a difficult Portsmouth event and won the opening race in front of their home crowd. This time there is less novelty and more expectation. The starting box will not make that easier. Offshore wind coming over Sassnitz’s steep coastline can become shifty and gusty. A bad start in a short SailGP race is not a small inconvenience. It can become the entire story. The home crowd can supply noise. It cannot supply clear air. “I could actually hear the crowd.” Sailors spend enormous amounts of money and technology trying to remove distraction. Sassnitz apparently puts some of it back. Anna Barth could hear German supporters from the water last year despite racing with in-ear communications. “It’s really tricky to hear with our in-ears on the water, but in Sassnitz I for sure heard the fans.” There is something slightly absurd about that. Six athletes are travelling at huge speed, processing wind, traffic, boundaries and boat data — and somewhere through all of it comes the unmistakable sound of thousands of people wanting one particular boat to win. Barth also gets one of the clearest benefits from the new split-fleet format. Fewer boats mean less traffic and more space to look at the actual racecourse. “I’m able to focus more on specific boats and anticipate better.” That is the promise of the format: less congestion, more sailing. It also creates a harsher test. If there is more room to find the right lane, bad decisions become harder to blame on chaos. “It feels always like a bit more pressure having the home crowd cheering for you.” Home advantage is one of sport’s favourite clichés because it allows two opposite things to be true. Thousands of people want you to succeed. Thousands of people are there to watch whether you do. Kosegarten-Heil has friends and family in Sassnitz, while his partner is expecting their child in October. The whole German sailing ecosystem feels unusually close. “There is a bit more pressure on us, but this is what you need to deal with.” That is the bit usually edited out of the homecoming montage. Belonging can make athletes feel stronger. It can also create a room full of people whose disappointment you can imagine before anything has even gone wrong. The crowd is energy. The invoice arrives as expectation. “When you’re doing 90 km an hour, a crash with the water hurts almost as much as a crash with something solid.” Nicolai Sehested arrived with tape around his finger and an unusually convincing explanation for why water should not always be considered the soft option. ROCKWOOL Racing had been experimenting with crew configurations in practice when a manoeuvre went wrong. No other boat was involved. The F50 simply met the water badly. “There’s been a few hiccups on our boat in terms of a few crashes — not with any other boats, but just with the water.” This is where SailGP’s television polish can disguise what the athletes are actually doing. The boats foil above the surface, the graphics make the racing legible, and everything looks controlled until something stops being controlled. At 90 km/h, “the water” is no longer a reassuring phrase. “There’s way more in the tank.” Sehested already owns the number everyone keeps mentioning in Sassnitz: 103.93 km/h, set here in 2025. SailGP still promotes Sassnitz as its fastest racecourse on the back of that run. He also sounds almost mildly inconvenienced by everyone asking about it. The team is not going hunting for a record at the expense of race points. The conditions need to arrange themselves: the right gust, the right angle, the right run towards mark one. Then? “It’s just a matter of time before we break 105 km an hour.” That is the strange thing about records in engineered sports. One minute 103.93 km/h is a headline. The next it becomes evidence that the machine has not finished revealing itself. The more interesting question is not whether somebody can hit 105. It is whether they can hit it while still making a sensible racing decision. “The biggest threat is ourselves.” Sébastien Schneiter supplied the line every coach likes and every athlete eventually has to prove. Asked which team worried Switzerland most in its split-fleet group, he refused the invitation. “If we can do the things well within our team and sail cleanly around the racetrack, we can beat anyone.” It sounds tidy. SailGP is not. At these speeds, “focus on ourselves” still requires knowing where everyone else is, finding pressure, managing boundaries, executing manoeuvres and avoiding expensive carbon-fibre meetings. But there is something useful underneath the cliché. Once a team becomes competitive enough, rivals stop being the only threat. Execution becomes one. The better you get, the fewer external explanations remain available. “Coming second at the end of the year is probably going to be very frustrating.” Nathan Outteridge has discovered the awkward economics of improvement. Artemis are a new team. Two consecutive runner-up finishes should feel excellent. They do. Until they don’t. “There’d be a lot of teams happy coming second in all these events throughout the season.” But repeated proximity changes expectations. Once athletes learn they can reach finals, reaching the final stops being the achievement. Outteridge’s more telling point is that Artemis now feel capable of racing against the established front-runners. The dangerous moment for a new team is not when it believes it is bad. It is when second place starts to feel like evidence of what it should have won. “We really need to put focus on not relaxing.” Success apparently comes with its own superstition. Florian Trittel’s Spanish team arrived in Sassnitz carrying two consecutive event victories. Rather than discussing a three-peat, Trittel remembered the previous time they managed back-to-back wins. The next event was poor. “For us it’s about wisely managing the momentum that we’re carrying.” Momentum is one of those sports ideas everybody invokes and nobody can actually store in a cupboard. Winning can create confidence. It can also soften urgency, increase attention and make every rival more interested in beating you. Trittel’s problem is therefore not how to enjoy momentum. It is how to behave as though it does not owe him anything. “I don’t have too many friends and family here, but that’s just a general thing.” Then Sehested punctured the entire mythology of home support in about ten seconds. Asked whether Sassnitz felt like a home event for ROCKWOOL Racing — Denmark is close, ROCKWOOL is the title partner — he admitted there were not many friends and family attending. “That’s just a general thing. There’s nothing to do with the event.” Elite sport spends a lot of time presenting athletes as disciplined machines. Occasionally somebody remembers to be funny. At an event dominated by marginal gains, championship mathematics and 100 km/h boats, perhaps that matters too. A team still has to be somewhere people can take the piss out of themselves.