The Ocean Race Atlantic’s new Super Sprint asks boats to cover raw distance regardless of direction — deliberately removing the tactical tension that defines offshore racing.
The Ocean Race Super Sprint delivered its first winner on September 2, somewhere in the Atlantic off New York: Boris Herrmann’s Team Malizia covered 6.75 seamiles in twenty minutes aboard the brand-new Malizia 4. A day later, Francesca Clapcich’s 11th Hour Racing team won Sprint 2. The cumulative leaderboard now shows Malizia on eleven points, 11th Hour on nine. These are real results, produced by real sailors pushing real boats. Yet they measured something offshore racing has not traditionally asked its competitors to optimise: pure GPS distance, point to point, regardless of direction.
That last phrase is the one worth stopping on. It appears on the official Ocean Race scoreboard, and it is not an accident of drafting. It is a design choice, and it changes what the Ocean Race Super Sprint actually is.
What “Regardless of Direction” Actually Means
Offshore racing is, at its core, a VMG problem. Velocity Made Good — the component of a boat’s speed that translates into progress toward a destination — is the discipline that separates the sport from powerboat racing or a drag strip. A boat that is fast but sailing the wrong angle loses to a slower boat on a better course. Every routing decision, every gybe, every weather call is a negotiation between speed and direction. Strip that negotiation away and you are left with something simpler: a speedometer.
The Super Sprint strips it away. By measuring the greatest GPS distance covered in twenty minutes without reference to the course toward Lorient, it rewards raw boatspeed alone. A crew could theoretically win a sprint while sailing away from the finish. In practice that probably will not happen — the boats are already heading east, and a sprint at 17:00 CEST is unlikely to prompt anyone to reverse course. However, the format does not care whether a crew bears off to find a faster angle at the expense of progress, or sails high and slow but closer to France. It cares only about the number on the GPS.
For a sport whose entire intellectual premise is that speed and progress are different things, this is a notable omission.
The Tour de France Comparison, and Why It Limps
The organisers themselves invite the cycling analogy. Their scoreboard page describes the Super Sprint as “similar to how sprints and climbs are parallel competitions within the Tour de France cycling race.” The comparison is flattering. It is also misleading in a way that matters.
The Tour’s green jersey — its points classification — is, like the Super Sprint, a formally separate classification from the general classification. Green jersey points do not change GC time-based standings any more than Super Sprint points change the overall Ocean Race Atlantic result. But the green jersey reshapes race behaviour because its sprint points are contested on the race course, in the race direction. Riders earn sprint points at intermediate waypoints and stage finishes they must pass through anyway. Chasing green changes how teams ride: leadout trains form, breakaways are controlled, positioning battles erupt kilometres before the sprint line. The parallel classification visibly reshapes the race it sits inside.
The Ocean Race Super Sprint has no comparable feedback loop. It does not affect the overall race standings. It occupies a fixed twenty-minute window inside a daily broadcast. And because it measures distance regardless of direction — detached from the course, detached from progress toward Lorient — it cannot even claim to reward the boat making the most ground at any given moment. It is a classification without consequences, measured on a metric without context.
A classification without consequences, measured on a metric without context — that is not a parallel competition. It is a segment.
The Broadcast Logic
None of this means the Super Sprint is stupid. It means the Super Sprint is television.
The format sits inside a 30-minute OnBoard Live Show broadcast daily at 17:00 CEST on YouTube, DAZN, and several international networks. The show features live connections to every boat. The Super Sprint gives that show a competitive centrepiece — a daily competitive segment with a start, a finish, a winner, and a number. For a mid-ocean passage race in which the actual standings may barely change over 24 hours, this is not a trivial problem to solve.
Traditional offshore racing is famously resistant to live broadcast. The action is slow, invisible, and distributed across thousands of miles of ocean. The Ocean Race has tried various solutions over the years. The In-Port Race Series in the 2022-23 edition staged short inshore races at stopover cities, giving fans a visible spectacle. Those races did not directly add to overall standings but served as a tiebreaker mechanism, and they took place at stopovers between offshore legs rather than being embedded within a passage. The Super Sprint attempts something more ambitious: manufacturing a daily broadcast moment inside the passage itself.
The question is what that moment teaches its audience.
The Audience Problem
If you are new to ocean racing and you tune into the OnBoard Live Show, you will see six foiling IMOCAs sprinting for twenty minutes, and you will see a winner. You will learn that Malizia 4 is fast. You will learn that the boats cover impressive distances in short bursts. You will not learn why Boris Herrmann chose a southern course off New York before the fleet turned north. You will not learn how Clapcich’s navigator, Will Harris, weighs the risk of a fast reaching angle against the cost of extra distance to Lorient. You will not learn any of the things that actually decide who wins this race.
This is the tension at the heart of every sport’s broadcast strategy. You can simplify to attract a wider audience, or you can insist on the sport’s native complexity and accept a narrower one. Most sports do both — highlights for casual viewers, analysis for devotees. The Ocean Race Super Sprint presents itself as the former. Yet because it is embedded inside the race and carries its own leaderboard, it risks becoming the thing a new audience learns to watch for. It is training a viewer to value speed over VMG, distance over progress, the dramatic over the tactical.
The strongest counter-argument is straightforward: any entry point is better than none. If a twenty-minute sprint brings a viewer to the tracker, and the tracker leads them to the routing decisions, and the routing decisions hook them on the real sport, then the Super Sprint has done its job. This is the funnel theory of sports broadcasting, and it has worked elsewhere. SailGP’s stadium racing format has grown its audience significantly since launching in 2019, demonstrating that short-format, close-to-shore racing can attract viewers.
But SailGP’s format is the competition. Every race counts. Every result matters. The Super Sprint, by its own design, does not affect the overall standings. It is a parallel entertainment, and its audience knows it — or will learn soon enough.
What the Sprint Cannot Show
Two days into a roughly seven-day transatlantic crossing, the six-boat IMOCA fleet is still sorting itself out. Malizia 4 led after the opening night. The fleet fought through weak, shifting winds near the Gulf Stream before turning east. These are the kinds of conditions in which offshore races are won and lost — not in twenty-minute bursts of speed but in hours of patient, invisible positioning.
Conrad Colman’s MSIG Europe, sailing an older non-foiling IMOCA, will almost certainly never win a Super Sprint. Yet Colman and his crew are racing the same ocean, collecting the same weather data, and solving the same VMG equations as everyone else. The Super Sprint cannot show what Colman is doing, because what Colman is doing is not fast. It is something harder to televise and more interesting to understand: it is tactical.
The Ocean Race has been experimenting with format since the Volvo era, from changing boat classes and leg structures to adding in-port racing and the VO65 Sprint Cup. Every experiment is a bet on the audience you want to build. The Super Sprint is a bet that daily drama matters more than daily complexity. It may well be right about what works on screen. The gamble is whether what works on screen will ever lead an audience back to the sport that plays out between the sprints — the slow, untelevised, beautiful arithmetic of sailing the right course.
The Right Question
No sailing publication has yet examined the Super Sprint on its own terms, and no sailor has been publicly quoted offering an opinion on the format. This is new territory for the Ocean Race Atlantic, and it deserves scrutiny rather than reflex applause or dismissal. The format is clever. The broadcast integration is serious. The question is not whether the Super Sprint entertains. It probably does.
The question is whether an audience trained on twenty-minute bursts of raw, directionless speed will ever learn to care about the thing that makes ocean racing worth watching: the tension between fast and right.
