For Tom Slingsby, the launch of Team Australia's 38th America's Cup challenge in Sydney this week was not a beginning but the closing chapter of a 17-year conversation.
Australia's most decorated active sailor — Olympic gold medallist, Moth and Star world champion, two-time World Sailor of the Year and Bonds Flying Roos SailGP skipper — has been chasing a homegrown Cup tilt since his early twenties. On Wednesday, he finally got it.
"The opportunity to represent Australia in the America's Cup with an Australian team is something that genuinely means a lot to me," Slingsby said as the Royal Prince Edward Yacht Club's challenge was formally lodged.
He let his memory roll back to the conversations that started it all. "I remember us saying 'One day we'll get our shot' and it's been almost 20 years since then, but here we are!"
Slingsby's appointment as Head of Sailing is more than ceremonial. He will function as a co-helmsman aboard the refurbished Te Rehutai, the AC75 that Emirates Team New Zealand sailed to victory in Auckland in 2021, while also acting as the team's competitive figurehead. His SailGP day job, where he leads Australia at the top of the global league, dovetails neatly with foiling AC75 sailing.
The structure around him is heavyweight. CEO Grant Simmer — a member of the 1983 Australia II crew that broke the New York Yacht Club's 132-year grip on the trophy — is on his thirteenth Cup campaign. Three-time Cup winner Glenn Ashby is Head of Performance and Design and is brokering the technical partnership with Emirates Team New Zealand. SailGP strategist Tash Bryant rounds out the named operational group.
Simmer framed the cultural challenge bluntly. "My job is to pull together a good team and create a culture in that team," he said. He noted, too, that the schedule is unforgiving for a campaign launching just two years out from racing: "The nice thing about tight on time and a pretty tight on budget – tight but adequate – is that you don't waste time on science projects!"
Ashby, who has lived inside winning programmes with both Oracle Team USA and Emirates Team New Zealand, spoke for the sailor in Slingsby as much as for himself.
"For more than half my sailing career I have had a dream to see an Australian team return to the pinnacle event," Ashby said. "One of the strengths of our country is that we're happy to lean in, swing hard and have a go!"
The dream Slingsby alluded to has a precise origin. Australia's last Cup campaign was Young Australia in 2000, fronted by a 20-year-old Jimmy Spithill — three months after Spithill's debut, Slingsby was a teenage Laser sailor watching from the dock. The country has not had an entry since.
Slingsby's SailGP teammates will not all make the cross to the Cup boat, but Bonds Flying Roos crew are expected to feature heavily in the Naples campaign. Racing begins in the European spring of 2027, with the Cup match scheduled for July 10 to 18.
A 17-year dream now has a deadline.
