{"id":80429,"date":"2026-09-04T04:59:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T04:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/80429\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T04:59:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T04:59:10","slug":"spain-sail-grand-prix-how-los-gallos-achieved-a-remarkable-turnaround-in-form","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/80429\/","title":{"rendered":"Spain Sail Grand Prix: How Los Gallos achieved a remarkable turnaround in form"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0This story is part of\u00a0The Athletic\u2019s coverage of SailGP, an international sailing competition that has been likened to Formula 1 on water. Follow SailGP\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With Diego Bot\u00edn and his crew flying high in the SailGP Championship, it\u2019s easy to forget things didn\u2019t always come so easy to the Spaniards.<\/p>\n

Ahead of this weekend\u2019s Spain Sail Grand Prix on home waters, Los Gallos are second overall in the standings after two event wins this season, comfortably ahead of Sweden in third and bettered only by Tom Slingsby and the Australian \u2018Flying Roos\u2019 who are enjoying an incredible run of form.<\/a><\/p>\n

But in 2023, the team was in disarray. Having finished last in Season 3, they were in need of a drastic change or else there was a risk the team would be chopped from the league altogether.<\/p>\n

A year later, Los Gallos battled their way to overall victory in Season 4 in a stunning turnaround and have continued to be among the championship\u2019s leading teams ever since.<\/p>\n

To understand how Los Gallos pulled off the most impressive upturn in the short history of SailGP, The Athletic interviewed three people who were instrumental in the Spanish revolution: wing trimmer Florian \u201cFlo\u201d Trittel, team CEO Tony Alqu\u00e9zar, and performance coach Hamish Willcox.<\/p>\n

They describe a transformation that had less to do with new technology, or a sudden influx of talent, than with a deliberate, sometimes uncomfortable, process of rebuilding trust, identity and belief.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to forget, watching Los Gallos race in 2026, just how close the Spanish team came to disappearing altogether.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a coach, a few sailors, and a shore team who didn\u2019t necessarily want to leave the team, and on the corporate side there was a lot of people on sick leave,\u201d Alqu\u00e9zar, who joined as CEO just two weeks before the start of Season 4, recalls.\u00a0\u201cWe really didn\u2019t have much of a structure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Willcox, who since early 2022 had been working closely with Bot\u00edn and Trittel as their coach leading up to their 49er Olympic campaign for Paris 2024, was brought in during that same period of turmoil, after SailGP CEO Russell Coutts decided Bot\u00edn needed to move from flight controller to the driver\u2019s position, i.e. the captain of the ship.<\/p>\n

Coutts is entitled to an opinion because at that point the Spanish were one of a number of teams who were centrally funded by the league, which was launched with the considerable financial support of Larry Ellison, the Oracle software billionaire who co-founded SailGP with Coutts in 2019.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe team was in real disarray,\u201d Willcox said, with a lot of disgruntlement caused by the removal of the previous driver, Olympic bronze medallist Jordi Xammar, from the boat. \u201cThere were quite a few people who disagreed with the change and were sort of in mutiny at Jordi\u2019s departure. So the team was in a real state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Willcox found a very low-tech but effective way of gauging the state of the Spanish team. \u201cI did a little survey of all of the other SailGP teams because I knew somebody in every team. And I asked them their opinion of our team, what they thought were the strengths and weaknesses, looking at us from the outside. People are very open to passing information, especially when you\u2019re last in the league.\u201d<\/p>\n

What Willcox found inside the team was a delicate matter: resentment over pay disparities and a string of small grievances that had curdled into low-grade distrust. Willcox\u2019s fix was disarmingly simple \u2014 that everyone be paid the same daily rate.<\/p>\n

He remembers telling the group that no one was doing the job for the daily rate. \u201cSo, what if we all just paid ourselves the same daily rate, put that behind us, and focused on winning the prize money instead?\u201d The proposal landed well, and became an important early building block.<\/p>\n

From there, Willcox pushed the team toward a flatter structure than the traditional sailing hierarchy, in which a star helmsman and a handful of senior crew dominate decision-making. The team ran an unusual exercise: sitting down and asking themselves, sailor by sailor, position by position, whether any individual or crew on a rival boat genuinely intimidated them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe went through team by team, analyzing the helmsman, the flight controller, the whole crew, comparing ourselves man-to-man, and none of them intimidated us,\u201d Willcox said. \u201cNot one.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exercise, he believes, reset the team\u2019s internal sense of its own worth.<\/p>\n

\"Los<\/p>\n

\n Los Gallos finished last in the 2023 SailGP championship but went on to win the title in 2024. (Ricardo Pinto for SailGP)<\/p>\n

Alqu\u00e9zar, arriving into this environment from a career that spanned two America\u2019s Cup<\/a> campaigns, as well as a number of Bahrain-backed investments in other sports, soccer club boardrooms, and Formula 1, brought an outsider\u2019s eye to a sport he admits he knew little about. What struck him first was the culture.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I saw when I joined the team was an incredible group of people. I\u2019d never seen that kind of humility in a team before, not in other sports,\u201d he said. But he also sensed something unresolved beneath the surface. \u201cYou\u2019d go in and see good friends, everything seemed fine on the surface, but something was wrong, and I couldn\u2019t quite work out what.\u201d<\/p>\n

To address it, the team brought in a mental-performance coach, an old friend of Alqu\u00e9zar\u2019s, to help bring to the surface any underlying tensions that the group hadn\u2019t fully acknowledged. The result, Alqu\u00e9zar said, was a culture the team now calls \u2018radical transparency,\u2019 in which anyone, from the shore crew to Alqu\u00e9zar himself, can flag a problem directly.<\/p>\n

\u201cEven I get told, \u2018Tony, I don\u2019t think this is right,\u2019 and that\u2019s fine,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s about taking that message the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Willcox found similar language in a book that shaped much of his thinking during that period, \u201cBelonging\u201d by Owen Eastwood. The book\u2019s central idea is that a team needs both a collective identity bigger than any individual, and sufficient space for each person to understand their own motivation.<\/p>\n

He adapted the book\u2019s principles specifically for the Spanish squad. It was around this time, born partly from an in-joke among the sailors, that the team\u2019s new name emerged: Los Gallos, which means The Roosters in Spanish. \u201cThis idea of a collective identity, aiming for something bigger than ourselves individually,\u201d Willcox said.<\/p>\n

Even with a rebuilt culture, the team faced SailGP\u2019s most severe constraint: almost no time to train.<\/p>\n

Unlike an Olympic campaign, where sailors spend hundreds of hours every year refining technique on the water, SailGP teams get only a handful of days between events. Trittel said that scarcity forced Los Gallos to get unusually disciplined about what happens off the water.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a lot of meetings, we always reviewed video of ourselves and of the opposition, between events, during an event, between days. That\u2019s really the toolkit we have for training right now,\u201d he said, describing deliberately separate technical and tactical conversations, breaking down maneuvers, straight-line speed, and starts into granular discussions.<\/p>\n

However, what Trittel said isn\u2019t so different to what the other SailGP teams are aiming to achieve off the water. There must be more to it than that.<\/p>\n

What Trittel believes ultimately separates Los Gallos from the rest isn\u2019t a training method at all, but chemistry and friendships built over years, both on the F50 and off it. He points to his own long sailing history with Bot\u00edn, forged in the 49er class, as a direct competitive advantage.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can sense what he wants sometimes because we have a history of sailing together on other boats,\u201d he said. Trittel compares the dynamic to that of New Zealand\u2019s Olympic gold medalists Peter Burling and Blair Tuke, who were also coached by Willcox for more than a decade.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are many moments, especially in the driver-wing trimmer relationship, where you need excellent alignment on certain decisions,\u201d he said. \u201cDecisions that have to be made in a fraction of a second, with no time to discuss them in the moment.<\/p>\n

\"Florian<\/p>\n

\n Spain\u2019s turnaround in form in recent seasons has been remarkable. (Jon Buckle for SailGP)<\/p>\n

After the big changes of 2023, initial progress came unevenly. Willcox recalls the team\u2019s expectations being kept deliberately low even as results began to turn.<\/p>\n

An early Season 4 win in Los Angeles gave the team its first real jolt of confidence, though gaps remained everywhere. What Los Gallos had learned to do by then, Willcox said, was \u201cidentify the gaps and go after the easy wins.\u201d These included starts, mark-room decisions and, above all, the ability to fight back through the fleet after a poor start, something which has become a hallmark of the Spanish in more recent years.<\/p>\n

The Season 4 title, when it came in San Francisco, arrived almost by accident. Los Gallos scraped into the three-boat final on the last race of the qualifying rounds thanks to an error by the French, while New Zealand and Australia, the dominant teams all season, sailed defensively, content simply to have already secured their spot.<\/p>\n

\u201cHumans perform best when their backs are against the wall,\u201d Willcox said.<\/p>\n

In the winner-takes-all final itself, a well-timed split at the bottom gate gave Los Gallos the gap they needed to hold on and win. \u201cNot a single person on the boat felt we\u2019d deserved it,\u201d Willcox said. \u201cWe\u2019d been given an opportunity and we took it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Spain<\/p>\n

\n Spain SailGP Team, helmed by Diego Botin, celebrate after winning the SailGP Season 4 Grand Final. (Adam Warner for SailGP)<\/p>\n

If the Season 4 win was surprising, what followed was almost harder to believe.<\/p>\n

Three weeks after the Grand Final, Bot\u00edn and Trittel arrived in Paris to compete for Olympic gold in the 49er class, physically and emotionally drained from the SailGP campaign. Willcox, who traveled with them, said the exhaustion was real, but that competing across disciplines had, paradoxically, helped.<\/p>\n

His prescription in the gap between the two events was blunt: total rest. \u201cJust completely decompress from SailGP,\u201d he told them. \u201cStay in bed until you feel the need to get up.\u201d<\/p>\n

The approach paid off.<\/p>\n

After a shaky final day of fleet racing threatened to derail their campaign, Bot\u00edn and Trittel composed themselves through some horribly light and fluky conditions on the Bay of Marseille and delivered a masterclass to win Olympic gold when the heat was on.<\/p>\n

Since then, Los Gallos have kept building rather than resting on the title. Alqu\u00e9zar has overseen the team\u2019s growth from roughly a dozen staff to nearly 20, backed by new ownership from Quantum Pacific and the arrival of coaches Simone Salv\u00e0 and Vicky Travascio.<\/p>\n

The core lesson, though, hasn\u2019t changed since those uneasy days of dismantling and rebuilding the team. Everyone on the team has bought into the need for mutual trust, transparency, shared identity, to form the foundations from which results will follow.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people talk to us about building a winning culture, and there\u2019s a lot wrapped up in that,\u201d Alqu\u00e9zar said. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to build our own culture, and we\u2019re still working on it. We haven\u2019t fully delivered it yet, and maybe we never will exactly the way we imagine; it\u2019s more of a north star that we\u2019re always working toward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, it\u2019s easy to sing when you\u2019re winning but Alqu\u00e9zar knows the team\u2019s current run of form won\u2019t last forever.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m sure we\u2019ll make mistakes, and things won\u2019t always go our way, but that\u2019s the process, like in life. It\u2019s not if things will go wrong, it\u2019s when. At which point the question is how we stick together and continue to give our best.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Spain Sail Grand Prix takes place in Valencia on September 5 and 6 from 7.30 a.m ET (12.30 BST). Viewers in the U.S. can watch on CBS Sports Network, while those in the UK can watch live on TNT Sports. For more information on how to watch wherever you are in the world, click here.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s note:\u00a0This story is part of\u00a0The Athletic\u2019s coverage of SailGP, an international sailing competition that has been likened…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[21004,798,17],"class_list":["post-80429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-global-sports","tag-sailing","tag-spain"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}