Looking at 6394 races that took place in 2021.

SYRF is using technology to grow the sport of sailing. One of the ways we do that is by turning data into spectatorship. SYRF has quite a few things to be proud of this year (launching LivePing for instance), but as we look back, we thought it might be fun to showcase some of our data from 2021, and most importantly, release it to the community.

Methods

SYRF.io is the world’s first sailing player search engine. Our mission is to connect spectators to race trackers as quickly as possible. Doing so is good for the sport, it’s good for tracking companies and it’s good for sponsors. As part of that mission, SYRF.io collects metadata about the players in the same way that Google collects information about html websites. Our services index new races every day from the leading race trackers and make the metadata searchable.

Overview

Here’s some eye candy visualizations of all 6394 tracked races that took place in 2021.

Each dot is a race and the color represents the tracker used in the race.
Great circle routes colored by number of boats in the race.

Where people sail:

If you haven’t checked out https://sailyachtresearch.org/where-do-people-sail/ you may find that interesting as well.

Let’s take a look at the countries and cities that had the most races.

These cities come from a dataset of cities and towns with > 1000 people. Often, they represent a suburb or hamlet near a larger city. If in fact a race was closer to a particular named town than a major city, we use the town name to be as precise as possible. If you’re interested in visualizing a heat map of where all races took place, we recommend following our tutorial below.

What the sail tech market looked like.

Unfortunately, most regatta managers don’t integrate with trackers, which means their customers are losing out on everything from sponsorship to coaching opportunities. Here’s how the regatta management space stacked up at the end of 2021. Keep in mind that where as trackers often care about races on the water, regatta management apps are more focused on events.

The number of races tracked in 2021 per tracking company.

Download the data and extract your own insights.

SYRF is releasing our 2021 metadata dataset for you to play with on your own. Fill out the download form here: https://forms.gle/2U6qapn38p72LanM8

Once you’ve downloaded the data, watch this video on using Kepler.GL to make your own visualizations.

Jon Weisbaum

After growing tired of designing advertising APIs, I left Google to lead SYRF’s engineering team. I’m helping to bring sailing into the cloud age by developing distributed solutions for timing, trajectory streaming, automated GIS, weather ingestion and polar analysis.