The Sailors Hoping to Win the America's Cup -- by Pedaling Bikes

"Over his long career making boats go as fast as humanly possible, Matt Gotrel has done all kinds of grueling jobs. In the Olympics, he rowed them to the brink of collapse to win gold for Great Britain. And in America's Cup racing, he used all of that upper-body strength to grind enormous cranks that operated the sails.

What Gotrel had never been asked to do until recently was sail a boat by riding a bike.

But at age 35, Gotrel is part of a new breed of America's Cup sailors known as cyclors. These are the men on every boat who spend their time on stationary bicycles, churning out the colossal power required to move the sails of some of the world's fastest hydrofoil yachts. Though they have been around for less than a decade, these beasts of burden have become utterly essential to modern racing -- and sparked a frantic recruitment drive among the sport's top teams.

That's because over the coming weeks, sailing's most famous regatta could be determined by which boat is carrying the strongest cyclists.

The British and Italian teams have eliminated the Swiss and U.S. and are preparing for a showdown for the right to face the defending champion from the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron in the Cup finals.

"These teams are becoming more and more professional, and high performance is a big part of that, with crossover from other sports," says Gotrel, a cyclor for the Ineos Britannia team. "So we'd be silly not to go and look for the most powerful guys."

The idea of putting men on bikes to help boats fly above water -- a series of engineering masterstrokes -- was first used in the America's Cup by Team New Zealand in 2017 to devastating effect. The Kiwis, who have held the trophy since, stomped the U.S. team in a rout.

Other boats had experimented with similar concepts, but couldn't quite figure out how to make it work.

For one, many skippers didn't love the idea of having a bunch of cyclors running across the boat midway through the race to switch sides the way the Kiwis did.

These days, that's no longer a concern with every team opting to put their cyclors in fixed positions in tiny carbon pods on either side of the boat. 

Cyclors had been outlawed for the 2021 Cup, but returned in 2024 as crew sizes shrank to eight from 11, which meant that grinders operating hand-cranks could no longer generate enough power.

"Obviously you're way more powerful with your legs than with your upper body, so it's a no-brainer," says Ineos Britannia skipper Ben Ainslie. "We literally can't operate the boat unless they're doing their thing and generating quite immense amounts of wattage."

All that wattage is stored in a hydraulic system and used to adjust the sails during the rapid maneuvering required in the regatta's head-to-head competition.

Over the course of a race, a boat might have to execute up to 50 maneuvers in the space of 20 to 25 minutes. Each one demands a lung-burning sprint from the cyclors.

When they weren't training, cyclors on the U.S.'s American Magic also joined in the technological race to develop those systems and their part of the boat, said Ben Day, a retired pro cyclist turned coach who is the team's performance lead.

"Some of the cyclors are mechanical engineers," he said. "They bring some of their own thoughts about how to support the development."

Not all of them need advanced degrees, however -- which is just as well, since finding adequate candidates is tricky enough as it is. There's only a shallow pool of athletes in existence who can suddenly morph into cyclors.

Road cyclists were built too light, since each boat has minimum weight requirements, and even bulkier track cyclists are often too small. So Team Ineos settled on a different population of huge men who knew what it meant to suffer: they turned out to be ex-rowers.

"We had some guys who had never been sailing before," says Gotrel, who is 6-foot-5, 210 pounds, and has trained on six-hour rides with the Ineos professional cycling team. "Let alone being on a 75-foot foiling boat."

What doesn't change is how much it hurts. The cyclors sit in their boxes, slow-broiled by the Catalan sun, while being thrown around corners, buffeted by G-forces, and pedaling like there's no tomorrow. Their power output averages around 500 watts for 20 minutes, Ainslie said, which is the equivalent of what a Tour de France winner might pump out during the steepest climbs through the Alps. And they must do all of it as their core temperatures soar above 100 degrees -- the rules don't allow for cooling systems in the cockpits.

So by the end of a race, a cyclor is little more than an achy, sweaty mess." [1]

1. The Sailors Hoping to Win the America's Cup -- by Pedaling Bikes. Robinson, Joshua; Kuriloff, Aaron.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 20 Sep 2024: A.12.