For 27-year-old Brit Cameron Gregory, capturing high-performance sailing is more than just a job – it’s a daily balancing act of performance tech, storytelling, and fast-moving logistics.
As Senior Content Producer at Athena Sports Group, Gregory’s work spans two high-profile campaigns headed by legendary British yachtsman Sir Ben Ainslie: the British America’s cup team and the Emirates GBR SailGP Team – as well as the Athena Pathway Programme.
If it involves a camera and a foiling boat, he’s probably behind it – on the chase boat, flying a drone, or behind a laptop turning raw footage into content.
“In short, everything that involves a camera around the Athena Sports Group sailing teams,” Gregory explains. “Across Athena Racing, Emirates GBR SailGP Team and Athena Pathway – I currently create the majority of video and photo content that you see on social media as well as some other responsibilities around cameras.”
And it’s not just the glossy media stuff. “For AC37 I was responsible for operating and maintaining a selection of the performance related cameras – coach cameras and onboard GoPros – as well as flying a drone for coaching and analysis video of the sailing.”
That means long days on the water, helping the performance team get the footage they need, while simultaneously trying to document the broader story of the campaign.
“When the America’s Cup is in full swing this was a bit of a balance,” he says. “The daily on-water role included: ensuring the performance team were content with what they were getting from GoPros positioned on the yacht; managing the ‘coach cam’ [a fabulously expensive gyro stabilised video camera that sits atop the main chase boat] to stream the yacht’s session back to mission control ashore, getting the drone up and down for aerial shots – all whilst also trying to ensure I could capture storytelling elements of the campaign and the training/testing session, and capturing glamorous Mediterranean backdrop images for social media.”
With the Cup campaign currently in a quieter phase, Gregory has turned his full attention back to SailGP. “The SailGP side of things is a bit of a different beast,” he says. “It’s less of a continuous full-steam approach than the Cup, with gaps between events, but each event is a million miles per hour.”
A Creative Path to Professional Sailing
Gregory’s route into professional sailing wasn’t traditional – and neither was his introduction to the sport. “I was quite late getting into the sport,” he says. “Growing up, my family was always very water sports orientated but never really particularly around sailing. My grandparents were sailors in their younger years in Plymouth and often spoke of it – I would say that was an influence in me choosing to get into sailing when I went to university.
That decision – combined with a longstanding fascination with extreme sports videos – steered him in a new direction.
