Russell
On behalf of all sailing journalists around the world who have had the temerity to have written anything that could be considered critical of SailGP, please accept our sincere and heartfelt collective apologies.
Please forgive us for caring enough about the sport of competitive sailing to express our personal opinions on how SailGP might be made safer for the sailors and more entertaining for the fans. What on earth were we thinking? We realise now that our views and those of our audiences hold no value whatsoever.
We would also like to thank you for pointing out the true motives behind our editorial output. Without your recent presidential address video we all would still be labouring under the terrible misapprehension that our stories, podcasts and videos provided an independent viewpoint that served to provide some balance to SailGP’s PR machine.
We now realise that – unbeknownst to us – what we were really out to do was to ‘tear down’ SailGP. (We are still not sure on why we would want to do that, but we are sure you are right – you always are.)
Please also believe us when we express our sincere contrition for putting the entire SailGP operation at risk with our ‘ill-informed’ comments. We had not realised that SailGP was in such a precarious state that a little media criticism could have put the multimillion-dollar international circuit in danger of collapse – and we were all so relieved to hear that the operation is now “too big for that to happen”.
We realise now that we could have avoided all this confusion if we had all simply done what you advised us to do and “thought about it for five minutes”. That five-minute thinking rule is so obvious now that you have pointed it out – and something we will definitely all be incorporating into our workflow going forwards, so we appreciate the tip.
Thank you with all our hearts Russell for taking the time to put us all straight on all this. Were it not for you taking the time to preach the truth on social media, we would still be mistakenly believing that a legitimate part of our role as journalists might be to compare and contrast sailing’s two most high-profile competitions – and we would all still be out there trying to create content that both SailGP and America’s Cup fans (mostly the same people) found interesting.
Truth be told, we should all also be thanking you for saving us a whole bunch of work going forward. Rather than all that time-consuming research and interviewing we have been doing previously, we realise now that all we need to do is to cut and paste the SailGP press releases.
Better still, maybe we should step aside and stop muddying the waters for you with our pesky independent viewpoints? Please let us know if that would help?