Tall, blond and with a beaming smile, Kyle Langford has enjoyed a meteoric career as a professional sailor that the RC44 class was heavily responsible for kick-starting.
“I was doing the World Match Racing Tour, with Keith Swinton and then Torvar Mirsky and it was going pretty well,” Langford recalls. “We were racing here in Sweden and Jimmy [Spithill] saw that we were a young Australian team, doing similar to what he’d done, and sent us an email saying, ‘we need an amateur for the RC44…’”
Langford is fortunate to come from Lake Macquarie (north of Sydney, just south of Newcastle) where Australia breeds most of its sailors – including Nathan Outteridge, Iain Jensen and Chris Nicholson among others. There he proved an accomplished dinghy sailor, winning the Volvo Youth Sailing ISAF World Championship in 2005 aboard a Hobie 16 catamaran. He then embarked on an Olympic Tornado catamaran campaign before the class got scrapped for London 2012. Instead he moved to Europe to start match racing.
The call from the Oracle Racing skipper came at a fortuitous time. Larry Ellison, Russell Coutts, Spithill and the team having won the Deed of Gift 33rd America’s Cup in their monster trimaran. Following this in 2010 Oracle Racing was campaigning two RC44s- Ellison and Coutts on Oracle Racing and an amateur driver with Jimmy Spithill on 17 (now Aleph Racing). 20-year-old Langford joined 17 as offside trimmer. While Oracle Racing won the overall series in 2010, that year 17 claimed the RC44 match racing world championship in Puerto Calero (back when RC44 events had both fleet and match racing components).
Clearly Langford made an impression with Spithill as from a lowly role on the RC44 he ended up trimming the wing on the Oracle Team USA AC72 catamaran in San Francisco. “That was unbelievable - perfect timing,” muses Langford of how he was fast tracked.
After successfully defending the America’s Cup, Langford competed in the Extreme Sailing Series for two seasons with Oman Sail teams as well as the America's Cup World Series and the 35th America's Cup (still with Oracle) in Bermuda in 2017. After this he tried his hand at racing offshore, landing a ride on board Team Brunel in the 2017-18 Volvo Ocean Race, winning the round the world race in 2022-23 with Charlie Enright on 11th Hour Racing.
His big gig in recent years has been sailing the first four seasons of SailGP with the Australian team before jumping ship, to rejoin Spithill with the new Italian team, Red Bull Italy.
After a 15 year break Langford has returned to the 44Cup with Markus Törnqvist’s GeMera team. “I live in Sweden now and when Artemis did the Youth and Women's America’s Cup, I spent the last year in Barcelona coaching them. Then they mentioned they were getting a second team together with Markus for this and asked me to get involved.”
On board GeMera, Francesco Bruni is tactician and Langford trims main and is also involved with running the boat and the crew. This has included setting up their new boat, which had her first outing in May in Porto Cervo, where remarkably they finished third, seemingly fast out of the blocks.
The GeMera crew is remarkable as while there is an almost two decades-old knowledge base of RC44 set up and tuning, their line-up is a mix of present day America’s Cup legends and Swedish youngsters with precious little RC44 experience.
Having the highly experienced Artemis Racing team of Markus’ father Torbjörn as a stable mate, certainly helped, although Langford says they are maintaining some independence: “We're able to think a bit differently, do things better, but also do things worse as well. But the nice thing is we can lean on our teammates to get us up to speed in the areas where we're lacking, and bring a different perspective, which is valuable.”
Langford is also involved in GeMera’s sail program with North (their sail designer is Juan Garay), although he personally runs the Doyle loft in Stockholm (although now part of the North Sails universe). “We've actually gone down a slightly different path than them [Artemis Racing] with sail design, because they're quite refined in the way they sail, whereas we don't have any experience in the class, so ours is more stock standard, and once we figure out how we sail the boat and what our style is, and the conditions and the venues, then we'll customise our set-up.”
Markus Törnqvist, while young has done a reasonable amount of dinghy sailing which also helps their perfroamnce. “He's got a Moth at home and he's done a lot of sailing. The racing is so close in this class that, especially at top marks, you need that instinct from the helmsman to make the right decision and put the boat in the right spot. He's surprised all of us with how well he's been doing, especially under pressure in those tight post-quarter combat moments.”
As to how he feels RC44 is aging, Langford says it is doing well: “The 44 is a lot of fun – probably the most fun you can have on a keelboat. Because I think the key is, all nine people are contributing to boat speed and need to be locked in to keep the boat going fast. If one stops doing their job well, then the performance is lacking. Whereas on a bigger boat you may have just your main trimmer, the helm, and maybe your jib trimmer sitting in, holding ropes - that's it. On the 44, every single person holds a control line, whether it is the checkstay, runner, jib lead, or whatever – that is pretty unique.
“Then the systems on the boat are difficult, which makes the boat handling challenging and easy to get wrong. But if your timing is perfect and the choreography between the crew is good, then you can pull off really nice manoeuvres. But the margins are so small: In Porto Cervo we were saying if we were five metres faster per upwind leg, we would have led at every top mark… That’s less than half a boat length.”
Changing from racing an F50 flying catamaran to RC44 displacement monohull and back is not that difficult, says Langford. “I feel like it takes me a day to kind of get into it. To be honest, the feel of trimming a mainsail or a wing is very similar. A lot of it is about heel control and just what mode you're in and that doesn't change - it's just the amount of movement, and of course the adrenalin...”
As to how the 44Cup has changed from his first stint on it in 2010, he admits he personally is a different person today. “Before I was 20 years old and I didn't know anything - I was so useless on board, that I couldn't believe it when they asked me to come back and do another event. I was fortunate the crew was very understanding. Today, I still have a lot to learn, but I've got a better understanding of how everything works. So it's hard to draw comparisons, because I was so green the last time I sailed these boats.”
As to how he spends his time racing today, Langford says he reckons he has about perfected the balance between SailGP the 44Cup plus the odd offshore race when it fits in. Often these are Rolex Sydney Hobart races with either Comanche or Wild Oats. “It's nice to have a bit of a mix and blend different racing. I enjoy the mixture.”