SailGP and Emirates help restore Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal before New York race

SailGP and Emirates turned a New York race week into a neighborhood restoration day on Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal, where athletes and stakeholders swapped F50s for gardening gloves. The work centered on planting native grasses, installing rain gardens and laying the groundwork for an experimental mussel habitat along the canal’s steel bulkheads.

The setting mattered as much as the labor. The Gowanus Canal was authorized in 1849 and completed in 1869, and its banks later held manufactured gas plants, foundries, coal yards, shipyards, mills and tanneries that helped turn it into one of the city’s most damaged waterways. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began full-scale dredging of the Superfund site in 2020, then amended its cleanup order for the canal’s middle segment on June 27, 2024. Nearby Sponge Park, an 1,800-square-foot rain garden completed in 2015, already captures and cleans stormwater runoff from 2nd Street.

For SailGP, the Brooklyn project fit squarely inside its Ocean Impact and Championing Oceans work. The series says its host-city activations are meant to deliver community-led environmental projects, and its sustainability policy frames that effort as a way to accelerate positive social and environmental impact across its ecosystem. SailGP’s 2022 Purpose & Impact Report also described an Impact League created to reward environmental and social action, giving the race circuit a more measurable framework than a standard sponsorship program.

In Gowanus, that strategy lined up with a restoration network already in motion. SailGP’s New York activation focused on planting and maintenance in public rain gardens and on expanding shoreline plantings at Sponge Park, while the broader project is expected to support 7,000 native plants, four intertidal planters around mussel habitat modules, 145 tree beds and 100 volunteers, along with youth training. The work also connected to stewardship efforts led by the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, which has long described its mission as building a resilient open-space network centered on the canal. A 2024 community grant supported the conservancy’s Mussel Habitat Project, reinforcing that the SailGP effort was plugging into an existing local restoration push rather than replacing it.

For catamaran fans, the message was clear: the sport’s most visible boats may still be the foiling F50s, but SailGP is also trying to win on land. By tying a high-speed regatta to visible work on one of New York’s most symbolically polluted waterways, the series and Emirates used race week to show that ocean-health credibility can be built block by block, not just earned on the water.