I remember when I was working for the America’s Cup website in Valencia back in 2007, and how my Canadian friend Peter Rusch, the website editor (then and now), used to laugh mockingly at me whenever I had a word of praise for Ben Ainslie. Ruschy doesn’t mock me any more. What any British sailing fan has known for years, the rest of the sailing world has finally woken up to. When Ben Ainslie won his fourth gold medal at London 2012 this summer, he moved past the legendary Paul Elvstrom as the most successful Olympic sailor of all time.
Ben didn’t have much time to celebrate his success before it was time to hop on a plane for the first America’s Cup World Series regatta in San Francisco. It would also be the first outing for Ben Ainslie Racing, the subsidiary team of Oracle Team USA which is to be skippered by Ainslie and crewed by members of the defence team. Ben also announced that his long-term sponsor JP Morgan will be lending its support to Ben Ainslie Racing, although we’ll have to wait and see if Ben can ever gather the funds to mount an America’s Cup team fully on his own terms.
For the time being, he will be working as an employee of Oracle Team USA in its bid to defend the America’s Cup in summer 2013. It will be interesting to see what role he takes up in the team once the Americans’ AC72 giant catamaran comes on stream. As I write, it was just rolling out of the shed in San Francisco, a few weeks after Emirates Team New Zealand had launched its AC72 in Auckland. Once we’ve got used to the sight of these things, the AC45s will look like playthings.
But as for Ainslie. Does he have any hope of displacing James Spithill as the helmsman/skipper? The winning skipper of the last America’s Cup must be starting to feel naked without any medals around his neck. Not that he’s ever tried, because Spithill has been a dyed in the wool America’s Cup sailor since the age of 20 when he got the opportunity to steer Young Australia in 2000 at the Louis Vuitton Trophy series in Auckland.
Aside from Ainslie, there’s another new Olympic champion in the Oracle ranks, Spithill’s friend and fellow Australian Tom Slingsby who dominated the Laser class in Weymouth. And meanwhile Team Korea have proven what a smart signing they made with Nathan Outteridge earlier this year, the 26-year-old Australian sailing to an easy Olympic gold medal in the 49er skiff.
Then again, gold medals don’t necessarily mean that you’re any good at the America’s Cup, as former US team OneWorld was only too keen to tell a young Ben Ainslie back in 2000. Underused and underrated by his peers, Ainslie couldn’t wait to leave, and OneWorld’s loss was Team GB’s game as Ainslie embarked on a Finn campaign that would lead to a decade of dominance in the Olympic heavyweight singlehanded dinghy.
Funnily enough, Spithill was the chosen helmsman for the ill-fated OneWorld campaign. Now 12 years later, Spithill and Ainslie find themselves to be team mates again. But does Oracle have any real intention of using Ainslie in a meaningful way in its campaign, or is it a matter of paying handsomely to have the world’s best sailor in the Oracle tent pissing out, rather than take the risk of having him on the outside, pissing in?
So all us ‘experts’ observing the America’s Cup have been saying that no one’s ever going to take it away from Oracle next September. But after the defender’s shock pitchpole and subsequent destruction of its multimillion dollar AC72, the odds on a Kiwi victory have shortened considerably.
After some ho-hum performances in Europe, I’d begun to wonder if the sailors at Oracle were really that bothered about results on the AC45 circuit. But after a barnstorming performance in Newport, I’ve revised my view. Whichever way you look at it - financial, technological or in pure sailing terms - the Defender is going to be very hard to beat.
San Diego was meant to by my warm-weather escape from the English winter, but the shorts and T-shirt never even got unpacked. Should have brought my umbrella. Still, if the weather disappointed, the America’s Cup World Series continues to deliver unpredictability and drama. Question is, how many of the nine teams in San Diego will we see next year? For some, money’s too tight to mention, but at least the return of Luna Rossa provides the prospect of another big team to challenge the might of Oracle Racing.
I’ve got my fingers crossed that the Oatleys have more backbone than other recent challengers of record. The wine magnates from downunder are struggling to recruit the top-draw Australians for their fledgling campaign, but they do at least have the power to hold Larry Ellison’s team to the kind of cost-control measures that have long been promised, but which are yet to materialise.
The two races I witnessed of the Louis Vuitton Cup finals in San Francisco, I was fortunate to see two boats cross the finish line, both intact and still sailing. Until that point, the challenger finals had been a war of attrition, with a nosedive bringing the Kiwis precariously close to capsizing their usually impeccably sailed AC72, Aotearoa.
Watching Russell Coutts go for a start line gap that wasn’t there was perplexing. Had the America’s Cup legend lost his marbles? His high-speed collision with the committee boat makes for good YouTube viewing fodder, that’s for sure. Plenty else in San Fran to keep us entertained, including Ben Ainslie’s baptism of fire at the helm of his AC45.
“If it doesn't break, it’s too heavy,” was a bold statement that defined legendary designer Ben Lexcen’s America’s Cup career. If anyone pursues that mantra for the 34th America’s Cup, I’ll eat my hat. Artemis Racing have just become the first team to point a full-size wing rig into the sky. But no one wants to be the first to have one of these space-age structures come tumbling down.
Visiting the Amels yard in Vlissingen, it was staggering to see how far the build of the Amels 199 has progressed since I last wrote about the radical Tim Heywood design a year or so ago. Heywood hopes the audacious curves of the 199 will forge a new direction in superyacht design, and having seen her in the flesh, I hope so too.
The first event of the America’s Cup World Series in Portugal is fast approaching. While the established Cup teams are sticking with their old keelboat personnel and re-skilling for a new format in fast cats, the start-up challengers are recruiting from the ranks of Olympic sailors. This new breed might have little to no experience of the America’s Cup, but they have grown up racing fast, high-performance boats like Tornados and 49er skiffs. The AC45 catamaran is an obvious next step for this younger generation.
Australia are coming on strong, and threaten to topple the mighty Team GB from their perch as the pre-eminent sailing team in the world. Tom Slingsby wrapped up Australia’s first gold of the regatta, but his mates in the 49er Nathan Outteridge and Tom Slingsby sealed 49er gold with a Medal Race to spare, as did the Kiwis for silver.
Finn sailors around the world must have breathed a sigh of relief when Ben Ainslie hung up his hiking pads after squeaking that fourth gold medal at London 2012. When Sir Ben said that he was signing off from his glittering Olympic career to focus on the America’s Cup, there were times when I wondered if he would do a ‘Redgrave’ and make a comeback for Rio 2016. But Ben’s hopes and plans for his own Cup campaign seem to be coming together nicely and so we will see a new face representing Great Britain in the men’s heavyweight singlehander, a class that GBR has dominated since Iain Percy won the first of his gold medals at Sydney 2000.
Nine months in the making was too long, but maybe it was worth the wait. The Protocol for the 35th America’s Cup is not entirely fair, but Team Australia appear to have done a reasonable job in negotiating a decent bargaining position for the prospective challengers who want to compete against Oracle Team USA in summer 2017.
So all us ‘experts’ observing the America’s Cup have been saying that no one’s ever going to take it away from Oracle next September. But after the defender’s shock pitchpole and subsequent destruction of its multimillion dollar AC72, the odds on a Kiwi victory have shortened considerably.
