I concluded last month’s diary with the statement: “After the strong showing by Spithill and Ainslie at this event, it’s the defender who has the most reasons to be cheerful at the moment.” Ummmm.... can I take that back, please?
When I wrote that, it was off the back of two Oracle team boats taking the top two places at the final America’s Cup World Series event of the year. James Spithill might have been the only one to pitchpole his AC45 during the regatta, yet still he bounced back to win the competition, narrowly ahead of new team colleague Ben Ainslie.
About two days after I wrote that, Spithill pitchpoled again, but this time aboard the team’s multimillion dollar AC72 catamaran. This was never meant to happen. A pitchpole in an AC45 has become commonplace, something we’ve come to expect at least once per event. It’s surprising that there hasn’t yet been a serious injury. But falling from 60 or 70 feet in the air? Of course someone’s going to get hurt.
And yet, amazingly - and thankfully - no one was seriously hurt. But the boat was. A 5-knot current carried the upturned platform past the Golden Gate Bridge and many miles out to sea before the team tenders commenced the long, slow tow back. By the time they got the boat home, it was 1 o’clock in the morning, about 10 hours after the pitchpole. Whilst the platform emerged relatively unscathed, the giant rig - worth an estimated $2m - was trashed.
Perhaps more important than the money is the lost time, with Oracle not expecting to get any further AC72 sailing done this side of Christmas. It seems like all the designers have opted to put their 72-footers on a form of hydrofoils, enabling the twin hulls to lift clear of the water and accelerate to speeds approaching or even exceeding 40 knots. Observers of the Oracle catamaran suggest it has looked far from stable when riding above the water, an accident waiting to happen, perhaps.
By contrast, on the far side of the Pacific Ocean, Emirates Team New Zealand’s 72-footer has been flying around the Hauraki Gulf on its foils quite happily, and the Kiwis are already homing on the detail - adding aerodynamic coamings and relatively trivial stuff compared with the back-to-the-drawing-board challenge staring back at Oracle’s design team. Luna Rossa have demonstrated the value of their close collaboration with the Kiwis by getting up and foiling within a few hours of launching their sleek silver machine in late October. It has been a much more cautious launch by Artemis Racing in November, with the Swedish team getting its big red boat wet on San Francisco Bay, but not yet really pushing it. Which is understandable, when you remember how their brand new wing rig came crashing down in Valencia earlier this year, and now having witnessed the recent Oracle catastrophe.
So, from all the talk being that no one can possibly take the America’s Cup away from Oracle next September, now all the ‘smart talk’ is that Auckland is already preparing for a homecoming celebration. Spithill doesn’t see it that way, of course: “There’s no question this is a setback. This will be a big test for our team. But I've seen these guys in a similar situation in the past campaign before we won the America's Cup. A strong team will bounce back from it. This won't stop us from winning the America's Cup.” Perhaps not, but the game has certainly got a lot tighter.
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.
Any British sailing fan has known just how good Ben Ainslie is for a long time. Even so, watching him win his fourth gold at London 2012 still took my breath away. Question is, will any of that superhuman success ever give Ben a chance to take a leading man’s role in the America’s Cup?
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.
“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.
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.
“A joke.” That was how Dean Barker summed up his view of the AC45 racing in Venice in May. From a spectator’s point of view, I thought it was fantastic. But the light airs drifting off St Mark’s Square has reopened the debate about which should take precedence in the America’s Cup - the sport, or the show.
The 34th America’s Cup was great, and all the more so after what was the least competitive, most dull and least well attended Louis Vuitton Cup in its 30 year history. As I wrote three years ago, and three years before that, the last two Challengers of Record have not challenged at all, but rolled over to have their tummies tickled by the Defender. This time we’re hoping the new Challengers of Record, the Oatleys from Australia, will be less poodle and more bulldog.
After a summer of some of the most high-speed but dull racing the world never wanted to see, the America’s Cup Final delivered some of the most spectacular, unpredictable match racing in the event’s 162-year history. I thought the 2007 final between New Zealand and Alinghi was great. San Francisco 2013 was better.
Thirty years ago I remember waking up and hurrying downstairs to open the Daily Telegraph and find out who had won the America’s Cup. In a pre-internet age, news travelled slowly, and so did the boats. But Australia II’s victory was a massive day for Australia and a major turning point for the Cup. Fast-forward 30 years, and the boats are six-times quicker but far fewer in number. So will 2013 go down as a vintage year in Cup history?
This summer we will see an America’s Cup where four giant 72-foot catamarans will barely touch the waters of San Francisco Bay. Instead they’ll be flying around above it, as Swedish team Artemis has recently conceded that ‘foiling’ - rather than floating - is the new way of sailing super fast.
As we reach the business end of this America’s Cup cycle, we find ourselves in the ‘phoney war’ of dissembling and misinformation. Four fast boats on or above the water, yet the news flow has dried to a trickle of Twitter comments. Don’t we, the fans, deserve better? No! This is ‘their’ Cup, and ‘they’ can do what they want.