9 March 2021
After “There is no second place”, the oldest cliché of the America’s Cup is ‘Fastest Boat Wins’.
Barring some freakish accident such as befell American Magic earlier this year, the same old formula of superior boatspeed will apply to the 36th Cup.
According to the bookies, the odds are heavily in favour of Emirates Team New Zealand...
With all the work I’ve done on Road To Gold (www.roadtogold.net) over the past six months or more, my project partner Hamish Willcox has mostly kept his thoughts to himself about the expectations inside the Kiwi camp. Quietly confident, is how I would put it, even if the Kiwi press have been accused of being a good deal noisier and less gracious about their expected superiority over the Italians.
This is part of my chat with Hamish last weekend when he talks about his thoughts on the Olympics and the America’s Cup (both projects that he will be sharing with Pete Burling and Blair Tuke), and what that Code Zero gennaker is really all about and if it will actually play a part in the defence of the Cup.
For an overview of the story up until now, you can’t get much better than Richard Gladwell’s analysis on Sail-World.com. Richard has been the man-on-the-ground and on-the-water throughout every stage of this Cup...
https://www.sail-world.com/news/235701/Gladwells-Line-Rolling-the-Americas-Cup-dice
Just a few hours to go now. Whatever the outcome, watching these AC75s tear round the track has been a lot of fun. A bit of close competition would be even better, but that’s the bit I wouldn’t want to bet on. Fastest Boat will win, and probably at a canter.
Why bother match racing at 4 knots when the America’s Cup demands you race at 40? I asked the Italians from Luna Rossa this question at the Monsoon Cup in Malaysia. Meanwhile, what to make of Iain Murray’s job change, from gamekeeper to poacher? And which other big-name Australians will follow the ‘Big Fella’ to Hamilton Island? 
