America's Cup Race #2 on Sunday

hah..yeah. I do have other things to do periodically.

No you don't, stop pretending Jake! <img src="<>/grin.gif" alt="grin" title="grin" height="15" width="15" />

I had to watch the Daytona 500! - and it had several delays due to pavement coming up on the track...so I watched sports from 5am to 8:30pm yesterday.

I taped the 500.

But I must admit I’m probably the last person on Earth to not get Cable or Satellite TV. I still use Rabbit Ears now they are High Definition. When I first moved out on my acreage it was not offered, thought I was going to die, after I was weaned off of it I did not miss it. Then when it was offered many years ago my kids were young and I figured it was one less distraction. Both kids went to school on scholarships. Now I’m thinking about getting it after all these years mainly for F1 auto racing but I still don’t watch the tube much after football season. Boat building takes most of my time.

I think BMWO could have raced in more for sure... look at the conditions that they've tested that boat in... definitely more than they sailed in yesterday.

Official AC Press Release, you can never have enough statistics:

4 countries have defended the America's Cup: The United States, Australia, New Zealand and Switzerland

Ummm...England?

They were the originators, right? I believe it was called the 100 Guinea's Cup, which the yacht America won, then the name was changed, or do they not count the -first- race?

I think the Poms British only competed/challenged but never actually won.

See: 7 countries have reached the America's Cup Match (England, Italy, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and the United States)

'Great Britain' if you don't mind, old chap!

From Wikipedia

1851 America wins the Cup

In 1851 Commodore John Cox Stevens, a charter member of the fledgling New York Yacht Club (NYYC) formed a six-person syndicate to build a yacht with intention of taking her to England and making some money competing in yachting regattas and match races. The syndicate contracted with pilot-boat designer George Steers for a 101 ft (30.78 m) schooner which was christened America and launched on May 3, 1851.

On August 22, 1851, the America raced against 15 yachts of the Royal Yacht Squadron in the Club's annual 53 mile regatta around the Isle of Wight. America won, finishing 8 minutes ahead of the closest yacht. Apocryphally, Queen Victoria, who was watching at the finish line, asked who was second; the famous answer being:

Ah, Your Majesty, there is no second.

[5]

The surviving members of the America syndicate donated the Cup via a Deed of Gift to the NYYC on July 8, 1857, specifying that it be held in trust as a perpetual challenge trophy to promote friendly competition among nations.

Roit roit, sorry, so sorry...

You damn Brittish think you're Soooo superior!

Name that movie.

;^)

A Fish Called Wanda.

Kevin Kline was great.

You mean Otto?

Jamie Lee was pretty hot too,

Speak Italian to me Otto!

but that was before she started selling colon blogurt!

And John Clese was, as always, extra great!

Truely a clasic, wish I had it on DVD.

There is quite a little buzz about the America's Cup here at work this morning with all the non-sailors. Several media outlets are reporting on it now that it's over <img src="<>/mad.gif" alt="mad" title="mad" height="15" width="15" />. I've been getting peppered with questions about it all day.

For those of you SNG supporters. Here's what the PRO had to say about your clubs shameful behavior:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10626650

It's a shame there wasn't a smaller regatta scheduled to run with the AC, just to keep up spectator interest. Something like X 40s, F18s, ( I can't help myself) F16s.

You and I both know Larry is going to pull the same Sh!@ at his venue. It's just hyper rich douche bags doing what hyper rich douche bags do.

I really don't believe that. I think the next several iterations of the cup will see reasonable teams sit down and agree before hand on reasonable limits to the sailing conditions together.

<img src="<>/laugh.gif" alt="laugh" title="laugh" height="15" width="15" />

Everything coming out of the BMWO press machine says that Jake is right. They aren't rushing to release what they'll race in, where they'll race or when they'll race. They want to get a consensus of the viable AC teams together and see what they want.

While

Uncle Larry

might be a dickhead to work for and in the business world - he was the guy who put an end to the SNG/Alinghi shenanigans. He knows damn well that the sailing community is now going to hold his feet to the fire like they did to Ernesto.

We will see, Ernesto said the same thing when he took the cup from the Kiwi's how it will be better and fair and blah blah blah.

You both under estimate Mr. Ellison, but hey I could be completely wrong he could be in it just for the love of the game, maybe he won't use the power and influence his money generates to tip the scales in his favor. Maybe, he'll even impose a spending cap, 2 billion maybe I mean we do want try and keep some of the rif raf out of the cup don't we?

so so so sad that Curling is on major network TV but the AC couldn't even be on some PPV cable channel. Pathetic

edit:
ok... it is women's curling which I figure might have some merit... but still <img src="<>/smile.gif" alt="smile" title="smile" height="15" width="15" />

Curling costs nothing to produce and people watch it. Sailing costs a fortune to produce and nobody watches it, not in numbers that pay the bills anyway.

Maybe Uncle Larry will give all multihullers a break on Oracle license fees in celebration!

Here's a couple of suggestions for the next contest:
1) Madate that all crew on board be citizens of the country their boat represents. I think it's absurd to require that the boat be constructed entirely in country, but allow teams to shop the world for crew.
2) Require the defender to guarantee a purchase of at least $1,000,000.00 of television advertising across whatever networks/stations broadcast the race live nationwide. Assuming a LV Cup runoff, require each challenger to similarly buy $500,000.00 of TV advertising and the winner to kick in an additional $500,000.00. Maybe then we could get at least one channel to cover it.

My guess is that you will actually see some movement in the national sailor direction. Probably something along the lines of a particular percentage of your team must be from your nation.

If the event is large enough (like the 32nd cup), TV purchases rights to broadcast the event. Unfortunately for us, Versus (in the US) lost their butt when they covered it in 2007 - we may be watching on the internet again until some AC racing takes place in US waters.

From Sailing World

A Bit of a Mutiny

As was widely reported, Race 2 of the 33rd America's Cup was the race that almost didn't happen—and not for the reasons with which most sailors are familiar. Struggling against a fickle breeze and with poor weather looming for the foreseeable future, 33rd America's Cup principal race officer Harold Bennett kept the two multihulls on the water until late into the afternoon on Sunday. A half hour before the 4:30 p.m. cutoff for the start, the breeze finally solidified, 7 to 9 knots from the east, and Bennett indicated the he was aiming for a 4:25 p.m. start.

Courtesy www.AmericasCup.com
New Zealander Harold Bennett was the principal race officer for the 33rd America's Cup.
However, the Swiss team on Alinghi 5 didn't want to race, feeling most likely that the waves were too high, and relayed that to members of the Société Nautique de Genève working on the race committee boat. What happened next is just one last piece of absurdity in what has been a fairly unique chapter in the history of the America's Cup. Bennett sat down with four journalists yesterday (myself, Stuart Alexander of the Independent, Angus Phillips of the Washington Post, and Jim Doyle of the San Francisco Chronicle) to talk about the incident.

Harold, what happened on the boat when you tried to start Race 2? Is it true that the SNG members on the boat refused to perform their jobs?
We had a bit of a mutiny. I don't think SNG wanted to go, so they decided they weren't going to do flags. So Tom [Ehman, BMW Oracle Racing's head of external affairds] took the AP down and my boat driver, who's also an international umpire, he shot up forward and did the rest of the signals.

Does this stray into Rule 69 territory. Would you normal write a report for ISAF?
Yes I do have to and obviously that's going to be included in any report. That's what you do, you've got outline what's going on on the boat, whether it's good or bad.

What could've been their motivation? The wind was as light as it could get and still be stable.
We had a perfect breeze the way I saw it. I had good weather information from the Alinghi weather team. It was perfect, everything lined up, 8, 9 knots up the course. And it was like, well, let's do it.

Have you heard of a race committee at any regatta deciding they want to prevent the race being run?
No. Well I've certainly never experienced it. No I've never heard of that before.

When you said, 'Let's get this race off.' They just said, 'We're not doing it.'? No reason?
Well one guy was over my shoulder, telling me that the waves were too big, that the boats were going to break. I just said, I don't believe that. I know that boat boats when they were going upwind the alarms were going off. I understand that, I was told by the sailors of both teams afterward, last night. They were taking a little bit of strain. But crikey, if the boats are that flimsy, I guess it's a problem, isn't it.

They said they were pushing the boats as hard as they'd ever pushed them.
I think the guys have said that to me, that they did push them hard.

Strain in those situations is a matter of mainsheet load, and a lot of other things. There are a lot of things they can do to ease the strain.
You're right with that. But I guess if you look at the intricate systems that's underneath that cat, God you'd only need one of those to fail and the whole thing would fold up like a pack of cards.

But they always knew that?
I guess they would, they would know that.

I don't know of any race boat that you don't push hard on occasion.
Isn't that what you do with the boat, you drive it, you drive it hard. I don't know, I guess both of them have built their boats to a, I don't know, a fairly low spec as far as strength is concerned. They're obviously very strong, if you have your alarms going off yesterday, stuff like that…

Well it depends where you've set the alarm?
I guess it is, yeah.
I said in the press conference, after the first or second day we didn't race, I had now idea where the limits where in these boats. Up until we'd had these boats on the water that was the first time I'd seen the Oracle boat, apart from one day it came past us and then went in. I'd not seen that one wound up in anger, if you like to put it, around us. I'd seen the Alinghi boat a bit, we ran a couple of races for them leading up to the regatta. I had no idea where the limits are, I don't know, but I've got a better idea now. I don't think you would be able to put them out into much seaway, it would be dangerous for them.

What kind of wave heights were you seeing yesterday?
I would've thought the swells were close to a meter. They were some quite big swells that came through at one stage. They were long; they were fairly well apart. But I think for those boats they were probably not quite straddling them. They were into them and over them, so I guess that was putting quite a lot of pressure on them, when they dipped the hull into the wave in front.

In the U.K. there's an obsession with health and safety, duty of care. Were those concepts being voiced at all by fellow members of your race committee.
No their concern was more over the club's insurance on the event, liability for the event, if there was an accident, which if I understand it, surrounded the notice of race. So what was written in the original notice of race, and subsequently pulled out, left them in a bit of a position where it was like, 'Wow, if we're outside of these parameters, we've got a problem.'

So the concern was financial and not for people?
I can't answer that. I don't know what their thinking behind it was. I certainly was concerned about the safety of the guys on the boat, if one of these things folded up, or they had a collision, that was a concern that I had. That was one of the reasons with the length of the starting line. I had no idea what we should do with the starting line. I know that for match racing, a 30-second line is ideal, but with these boats, a 30-second line is only like 400 meters. You put them head-to-head doing 20 knots, that's a 40-knot collision course as they're coming together. If one of them got it wrong, you'd have a real problem. That's why I settled on what I did, which was like 800 meters. At the end of the day I don't think that was too far wrong.

What parameters did you think the conditions yesterday exceeded?
Yesterday, that was the point that was being made to me, that the waves were too big.

It's a tough job, being a PRO. There's no real hard and fast standards. Everything is on a variable scale. There's no way of saying this is OK and this isn't other than common sense.
Absolutely. It's common sense, it's what you see; it's your gut feeling. Which was a point I was trying to make with the guys on the race committee with me was that you can't make a committee decision on every thing that's going to happen on the water. It doesn't work. One person has got to deal with that and that's what a race officer does. From my perspective looking at that, it's your gut feeling about what you think is going to happen, what you can see, and you do it. From my point of view; that's worked out fine. But there are people probably have other views about that. I did it the best of my ability and I don't see an issue with that.

Who was on the race committee boat?
Lucien [Masmejan, Alinghi counsel] and Tom Ehman were the two observers from the team. Not participating, there just to observe. Then myself, a boat driver who's Spanish, who's also an international umpire. Then another Spanish guy who coordinated my thoughts about what I wanted on the race track as far as position on marks and stuff like that. He did all the communications for me. The guys on the mark boats, they were all Spanish as well, so his role was vital. The SNG guys there were four of them, one was Fred Meyer, he didn't really participate, he watched. The other three guys, two of them were doing flags, one was doing the time keeping and calling the flags. I have to say that Pascal, the guy doing that, he stood by his post, he did the job, doing the time and calling the signals. I applaud him for that. I thanked him sincerely for that. If he'd have walked off too, we had a problem. So my boat driver did the flags on the front, Tom Ehman took the AP down when it was time and we just got on with the rest of it.

Can you remember the names of the other two guys from SNG?
One was Marcel and the other was Nicolas Grange. Granche is the cat sailor, who was, I guess, the expert for multihull sailing. [ed's note]

Technically they were under your direction?
Absolutely. That's how you operate on a boat. My role was to coordinate the whole thing and make the calls and the rest of them were to do the job.

Larry Ellison made a definitive statement at his victory press conference that he will use an independent body to manage and run the 34th America's Cup. How do they do that so that you can do your job, without your impartiality coming into question, warranted or not?
I think the concept of America's Cup Management

Luigi

Reggio and I were the two principal race officers doing the job, well he was principal and I was senior. There was a committee there that was three of us, plus two Spanish guys who were our deputies, that was the race committee and we would discuss things. When you go to the water, the two race officers, they do that. I think what Larry Ellison has pointed out, and Russell has mentioned it as well. An independent body to run the racing, yup, I think that's a damn good idea. You pull n from wherever the key people to take up those roles. As long as it's not all from the same country, or something like that, then you probably have a pretty good mix of people.

How do you make it independent? ACM was ostensibly independent, but we still had these questions.
I would think they may set up a company that has a board which involves people from all the teams, or something like that. That's what I would think, I don't know, but that would be sensible and they'd hire the right people to do the job. If I happen to be one of those, then so be it. I'd probably do it again. But that's for someone else to decide.

I would like to see the helm and half of the rest of the crew be from in country. Strict CIC.

After watching on the net to hell with TV. No commercials every 5 minutes. The ability to play it back at will. Watch when you want. I want to be able to see everything unfiltered. We could chose the feed (commentators) we listened to. The camera work was good. I wish they would have shown more from the starboard side of USA-17 on that reach. Could you imagine sitting on that ama just in front of the board on the reach. Wahoo! To that I hate EB even more for not allowing cameras on board. We were denied so much by that move.....but I digress.

I thought that they dropped the nationality requirement because it just forced people to change their citizenship for their employer. It was simply too easy to work around the requirement.

More to the point... what does it matter?

Just watching the Olympics... the Canadian internet mogul guy jumped to Australia to board... I think he won a medal. The Japanese girl jumped to Russia to compete in pairs figure skating.... she needs a visa to go home to see her mom. I think I remember Navratolova represented the USA in the tennis Olympics.

Bottom line... it's not a big deal and I don't see how it builds support for a US flagged sailing team funded by a rich US owner... The modern Cup is not even as nationalistic as the Olympics.

Besides... We only notice winners...

My opinion is that jumping citizenship would be a blatant attempt to subvert the rules, and I'd hope that a threat of a rule 69 action might discourage it.