THE GREATEST COMEBACK

Against the Wind

One of the Greatest Comebacks in Sports History

BY STU WOO

Photo: Getty Images; Animation: The Wall Street Journal

The winds on San Francisco Bay started kicking up in the late morning. Before long, they were blowing more than 20 miles an hour.

Jimmy Spithill and his 10 teammates put on their crash helmets and flotation vests and climbed aboard the AC72, a menacing, 13-story black catamaran capable of near-highway speeds. As a powerboat pulled them into the bay for Race 5 of the 2013 America’s Cup, Mr. Spithill shot a glance at the Golden Gate Bridge. It was shrouded in fog.

Jimmy Spithill in front of San Francisco Bay on Feb. 3, 2014. Drew Kelly for The Wall Street Journal

An unfamiliar, uncomfortable feeling was tugging at him. Mr. Spithill, skipper of Oracle Team USA, the richest and possibly most prohibitively favored team in the history of the world’s most famous yacht competition, had lost three of the first four races. Something was wrong with the way the Oracle boat was performing. Now he was facing the unthinkable: His team might lose.

The America’s Cup, first held in 1851, is believed to award the world’s oldest international sporting trophy. The contest also is one of the least professionalized. There is no permanent organization, commission or governing body. The winner gets to pick where and when the next race is held—typically every three to five years—and what type of boat is used. All that tends to make the racing rather lopsided. In most cases, the faster of the two boats in the finals wins every match—and the faster boat is usually the defending champion.

The 2013 Cup wasn’t supposed to be any different. But a competition that was expected to be humdrum turned into one of the most remarkable ever. This account of how that happened was pieced together through extensive interviews with the sailors, engineers and other team leaders.

 

Largely because of team owner Larry Ellison, the founder of software giant Oracle Corp. and one of the world’s richest men, Oracle had all the advantages conferred upon the incumbent, plus some.

The 11 sailors were a collection of international superstars. The engineers who designed the yacht and the programmers who built the software used to plot strategy had no peer. Oracle’s computer simulations suggested the AC72—which cost at least $10 million to build—wasn’t just the better boat in the final, it was the fastest sailboat ever to compete for the Cup, capable of 48 knots, or about 55 mph.

Mr. Spithill wasn’t sure why Emirates Team New Zealand, Oracle’s opponent in the final, had been faster so far. The prevailing theory among Oracle’s sailors was that they were just rusty. As the defending Cup champions, they hadn’t had to race in the preliminaries.

As the AC72 dropped its towline on Sept. 10 and headed for the starting line, Mr. Spithill hoped that in Race 5, the Oracle crew would get its act together.

The start of an America’s Cup race is an exercise in pinpoint execution. The two boats can’t cross the starting line until a countdown timer hits zero. On this day, both boats hit the line simultaneously.

The five legs of the racecourse sent the boats from near the Golden Gate Bridge to the downtown San Francisco waterfront and took anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to complete, depending on wind. Through the first two legs, Oracle was in total control, building up an eight-second lead.

 

The upwind third leg was the one that had been keeping Mr. Spithill awake at night. Sailors have known since ancient times that sailing against the wind requires plotting a zigzag course—called tacking—steering the boat back and forth at a roughly 45-degree angle to the wind. Oracle’s aura of invincibility had crumbled on this upwind leg. If New Zealand was behind at the upwind turn, it would take the lead. If the Kiwis already had the lead, they would turn the race into a rout.

Tacking involves an elaborately choreographed routine. To initiate the turn, eight sailors crank winches resembling hand-operated bicycle pedals, powering the system that moves the sail. Two sailors pull ropes to adjust the angles of the enormous mainsail and the smaller jib. At precisely the right moment, the skipper—Mr. Spithill—spins the helm. Then all 11 sailors scurry from one hull, across a patch of trampoline-like netting, to the other side.

If everything goes right, the boat loses little speed. A small misstep or two, however, can cause the boat to bog down—or in extreme cases, to capsize.

As the upwind leg began, New Zealand headed out toward the San Francisco waterfront while Oracle vectored toward Alcatraz Island. Mr. Spithill looked over his shoulder and saw he was ahead of New Zealand by 2½ boat lengths. But the Kiwis edged closer with every turn. Within three minutes, New Zealand’s red yacht crossed in front of Oracle. Mr. Spithill had blown another lead.

By the time the boats reached the fourth leg, the gap was too large for Oracle to recover. New Zealand won by more than a minute. In racing terms, that might as well have been a week. New Zealand was now nearly halfway to the nine wins it needed to secure the Cup—and the time gap between the boats was only getting larger.

Even the Kiwis were surprised. After the race, Team New Zealand’s managing director, Grant Dalton, passed one of his sailors in the hallway and said: “I can’t believe we just won.”

As the AC72 skulked back to its berth, Mr. Spithill heard the voice of Russell Coutts, the New Zealand-born chief executive of the Oracle team, on his walkie-talkie: “Have you thought about using the postponement card?”

A postponement card is the America’s Cup equivalent of a timeout, envisioned as a way for teams to fix problems like broken equipment. By using it, Oracle would be able to delay the afternoon’s second race to the next race day, 48 hours later.

“We’re going to play it now,” Mr. Spithill told Mr. Coutts.

At the postrace news conference, the grim-faced skipper said: “We feel like we need to regroup, really take a good look at the boat.”

The following day, his team practiced in the bay and considered modifications to the boat, while the programmers ran simulations. In addition, the team’s tactician, who advises Mr. Spithill on wind, current and strategy, was replaced.

Mr. Spithill thought the break, and the small modifications they had made, might have done the trick.

The answer came quickly in Race 6. After getting blown out again on the upwind leg, Oracle lost by a margin of 47 seconds, and later that day, lost Race 7 by 66 seconds, its worst finish yet. New Zealand now needed just three more wins—and it had 12 chances to get them.

Already, the fans who gathered on the waterfront to watch the races had started cheering for the Kiwis. Unless Mr. Spithill figured out how to sail faster upwind, the affable sailor would forever be remembered as the engineer of his sport’s greatest flop.


Jimmy Spithill grew up in the tiny Australian town of Elvina Bay, just north of Sydney. He learned to sail in a leaky wooden dinghy that a neighbor had planned to throw away.

Being a sailor of modest means isn’t easy. Even as Mr. Spithill showed prodigious talent as a teenager, his parents—his father was an engineer, his mother a medical receptionist—struggled to send him to international competitions. Mr. Spithill exhibited an aggressive streak and a blue-collar mentality. Once, a week before the national high-school sailing championship, he broke his wrist playing rugby. He won the sailing contest in a cast.

In 1999, when he was 20, the Young Australia team made him the youngest skipper in America’s Cup history. The team lost, but he proved talented enough to get recruited to the U.S. team OneWorld in 2003. He lost again in preliminaries, to Mr. Ellison’s Oracle team, which went on to lose in the finals.

He returned in 2007 as helmsman for the Italian team Luna Rossa. During the semifinals of the challengers’ heats, he got his first glimpse of Mr. Ellison’s lavishly funded new Oracle team, with a budget that ran into the tens of millions. He routinely outwitted Oracle at the starting line and won the series, 5-1, before losing in the next round.

Mr. Coutts, the Oracle team’s CEO, was suitably impressed. When the Cup was over, he made Mr. Spithill one of his newest hires.

For the next Cup, team Oracle tricked out its three-hulled trimaran with a revolutionary carbon-fiber sail that looked like an upright airplane wing. Joseph Ozanne, then a 30-year-old engineer with a degree from a prestigious French aeronautics-engineering program, was responsible for designing the sail, which contained movable flaps like on an airplane.

Mr. Ozanne was in charge of a computer program, the Velocity Performance Predictor, that calculated optimal wing angles and projected speeds. But the sailors ignored his advice. “You did your job, now let us sail the boat,” Mr. Ozanne recalls being told.

Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison spent at least $10 million to build the AC72, the most technically sophisticated sailboat ever to compete for the America’s Cup.

After the sailors struggled for two days, Mr. Ozanne sat them down for a PowerPoint presentation. “You need to forget everything you’ve done on the conventional sail,” he said. When the sailors eventually heeded his suggestions, the boat began performing as advertised.

At the 2010 Cup, held in Valencia, Spain, Mr. Spithill led Oracle into the final. It was a cake walk, with BMW Oracle winning the first two races in the short best-of-three format. At age 30, he was the youngest winning skipper in the competition’s history.

For the 2013 Cup defense, Mr. Ellison decided to commission a new kind of boat, a decision that would turn the sport into something akin to Formula One on water. Picture two canoes, each one 72 feet long and made of carbon fiber, connected by a raft, with a 13-story wing, also made of carbon fiber, pinned to the middle. The software tycoon’s $10 million investment created a vessel that could do more than 50 mph.

The boat was so strange and powerful it was hard to handle. During training in October 2012, problems setting the sails and steering the boat caused the bows to nose-dive and the boat to pitch forward until the sail slammed into the water, leaving the sailors clinging to the yacht. The experience spooked everyone.

In May 2013, during practice for the Cup races, the Swedish team, Artemis Racing, had a similar mishap. One of the sailors got trapped underneath the boat and drowned.

Coming into the final, Mr. Spithill and his crew felt they were ready for the speed. And they had reason to be supremely confident. According to the computer, the AC72, with its skinnier hulls and drag-reducing dug-out cockpits, was superior to New Zealand’s boat.

If anyone had predicted that New Zealand would win six of the first seven races, they might have been thrown overboard. But that is exactly what had happened.


After his Race 7 drubbing, Mr. Spithill emerged from his shower to find that the team’s sailors, engineers, designers and computer scientists had started a meeting without him. All the chairs were taken.

Mr. Spithill sat on a desk and sipped a Red Bull as the 30 people took turns suggesting changes to the boat.

As mandated by America’s Cup rules, all the teams had to create boats of the same basic design—in this case a 72-foot catamaran. All of them had L-shaped boards under their hulls called “foils,” which stick down below the waterline like little feet. When the boats hit a certain speed, the hulls rise out of the water and ride on the surfboard-size foils, creating the illusion that the boats are actually flying.

Both Oracle and New Zealand had been foiling downwind. But New Zealand’s boat was getting partially up on its foils on the upwind leg, too.

Oracle had experimented with upwind foiling five weeks before the race at the insistence of Tom Slingsby, a redheaded Australian team member who had just won a sailing gold medal at the London Olympics. Mr. Slingsby had seen the Kiwis doing it in practice and the preliminary rounds, and to his eyes, they were sailing much faster than Oracle. Before the final, he had emailed Messrs. Spithill and Coutts, telling them it could be a “game changer” and they needed to try it.

For two weeks, they had—but for only a few minutes a day. Nearly every time they tried, Oracle’s hulls would fall off the foils and the bows would nose-dive into the water. There also was a bigger problem cutting into Mr. Spithill’s practice time. Cup officials were investigating a modification Oracle had made on its boat—one ultimately ruled a violation of the rules. Oracle was slapped with a two-race penalty before the competition even began.

There was little time to experiment with the new technique, and Mr. Ozanne’s software indicated Oracle would easily outsail New Zealand upwind even without foiling.

Now, with the Cup under way and New Zealand using the technique to smoke Oracle on the upwind leg, the topic was back on the table.

The engineers weren’t sure it was possible because modifications made before and during the race had created balance problems. When the AC72 was foiling, not enough of its load was borne by the rudders in the rear. That made the boat hard to control—sort of like an airplane with too much weight on its nose.

Oracle’s boat designers suggested redistributing the load, mainly by increasing the twist in the top of the sail and decreasing it down below. The shore crew worked through the night. Mr. Spithill went home to his apartment in San Francisco’s posh Marina District.

Each night, he would act out the farce of going to bed at 11—only to lie awake worrying. Before the races had begun, a confident Mr. Spithill had flirted with the idea of flying to Las Vegas during the middle of the competition to see a Floyd Mayweather Jr. boxing match. That never happened. Unable to sleep, he would eventually grab his laptop and dial up video of the losing races.

Each time, he jumped to the beginning of the upwind leg. Sailing upwind involves a trade-off between speed and distance—the tighter the angle to the wind, the shorter the total travel distance but the slower the boat moves. Mr. Ozanne’s computer program had given a target: Sail into the wind at a relatively tight angle of about 42 degrees, which would produce the optimal mix of speed and travel distance.

Looking at the video, Mr. Spithill could see that the Kiwis had come to a different conclusion. They were sailing at much wider angles to the wind—about 50 degrees, on average. They were covering more water but reaching higher speeds—more than enough to offset the greater distance traveled. Foiling appeared to be the key. Oracle’s computers hadn’t anticipated such speeds.

Nobody had expected this. Had team Oracle placed too much faith in the technology? Had its enormous budget lulled the team into overconfidence? Had Mr. Spithill gotten away from the lessons he had learned in Elvina Bay?

What especially galled him was the New Zealand team’s apparent contempt for Oracle’s approach. The managing director of the New Zealand team, Mr. Dalton, was openly disdainful of the costly, high-tech catamaran Oracle had chosen. The Kiwi boat had a similar, but more rugged, design. Dean Barker, the opposing skipper, was the son of New Zealand businessman Ray Barker, who had founded the menswear company Barkers.

Mr. Spithill didn’t relish losing the Cup to a team who could say, rightfully, that their win represented a triumph for the craft of sailing. With his team’s prospects getting dimmer by the hour, Mr. Spithill decided it was time to stop obeying the computers and start thinking like sailors.

The next morning, a scheduled off day, Oracle’s sailors made upwind foiling the focus of their practice. Rather than sailing 42 degrees off the wind, what the team called their “high and slow” mode. Mr. Slingsby suggested trying 55 degrees, which he called “low and fast.” When the boat got moving fast enough to get up on its foils, the crew made another discovery. It was able to tack more quickly—13 mph rather than 10 mph.

The mood began to lighten. But after three years of training, the America’s Cup might just come down to how well he and his crew executed a maneuver they had practiced for just one day.


In Race 8, New Zealand jumped out to an early lead. But after the boats turned upwind, Oracle was moving faster than ever. The difference was Oracle was now foiling, too.

The race was dead even until near the end of the upwind leg, when Oracle pulled off a quick turn and began heading into the path of the Kiwi yacht. In sailboat racing, the boat on “starboard tack”—when the wind is blowing from the vessel’s right side—has the right of way over a boat on the opposite tack, with the wind coming from its left side. Oracle’s turn gave it the right of way. The Kiwis would have to either slow down and turn or go behind Oracle.

New Zealand tried to turn quickly, but miscues caused the wind to catch the sail the wrong way. Its right hull lurched into the air and the giant yacht began tipping. Oracle was headed directly into the underbelly of the Kiwi yacht, which was teetering at a 45-degree angle to the water.

 

“Starboard!” Mr. Spithill yelled into his radio to alert race officials the Kiwis weren’t yielding the right of way. As he yanked the helm to turn away, the New Zealand boat stopped tipping and slammed back into the water. The near capsizing completely sapped its speed.

Oracle won the race by 52 seconds. The sailors pumped their fists. Despite their six-race deficit, they had clearly caught New Zealand by surprise. “We rattled them,” Mr. Spithill told his team.

Back at the Oracle base, Mr. Ozanne said he had found the flaw in the computer model. To get going fast enough upwind to get on the foils, the yacht initially had to sail at an angle that would force it to cover more water—something the computer wasn’t programmed to allow. When Mr. Ozanne input the wider angles into the software, the computer had recalculated the speed and showed the boat could sail faster that way, confirming what the sailors had found.


Six days later, early in the morning of Sept. 20, Jimmy Spithill drove through the empty streets of San Francisco to the Oracle base for what he thought could be the team’s final race.

While Oracle had figured out to how to match New Zealand’s speed upwind, it hadn’t yet mastered the technique. The Kiwis had rallied to win two of the next three races, giving them an 8-1 advantage—thanks to the two-race penalty meted out to Oracle at the beginning—then Oracle had taken a race. Still, one more loss for Oracle and it was done.

Instead of turning on the car radio, Mr. Spithill plugged in his iPod and played one of his favorite songs, Rage Against the Machine’s “Take the Power Back.”

It was another foggy afternoon and the winds were unusually light. At the start, New Zealand took an early lead. As Oracle fell behind, the team continued making mistakes. The Kiwis sailed away through the fog. Their lead grew to nearly a mile. It was, for all intents and purposes, the end.

The Kiwis had one thing going against them. Under Cup rules, the winning team had to complete the course within 40 minutes or the race would be abandoned. The winds were so light, and the pace so slow, Mr. Spithill didn’t think the Kiwis could do it. But he wasn’t sure.

At exactly 2 p.m., Mr. Spithill heard the voice of a race official in the radio. “This is the race committee,” he said. “The time limit has expired.”

The Kiwis, about three minutes from the finish, had run out of time. “It just wasn’t meant to be,” says Mr. Dalton, the Kiwi team’s managing director.

The day wasn’t over yet. About 30 minutes later, the winds had picked up and the two boats entered the starting area to try again.

The Kiwis beat Oracle at the starting line. But by the time Oracle got to the upwind leg, it had a 20-second lead. It won by a commanding 84 seconds. The score was now 8-3.

On the next day of racing, Oracle took an early lead and held on to win by 23 seconds. In the day’s second race, it did the same, winning by 37 seconds.

It was now 8-5. Oracle now was foiling faster upwind than the Kiwis. But Mr. Spithill was well aware that with one misstep, it would be over. Still, the America’s Cup would be a race after all.

In the next race, Oracle outmaneuvered New Zealand off the starting line and led wire-to-wire. The score was 8-6.

The crowds were growing. Spectators who had earlier cheered for the underdogs from New Zealand had begun to cheer for the Americans.

On Sept. 24, Oracle took an early lead in the first race that it never relinquished. In the day’s second race, it took the lead on the upwind leg and won by 54 seconds. The score was 8-8.

Now it was the turn of Mr. Dalton, the New Zealand team’s managing director, to fear the worst: that the Oracle team might pull off the greatest comeback in Cup history.


The next day, Sept. 25, was the day of the decisive 19th race. During his drive to the base, Mr. Spithill listened to Pearl Jam’s live rendition of “Immortality.”

As a powerboat towed the Oracle yacht past the Kiwi base, Oracle’s sailors waved at their opponents in what had become a daily test: How many New Zealand team members would wave back? This time, nearly all of them did.

Mr. Dalton, New Zealand’s managing director, now saw his team’s prospects as bleak. “We knew we were going to lose the last race unless we sailed a perfect race,” he said.

About 45 minutes before the start, Mr. Spithill heard a loud bang. A critical piece of the sail—a part attaching some of the flaps to the wing—had sheared off. The wing wouldn’t curve properly without it.

Two powerboats sped over and the maintenance guys climbed up onto the wing and started shooting hot glue everywhere. They finished the job about five minutes before the boat had to enter the starting area. Mr. Spithill and his tactician looked at each other and laughed.

On the San Francisco shore, the Oracle supporters were back in full force, waving American flags. Just after the boats crossed the starting line, Oracle caught a gust of wind that sent its bows submarining into the water, costing it precious seconds.

Mr. Spithill had decided to sail conservatively. He wouldn’t get tangled with the Kiwis on the downwind leg, lest they crash or capsize. His goal was to keep it close until the upwind section, where he knew his boat now was faster.

 

When Oracle hit that leg, it trailed New Zealand by only three seconds. On every tack, it edged closer. Not far from the San Francisco waterfront, Oracle took a lead. When the upwind leg was done, Oracle was up by 26 seconds. The race was all but over.

As Oracle approached the finish line, Mr. Spithill glanced at one of his teammates, Kyle Langford, who was working in front of him. Mr. Langford, a 24-year-old last-minute addition to the crew, was in charge of adjusting the angle of the 13-story sail with a thick rope he held in his hands. There was nothing high-tech about this job, but it was absolutely crucial. If Mr. Langford dropped the rope, the yacht would quickly lose momentum and possibly capsize.

About three minutes from the finish line, the rope slipped out of Mr. Langford’s hands. He lunged and caught a piece of it with his left hand—just barely—and held on. Mr. Spithill laughed and said, “Nice catch, mate.”

Oracle crossed the finish line 44 seconds ahead of New Zealand. The sailors hugged.

A powerboat pulled up five minutes later. On it was Oracle founder Larry Ellison. He stepped aboard the yacht and said, “Do you guys know what you just did? You just won the America’s Cup!”

LOOKING AT THE COMEBACK AC 34

Burns and Speer:
Secrets of the Comeback

ACEA/Guilan Grenier

ACEA/Guilan Grenier

“Platform aerodynamics, I think, made the difference between the American boat and the Kiwi boat.” Tom Speer, wing designer, Oracle Racing

By Kimball Livingston

We could have titled this, Six Extra Feet of Wing, But Do You Know How to Use It?

The way “Fresh” Burns tells the story, and he should know, having been head of performance for Oracle Team USA, there were multiple turning points in Oracle’s desperate, early losing days of the San Francisco America’s Cup. The American boat was losing on every tack, every gybe. Then the Mere Grinders came to the Mighty Chiefs and said something like, “Look, we can tell when the boards are loaded and when they’re not loaded. Why don’t we try moving them when they’re not loaded?”

Boink.

And if you’ve been around even a little while, you’ve heard someone on deck wisecrack, “You just keep grinding, and if I need any sheet, I’ll take it.”

Well, sonny, that’s pretty much how the Oracle crew was sailing USA-17—with hydraulic pressure always on tap—on those upwind legs where the comeback finally kicked in. Nonstop pumping. No-delay trimming. That was the context when Ben Ainslie yelled, “This is it! This is it! Work your arses off!”

Skiff stuff, translated. Advanced Sailing 101.

And then the dazzled Kiwi press went to spinning stories about a “Herbie,” a Boeing-built gyroscopic stabilizing contraption that made quite a good story, if you needed a story. My headline ran, “Bigfoot Sighted on Grassy Knoll.”

These days, Burns commutes between his home in the California wine country and 201 Shipyward Way, Suite B, Newport Beach, CA. That’s the street address of Morrelli & Melvin, where the next design rule is taking shape. If you’re paying attention, you already know the basics: 60-65 feet long, certain components made one-design in the hope of achieving cost savings, fewer restrictions on control surfaces to make the boats, in turn, easier to design, safer to sail, and faster per foot of LOA. Oracle Racing CEO Russell Coutts has gone public with that much, and in my too-cool-for-school fashion I assumed that 60-65 feet was merely a gloss of an already established overall length, to hold something back for the press conference at the release of the next Protocol, presumably in March. Maybe. But when I threw that at Oracle wing designer Tom Speer—returning for 2017— Spear allowed as how, “Actually, I think they’re still working on it.”

Maybe. Tom Speer is a straight shooter when he can be. I think we can take it for granted that it’s a welterish job down at M&M, trying to sort through the gamut of the possibilities for a 2017 AC generation in the wake of all the unintended consequences of the 2013 generation.

ACEA/Guilain Grenier

ACEA/Guilain Grenier

Speer spoke on Wednesday at a noontime gathering on the San Francisco cityfront, addressing wing development over the decades and, inevitably, in Q&A, the comeback. He went so far as to say, “Platform aerodynamics, I think, made the difference between the American boat and the Kiwi boat. We had that pod [below trampoline level] that effectively extended our wingspan two meters. That gave us the potential for the upwind speed that we eventually developed, and platform aerodynamics is the area in which we perhaps can make the biggest performance difference going forward.”

With that potential waiting to be exploited, and New Zealand close to clinching the win in spite of it, another key turning point in the 34th match came, gradually, as Oracle studied how to retrim to add more load to the back of the wing. “The boat had lee helm,” Speer said. “You know that kills upwind speed. It was clear that we needed to retrim, so we raked the wing aft—and no, that didn’t work. It turned out that when we powered-off the upper elements—when we added twist aloft—the center of effort shifted down and forward. There was no relief in that. So instead we opened the slot. That gave us less lift on the main element and more lift on the flap [which funnels air aft]. Over the course of the regatta we increased the traveler load by 50 percent. That eliminated lee helm, helped the boat point, and simply made us faster upwind.

“So, it was a bunch of boat-tune things that turned it around for us. Look at any one-design fleet, and the difference between the front and the back is huge. Most of that is fine tuning.”

Before we leave the subject of “slot,” we should listen to Tom Spear describe the effect of the slot from an engineer’s point of view. Here goes: “The slot allows you to go to a higher maximum lift because of the behavior of the boundary layer, which is where all your skin-friction losses occur. The boundary layer is thin, but it wants to get stuck to the wing and not move. Meanwhile, at the leading edge of the wing, the pressure is very low. Toward the trailing edge, pressure increases. There is a tendency to push the boundary layer toward lower pressure—push it forward on the wing—and that’s where you get flow separating from the surface and a big dropoff in lift. With a slot-and-flap arrangement, you are basically dumping slow air from the lead element into high-velocity air around the flap. Or, let’s say that you are taking one bottom layer and handing it off to a fresh bottom layer on the flap.”

Wings have been a fascination in this space for years, but in Spear’s figuring, “Wing development has hit a plateau. [in only one AC cycle, after decades in C-cats and A-cats!]. Given the motivation to control costs, it’s likely the next design rule will constrain the design of the wing so that teams don’t have to spend so much in that area.” Again, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve heard the talk in high places about making all or, more likely, parts of the wing one design.

NEXT:
Control. Control. Control. Another just-in-time for Oracle, and the hydro that bit New Zealand.

 

GAME ON, STARTS SATURDAY AND ICE IN THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE

Saturday, Sept. 7: Final Race 1 (1:10 pm PT), Final Race 2 (2:10 pm PT)

Sunday, Sept. 8: Final Race 3 (1:10 pm PT), Final Race 4 (2:10 pm PT
Tuesday, Sept. 10: Final Race 5 (1:10 pm PT), Final Race 6 (2:10 pm PT)
Thursday, Sept. 12: Final Race 7 (1:10 pm PT), Final Race 8 (2:10 pm PT)
Saturday, Sept. 14: Final Race 9 (1:10 pm PT), Final Race 10* (2:10 pm PT)
Sunday, Sept. 15: Final Race 11* (1:10 pm PT), Final Race 12* (2:10 pm PT)
Monday, Sept. 16: Reserve Day
Tuesday, Sept. 17: Final Race 13* (1:10 pm PT), Final Race 14* (2:10 pm PT)
Wednesday, Sept. 18: Reserve Day
Thursday, Sept. 19: Final Race 15* (1:10 pm PT), Final Race 16* (2:10 pm PT)
Friday, Sept. 20: Reserve Day
Saturday, Sept. 21: Final Race 17* (1:10 pm PT)
Sunday, Sept. 22: Reserve Day
Monday, Sept. 23: Reserve Day

Finally the boats and teams get on the water. A point when all the talk and squabbling is left ashore. It becomes a sailboat race. Even in my era once you left the dock it was about sailing and nothing else.

In unrelated news, I am not sure why people are surprised the the ice is back, August 15th used to be the latest date before the ice started migrating towards the south.

 

North West Passage blocked with ice – yachts caught
‘North West Passage – showing ice blockages’    © Environment Canada

The Northwest Passage after decades of so-called global warming has a dramatic 60% more Arctic ice this year than at the same time last year. The future dreams of dozens of adventurous sailors are now threatened. A scattering of yachts attempting the legendary Passage are caught by the ice, which has now become blocked at both ends and the transit season may be ending early. Douglas Pohl tells the story: 

The Passage has become blocked with 5/10 concentrated drifting sea ice at both the eastern and at the western ends of Canada’s Arctic Archipelago. At least 22 yachts and other vessels are in the Arctic at the moment. Some who were less advanced have retreated and others have abandoned their vessels along the way. Still others are caught in the ice in an unfolding, unresolved drama.

The real question is if and when the Canadian Coast Guard(CCG) decides to take early action to help the yachts exit the Arctic before freeze-up… or will they wait until it becomes an emergency rescue operation?

The first blockage area is at Prince Regent Inlet in position 73.7880535N, -89.2529297W which became blocked on 27th August with 5/10 ice concentration with 7/10 ice pushing.

This effectively closes the 2013 Northwest Passage without Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker escorts for transit. The alternative is a very technical and risky southern navigation through Fury & Hecla Strait mostly blocked with sea ice.

Currently there is a commercial cruise ship on a west to east passage which will reach Prince Regent Inlet in another day. It is unknown if there is a CCG icebreaker in the area to provide assistance since government ships do not provide Automatic Identification Service (AIS) to public AIS websites.

Since one of the Canadian Coast Guard’s prime missions is to provide icebreaking for commercial shipping it will be interesting to see if Canada Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Government views this as an opportunity for good public relations to help recreational yachts transiting the Northwest Passage.

Another choke-point stopping marine traffic is on the western Canadian Arctic at Cape Bathurst in position 70.6672443N, -128.2763672W which became blocked on 26th August with 2/10 ice concentration and quickly filled with 5/10 ice on 27th August and today has 8/10 ice pushing towards Cape Bathurst. Latest word is the ice is retreating at an agonizing 1 nautical mile per day northward.

Empiricus – one of the ice-blocked yachts, still smiling –  © Environment Canada

There are a number of yachts known to be in the Cambridge Bay area heading west: ACALEPHE (CA), ISATIS (NEW CALEDONIA), LA BELLE EPOQUE (DE), LIBELLULE (CHE), NOEME (FRA), and TRAVERSAY III (CA). PAS PERDU LE NORD (DE) was ahead by 10 days and has already gone on to Arctic Alaska waters. While BALTHAZAR (CA) departed from Inuvik a month ago and is now on the hard in Nome Alaska.

The following yachts are enroute from the west to the east: ANNA (?), rowboat ARCTIC JOULE (CA), DODO’S DELIGHT (GBR), EMPIRICUS (USA). rowboat FAIRMONT’s PASSION (USA), tandem-kayak IKIMAYIA (CA), in Russian sea ice is LADY DANA (POL), POLAR BOUND (GBR), rowboat ROWING ICE (FRA), in Russian sea ice is TARA (FRA), and a group of jetskis known as DANGEROUS WATERS (USA) reported east of Gjoa Haven.

Several updates on known others:
LE MANGUIER (FRA) is wintering over in the ice at Paulatuk. Motor Yacht Lady M II (Marshal Islands) was escorted by CCGS icebreaker HENRY LARSEN through Bellot Strait eastbound on 20130824. ARCTIC TERN (GBR) and TOOLUKA (NED) retreated to the east towards Greenland/Newfoundland away from Bellot Strait on 20130822 with the opinion that the Arctic ice was finished melting and freeze-up would prevent them from reaching the Northwest Passage finish line at the Arctic Circle in the Bering Strait.

MORE SANCTIONS FOR ORACLE?

Oracle Team USA could face more sanctions; ETNZ’s Dalton accuses team of cheating

Oracle Team USA, the defender in the America’s Cup, could be in serious trouble.

Having already admitted rules violations during the America’s Cup World Series, a warm-up to this year’s regatta, the team has been described by a Cup committee as having made “an intentional effort’’ to circumvent the rules.

And on Tuesday, Oracle’s chief rival directly accused the American team of cheating. “You can’t actually get to any other point than the fact they were cheating,’’ Emirates Team New Zealand managing director Grant Dalton said in an interview. “I think it’s really serious.’’

Oracle could wind up forfeiting one or more race wins in the best-of-17 America’s Cup finals, or it could be thrown out of the regatta altogether, an international sailing expert said.

A five-member international jury “could dismiss them from the event, which would hand the trophy to the winner of the Louis Vuitton (challengers) Cup,’’ said Bob Fisher, an America’s Cup historian. “Still taking a strong line, they could give the Louis Vuitton Cup winner one or more wins in the America’s Cup finals. It depends on how strongly the jury feels about it.’’

The latest developments add to the troubles of a series plagued by soaring boat costs, a scarcity of challengers, a crash that killed a crew member, intense rules disagreements and one-sided races.

Meanwhile, with the major league baseball season entering the home stretch and the NFL exhibition season in full swing, the Louis Vuitton Cup is  attracting scant attention in the Bay Area. The finals begin Saturday between Team New Zealand and Italy’s Luna Rossa Challenge.

Oracle admitted last week its shore members illegally placed weights in the bows of all three of its 45-foot catamarans during the America’s Cup World Series. One of the boats was loaned to a British team.

In a report to regatta director Iain Murray, the America’s Cup measurement committee said, “The modifications appear to be an intentional effort to circumvent the limitations of the 45 class rule.’’

The committee’s report was used as the basis of Murray’s filing a protest to the international jury of the International Sailing Federation. The jury is investigating the violations.

In disclosing the violations on Thursday, Oracle team chief executive Russell Coutts said a team employee, possibly more than one, added the weights without the knowledge of management. He called the placement “a ridiculous mistake’’ because “it didn’t affect the performance.’’

Oracle voluntarily forfeited its wins in four ACWS regattas and its two overall season championships.

In an interview, Dalton disputed Coutts’ contention that the weights didn’t affect the boats’ performance.

“Why would you actually do it, if it didn’t make a difference?’’ Dalton said. Properly placed extra weight does improve the performance of the boat, he said.

“Because of the design (of the 45) you like the weight forward,’’ he said. That’s why “you put one guy really far forward to keep the bow in the water.’’

He called Coutts’ insistence that management didn’t know about the placement of the weights “complete nonsense.’’ He said he felt Oracle was trying to “snow’’ people with its explanations.

“It’s inconceivable,’’ Dalton said, “that a shore crew member woke up one morning and decided it was a good idea — that management would think it was a good idea  — that to make the boat faster you would put some weight in the boat, and then you’d come in to work one day and do it.’’

At Team New Zealand, for example, if someone were to add weights or move them around, the team would run tests to see if it would help performance or not, he said. He didn’t buy the idea that rogue employees committed violations on their own.

According to the measurement committee, a five-pound combination of lead and resin was found inside the bow strut on one Oracle boat. Bags of lead of roughly the same weight were found in similar positions on the other two boats.

Dalton said it’s possible that somebody placed several weights in the boats and, in removing them afterward, forgot about the telltale lead and resin. The weights were not discovered during the ACWS because detailed weight testing was not done on the AC45s, all of which were the same design, Murray said last week.

The violations were not discovered until July 26, when the boats were tested in preparation of the upcoming Red Bull Youth America’s Cup. If it hadn’t been for the youth sailing regatta, the violations probably would not have been discovered at all.

Asked last week to explain why it took two weeks after the violations were detected to disclose them, Coutts said, “We had to make sure it actually happened.’’ He did not elaborate.

Coutts was unavailable for comment Tuesday, a team spokesperson said. “We’re not going to be able to comment today,’’ she said.

Dalton steered clear of accusing Coutts personally. “I can only say that there’s a management failure,’’ he said.

Stephen Barclay, the American’s Cup chief executive, and Tom Ehman, the Cup director of external affairs, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Dalton said he didn’t expect the jury to take a long time to reach a decision. “We have absolute faith that the jury will get to the bottom of it,’’ he said.

He likened the use of illegal weights to bicyclists using performance enhancing drugs in the Tour de France.

He was asked why a team would take such a risk in a low-stakes event like the ACWS, far from a pinnacle like the Tour de France. Dalton replied, “I’m the wrong person to ask why. We didn’t do it. That’s a fair question: Why would you cheat? But there is no doubt that they did.’’

WHAT HAPPENS TO SAN FRANCISCO?

By Therese Poletti, MarketWatch


Getty Images

Oracle Team USA passes the Golden Gate Bridge while training for September’s America’s Cup regatta on Aug. 7.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — In February 2010, a jubilant Larry Ellison and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom stood together at City Hall to celebrate Ellison’s team winning the coveted America’s Cup, the oldest trophy in sailing.

Ellison, co-founder and chief executive of Oracle Corp. ORCL +0.24% ,  predicted — if he and his team were to pick San Francisco as host for the next America’s Cup — that the races would bring over $1 billion in revenue to the city, which was then still hurting from the Great Recession, about three times the economic windfall of the Super Bowl, which is coming to the Bay Area in 2016.

The current regatta, with three teams racing in the Louis Vuitton Cup, began in July with round robins, and continues with semifinals now until Aug. 30. The winner goes to the finals, which start Sept. 7, against the defending champion, Team Oracle USA. The final races could run until Sept. 21, if necessary. With so many months of sailing, the city would benefit from the visiting teams and spectators, with an estimated 2 million visitors spending money here on lodging, food, and sites.

In addition, the beauty of San Francisco Bay and its late afternoon high winds would lend itself to picture-perfect, made-for-TV races. The races of the huge colorful catamarans are taking place far closer to shore, as opposed to the America’s Cups of the past that typically take place in the ocean, far from most spectators.


Getty ImagesEnlarge Image

Italy’s Luna Rossa Challenge (L) and Sweden’s Artemis Racing (R) face off at the start of a semifinals match on Aug. 7.

But so far, the America’s Cup is shaping up to be less of an economic boon than predicted. What’s more, the cup has been a sporting disappointment, an event fraught with fighting, lawsuits, accidents and the tragic death of a well-regarded British sailor, Andrew ”Bart” Simpson in May, who was pinned under the Artemis Racing team’s capsized catamaran, during practice races.

From the beginning, the trials set the tone.On July 7 Emirates Team New Zealand sailed the course alone, and Italy’s Luna Rossa sat out in protest, while an international jury was deciding whether to enforce new safety rules imposed by the regatta director after the tragedy.

Leading up to the finals in September, the semifinals have begun this month and plenty of tickets are still available to watch from the various spectator venues, at different price ranges, from $35 up to tens of thousands for a yacht berth. Local media has had a field day, where the alternative paper, SFWeekly, has called it a “fiasco” and in February, city supervisor John Avalos told the paper that the city’s Board of Supervisors “were f-ing played,” by the America’s Cup organizing committee.

Billionaire’s bust?

What went wrong? Is this America’s Cup an example of too much money and too much technology? The races feature the fastest boats yet, with 72-foot-long hulls, and masts — some made of expensive carbon fiber — about 131 feet high, with the average price tag to build them about $100 million a boat.

These massive catamarans are also tech-laden, and at least in Oracle Team USA’s case, powered with specially designed software, a mesh network of sensors, on-board computers, GPS, and a WiFi network.

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One of the biggest issues most frequently cited in the ho-hum races so far, is the fact that there are only four teams, or syndicates.

“Historically, you would have expected more than 10,” said Sean Randolph, president and CEO of BayArea Council Economic Institute, which co-authored one of the big economic impact studies of the America’s Cup. “Ten to 12 would have been more of a normal size. You have fewer boats, and they are spending less.”

The four teams are all well-heeled and spent years getting sponsorship or are funded by billionaires like the defender Ellison. For example, Sweden’s Artemis Racing is chaired by Torbjörn Törnqvist, co-founder of the trading firm Gunvor Group.

 

“Timing was one factor,” Randolf said, adding that the economic recession came when many teams would have been starting to make plans to enter. “The other is that these are extremely expensive boats to build and operate, compared to the traditional model haul boats. The tech is exotic, they are fantastic, but they are very expensive to build, operate and maintain.”

Current estimates by the BayArea Council now predict that the America’s Cup teams, visiting tourists, spectators and other factors will bring about $900 million in revenue versus $1.4 billion previously forecast. But the city has to pay for police and transportation costs. A fundraising effort has already raised $16 million to help cover the city’s cost.

In 2011, Aaron Peskin, the former president of the city’s board of supervisors, sued the board of supervisors to pressure for an environmental review of the sites being used. A settlement was reached in 2012, and one result was that the city dropped its long-term leases of nine city piers to the America’s Cup organizers. Peskin also created a petition on Causes.com, asking for Ellison to cough up the funds the city would be need to cover police and transportation costs.

“The good news is that because no one is actually showing up, their costs are going down,” said Peskin, who lives on Telegraph Hill where he has a view of the festivities down at Pier 27. “This whole thing was predicated on somewhere between 12 and 15 teams from around the world.. It turned out to be three and Oracle, which is as exciting as watching paint dry.”

A few weeks ago, Avalos called up Peskin and asked him to go outside and see how many people were attending a race. “I went out there with some binoculars,” he said. “I said, ‘Do you want me to count them for you?’ There were maybe 100 people.”

Jane Sullivan, a spokeswoman for the city at the America’s Cup, said that as attendance projections have fallen to about 2 million visitors to the cup, versus 2.9 million previously, so have the city’s costs, originally estimated at $32 million. “We see the fundraising and the city’s costs getting very close together,” she said. In general, she said “we are very pleased that the city is filled with visitors.” She added that the city has done major improvements, just like many do getting ready for a big party, which will remain after the cup is over.

“The view of the city that is being beamed around the world, as an ad for San Francisco, you could not ask for anything better,” Sullivan said. “That is almost un-quantifiable.”

As the semifinals get started this month, economist Randolf and some of his researchers will interview visitors to get a sense of how much they are spending in the city, how long they are staying and other data.

“It’s still very much in play. I would sum it up we know the economic impact will be less than it was originally projected,” he said. Is the America’s Cup going to be a billionaire’s bust? “It’s too early to go there,” Randolph cautioned. “It’s quite correct to point to the things that haven’t gone as expected.”

That may turn out to be the understatement of the year, but it’s not over until the fastest boat wins.

AMERICA’S CUP IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

Turbulent Journey for America’s Cup

Eric Risberg/Associated Press

America’s Cup organizers said there would be 15 teams and $1.4 billion in economic activity in San Francisco. But teams have dropped out, and economic forecasts have fallen.

 

By  and MALIA WOLLAN
Published: July 26, 2013

SAN FRANCISCO — The race was scheduled to begin at 12:15 p.m., and fans were expected to pour into the well-manicured America’s Cup Park and line themselves all around the waterfront of San Francisco Bay to watch. Years of planning, promise and promotion were built toward what organizers called “America’s Cup Summer of Racing.”

Noah Berger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Of the 11 races in July, eight featured one boat, and three had two. Emirates Team New Zealand defeated Italy’s Luna Rossa in three races.

But this race, like most of the others so far, featured one boat, albeit an impressively majestic and fast one, sailing back and forth across the water. Even the competitors found it a bit laughable — the world’s most prestigious sailing race reduced to a glorified scrimmage.

“Halfway through race 1,” Emirates Team New Zealandposted on Twitter during the event’s first race, on July 7. “No surprises to be leading in a race with ourselves.”

Others were more critical. The San Francisco Chroniclecalled it “perhaps the worst nautical launch since the Titanic set off across the North Atlantic.”

In its first month, the America’s Cup, returning to the United States for the first time since 1995, has been viewed as a flotsam of broken promises and undelivered spectacle, stained by the May death of a sailor.

Little has gone as planned. Initial hopes were that 15 teams would compete with 72-foot catamarans, but there are only four. Oracle Team USA, the defending champion owned by the billionaire Larry Ellison, has a free pass to September’s finals. Another team, Sweden’sArtemis Racing, returned to the water this week for the first time since its boat capsized on May 9, killing the sailor Andrew Simpson. Artemis hopes to begin racing in August, joining what is formally called the Louis Vuitton Cup to determine which challenger will meet Oracle Team USA in September.

An exciting, vigorous competition was expected by now. Instead, teams are sniping, sponsors are groaning, people are suing, city officials are worrying and fans are not sure what to make of the entire enterprise.

Organizers are asking for patience.

“We’ve had lots of issues thrown at us over the course of the last three years,” Stephen Barclay, chief executive of America’s Cup Event Authority, said in an interview Thursday. “It’s been difficult for us to sell a promise or sell a vision. But now, in the last week or so, couple of weeks, we’ve been starting to see the reality. And it’s far easier to sell a reality.”

Before this weekend, there have been 11 races, eight of which had one boat and three featured two boats. Emirates Team New Zealand has handily won all three over Italy’sLuna Rossa, once despite a sail clip coming undone in the middle of the race, which stands as the most exciting moment of competition so far. Two races are scheduled this weekend.

In the end, organizers believe, the headlines will be different.

“Coolest venue, ever,” Tom Ehman, director of external affairs for the America’s Cup, predicted for the event’s ultimate legacy. “Reliable wind. Iconically beautiful. Closest match ever.”

Criticism Rolls In

So far, however, criticism has come like a surging tide, and race officials are doing all they can to corral the unflattering reviews. Last week, a blog and newsletter called Scuttlebutt Sailing News, widely read in sailing circles, published an online article that was critical of officials and their handling of a lawsuit aimed at the host Golden Gate Yacht Club.

The lawsuit involves an African-American sailing syndicate, which said that its rejected application to compete against Oracle Team USA for the right to represent the United States was not reviewed in good faith in 2011. A New York appellate court gave the once-dismissed suit life a few weeks ago, and now the group hopes for an injunction to delay the September finals. A court hearing is scheduled for Aug. 23.

Ehman fired back. In e-mail exchanges with the Scuttlebutt editor and publisher Craig Leweck, exchanges that Ehman also sent to others and were obtained by The New York Times, Ehman pressured Leweck to remove the post about the lawsuit. “Responsible journos” who have looked into the lawsuit, Ehman wrote, have “long since dismissed it as an attempted shakedown or worse of GGYC/ACEA/LJE” — referring, presumably, to Golden Gate Yacht Club, the America’s Cup Event Authority and Lawrence J. Ellison, the chief executive officer of Oracle Corporation.

“Are you the responsible voice of American sailing like Scuttlebutt used to be, or vying to be the latest and greatest sailing tabloid?” Ehman wrote.

Leweck, who declined to comment for this article, is a one-person operation based in San Diego. He received further pressure to delete the story from his Web site, including phone calls from high-level America’s Cup officials. The e-mails show that, after an adamant stand, Leweck eventually sent a proposed draft of an editor’s note explaining the disappearance of the article to Ehman and several other high-ranking America’s Cup officials. The published version included more remorseful language.

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“Upon review,” the note to readers said, in part, “Scuttlebutt disavows that article and regrets promoting this legal matter of, at best, dubious merit, and will now focus on the competition of the 34th America’s Cup, which is where our attention should be for this historic event.”

Noah Berger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Max Sirena discussing Luna Rossa’s decision to skip the first day of the Louis Vuitton Cup on July 7. The team was boycotting rule changes.

Ehman did not respond to requests for comment.

Organizers said they believe the return of Artemis will restart the momentum lost since Simpson’s death.

“The world changed for us on May 9,” Barclay said. “That wasn’t in the script.”

The same thing that organizers hope will attract fans — 130-foot sails, speeds close to 50 miles per hour and the threat of disaster, not unlike that in auto racing — threatens to mar the race’s legacy. In a bit of foreshadowing, Oracle Team America had a boat capsize last fall. No one was seriously hurt, but the boat was pulled under the Golden Gate Bridge and had to be rescued before drifting to open sea.

Many sailors, including some still in the race and others who dropped out, have said that the choice of the boat, called the AC72, was misconceived and should not be used again. “Seeing what those boats were capable of, speeds of up to 40 knots, frightened the life out of me,” Keith Mills, a British team owner, told The Telegraph of London after the death of Simpson, who was originally part of Mills’s team that folded in 2011. “The class rules looked like they were dangerous boats to sail. At 40 knots, the control is minimal. Hit a big wave and that is it.”

After Artemis’s accident, there was discussion over canceling July’s races. Instead, the decision was to refund the tickets that some fans had bought and proceed as best as possible.

In lieu of races, much of the focus has been on the scrutiny of safety protocols, bickering over arcane rules, making threats to boycott the races (Luna Rossa snubbed an opening gala and the first race) and — in a grand America’s Cup tradition — calling one another names. Russell Coutts, who won the America’s Cup with his native New Zealand before leading Oracle to a victory in 2010, called the protesting Italians “a bunch of spoiled little rich kids dressed in Prada gear.”

New Rules, More Worries

The America’s Cup, dating to 1851, might be both the oldest and quirkiest trophy competition in international sports. The winner of the trophy gets to set the parameters for the next competition — when, where and what kind of boats. There is no governing body to guide regularity. Each event starts from scratch.

Ellison won in Valencia, Spain, in 2010, on his third attempt, after a protracted court battle turned the event into a two-boat competition. He proposed bringing the next competition to the natural amphitheater of San Francisco Bay. Event organizers predicted 15 teams and $1.4 billion in economic activity, including 8,800 new jobs and 2.7 million spectators, according to the Bay Area Council Economic Institute, whose research was commissioned by the America’s Cup Organizing Committee.

“Who the heck needs the Olympics and the Super Bowl when you’ve got the America’s Cup?” said then-Mayor Gavin Newsom at a 2010 event at City Hall where the mayor presented Ellison with a key to the city.

But many teams that were expected to compete stayed away, leery of Ellison’s rules and the cost — an estimated $100 million to field a boat and a full staff of designers, builders and sailors. Teams from France and South Korea folded in the past year or so like poker players unwilling to keep up with the ante. Economic forecasts generally fell by a third, to a $900 million boost and 6,000 jobs. Worries escalated that taxpayers would be left to clean up a billionaire’s party.

The city will spend roughly $22 million for upgrades and services like police, but event organizers have said they will reimburse those costs through fund-raising and have so far collected $15 million. Barclay said Thursday that he was certain that the city would be left with no bills to pay.

Still, by signing the contract to host the America’s Cup, politicians were “bamboozled by a billionaire,” said Aaron Peskin, a former member of the city’s board of supervisors and former chairman of the city’s Democratic Party, adding that event organizers made “outlandish promises.”

But subsequent changes to the contract took back many perks.

“This could have been much worse for San Francisco,” Peskin said. “At this point it’s just a stupid business decision.”

Perhaps feelings will be different in two months. On Tuesday, Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa had a midday race. A crowd assembled at the America’s Cup Park, a temporary theme park of a village that includes shops, bars and an outdoor concert venue.

Most fans could not be sure what they were watching, as the boats sailed out of view around the bend toward the Golden Gate Bridge. But then the boat from New Zealand reappeared, passed Alcatraz, turned hard past a buoy and sailed toward the spectators.

For about 30 seconds, several hundred fans crowded against the water’s edge, cameras held high to capture the winning catamaran as it passed so close that people could make out the faces of the sailors. All eyes were on the boats. No one was looking back.

INTERNATIONAL JURY LISTENS

International Jury to hear Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa applications

05/07/2013 - San Francisco (USA,CA) - 34th America's Cup -The International Jury will hear applications from Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa Challenge beginning on Monday morning.

The two cases have been consolidated and will heard together with parties being given the opportunity to speak to their submissions.

International Jury chairman David Tillett says the hearing will last as long as is necessary to hear the evidence.

“We’d like to have a decision on Wednesday,” he said.

Both Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa are arguing Regatta Director Iain Murray exceeded his authority when some of his 37 Safety Rules effectively changed the AC72 Class Rule.

The Regatta Director argues the changes are necessary to run a safe regatta and are in line with the Rules of the event.

Full bios of the International Jury are available here.

The Transpac started today from Long Beach and the Halifax race started slowly yesterday in Marblehead.

HAVE THEY LOST DIRECTION?

 

Lack of progress in safety provisions frustrating America’s Cup in wake of Andrew Simpson death

Just two of original 37 proposals have been incorporated into the rules following death of British sailor

SUNDAY 16 JUNE 2013

Slow progress is being made in San Francisco on changes to the America’s Cup safety provisions following the death of Andrew Simpson during a training accident on the Swedish challenger Artemis.

With considerable fanfare, a review committee under the chairmanship of the regatta director Iain Murray produced a list of 37 recommendations, though the other members of the committee were told by the lawyers not to put their names to the proposals.

Over the weekend two, well one and a half, of the recommendations were incorporated into the rules for both the Louis Vuitton Cup (LVC) challenger elimination series and the match between the eventual winner and the defender, the locally-based Oracle Racing.

One covers technical matters surrounding the structure of the 40-metre carbon fibre solid wings and the dagger boards which lift the 72-foot catamarans so that they skim on foils above the water.

The second confirms that there will be no guest position when the yachts are racing. But it does not include, as originally proposed, a ban on on-board television camera operators. There is no indication when the remaining 35 proposals would, if at all, be adopted.

The opening exhibition race is scheduled for two weeks on Friday, 5 July, with the first LVC race between Emirates Team New Zealand and the Prada-backed Italians in Luna Rossa two days later.

An ETNZ proposal, backed by the Italians, to delay the whole event until 19 July and then run a condensed LVC was vetoed by the Swedes, even though they are indicating they may not be ready to race until 6 August and then only if their latest boat, which has yet to be launched, comes through all its sea trials successfully.

That veto is being investigated by two members of the international jury, one Britain’s Bryan Willis, the other a New Zealand lawyer, Graham McKenzie. But the whole thing may, as time runs out, have to be referred to the full five-person jury and the work of Willis and McKenzie is not due to start until Wednesday.

Nor has the United States Coastguard announced that it has granted the event a permit to race. The San Francisco Police Department is still preparing its report on ‘Bart’ Simpson’s death, though that will focus largely on criminality, and the Medical Examiner’s (coroner’s) report, a public document, has yet to be published on the causes of his death.