The way to the final - by Bob Fisher


The tumult and the shouting are over, such as they were in the first place, but nine of the original challengers for the America's Cup have been eliminated, leaving two of the biggest budgeted teams to slug it out for the right to challenge Team New Zealand. The struggle to the top has been fascinating and as the smaller, less well funded teams departed taking some surprises with them, there were close races and the general acknowledgement that designers were all thinking along the same lines - narrow, heavy boats with maximum stability.

The Italian Prada syndicate's Luna Rossa is to meet Paul Cayard's AmericaOne in the final of the Louis Vuitton Cup to decide which of them will be the eventual challenger, and throughout the competition this always looked to be the pairing that would decide the ultimate destiny. They are very similar boats and as Doug Peterson, the principal designer of Prada, remarked over the choice at the slightly elder of the two Prada boats, 'We are preparing to match boats with those we are going against, and that includes Team New Zealand."



By the Wayside

At the end of the day, and for some the finish of three rounds robin marked the end of the road, there is absolutely nothing in America's Cup racing to beat reliability and boat speed. One is useless without the other and by the time the cut for the semi final round was made, there were some unmistakable surprises. For only the second time in its challenging history the New York Yacht Club, for 132 years the trustee of the trophy, had been eliminated without progressing beyond the preliminary rounds.

It was Fremantle all over again, but this time for a different reason. In Australia the NYYC had a dreadfully slow boat. This time they had potentially the fastest boat on the water, but reliability was not so much a question as the answer in a failure of the most sensational kind. Sinking aside, it couldn't have been worse for Young America. It simply folded in the middle rather in the manner of One Australia in San Diego and was only prevented from sinking by virtue of the hull skin not splitting across underwater and the rapid deployment of airbags from support craft.

Earlier, Young America had demonstrated good boat speed and was a match for Prada's Luna Rossa and Paul Cayard's AmericaOne. It had promised to be an easy qualifier with close first round matches with both the other major players, but from the moment Young America folded and was replaced by USA-58, fear became a major ingredient in the NYYC campaign. John Marshall, the CEO of Young America admitted it, "I think that fear of the boat became a factor. The boat could have killed someone. You were all aware of one incident in the race immediately after we got back in the water and the whole crew was really distressed. They didn't know where the noise came from. They didn't know what happened". The incident he refers to, came when there was a loud crack, appearing to come from the hull of the new boat but in fact came from the gooseneck.

Bravo Espana completed her campaign one place down from Young America, but Luis Doreste exited on a high note by defeating Dennis Conner in Stars & Stripes. Absent from behind the wheel for the rest of the series, Conner decided that he would steer his boat in the final race, but the Spanish double Olympic gold medallist beat him to the start and was still in front at the finish. If the Spanish had a failing, it was that they were not used to the event and its pressures - these were largely a new group at the back end of the boat, but Doreste said "I think Spain will be in the next one and I will try to be there."

Abracadabra from Hawaii, having tried and failed to succeed, looked back at their problems, "I will say our problem is 100% lack of money" said John Kolius. "We kept paring things down and we finally ended up spending less than $10 million on a two-boat programme. You don't get very far like that". He later admitted that they would perhaps have been better off with a single boat campaign.

The crew that needed some money, at least, was the group of young people who were given Syd Fischer's boat to sail and then persuaded him that they could do better if they were allowed to charter OneAustralia. Syd provided them with that and accommodation plus a small sail budget and expenses. They sailed their hearts out and gave a few acknowledged crews a seriously hard time. They will be back at this event in the future. James Spithill at 20, has a glittering career in front of him and backers shouldn't be quite so hard to come by following the exemplary performance he and his crew displayed in Auckland.

Only the Swiss dared to produce a radical boat, or at least one with radical appendages. The design by Phillipe Briand and Peter van Oossathen, who claimed authorship of the winged keel of Australia II in 1983, had two ballast bulbs spread more than 40 feet apart, each one on a rudder. The design had tested fast in the banks of the Wolfson Institute at Southampton University and at times showed good speed in straight lines on the Hauraki Gulf, but the combined talents of triple Olympic gold medallist, Jochen Schumann, and Marc Pajot were insufficient to be able to steer it accurately.

The French surprised everyone including themselves. Given very little hope when they scored but two wins in the first round robin and only three in the second, and losing their first two in the third, they slammed their way back into contention with seven straight victories. They achieved this by altering Sixieme Sens dramatically, both the hull and the appendages and added new sails for the subsequent rounds. Perhaps the most significant change was brought about by the appearance of Luc Gellusseau in the afterguard. Gelluaseau has been a foremost proponent of the best in French competitive sailing for several years and the effect he had on Le Defi was marked. From the time he went on board, Le Defi only won races.

Dawn Riley's America True, steered by John Cutlar, was quite the star of the first three rounds, piling up an impressive record of 21 wins and 9 losses. The Phil Kaike design was quite the fastest of the single boat programmes and showed tremendous speed down wind. It just didn't stack up to the others during the semi-final, where Cutler was able to claim only two victories from the ten races.

The Nippon Challenge, skippered by world match racing champion, Peter Gilmour, just edged America True out of second place by half a point, after the first three rounds with 20 wins and ten losses. But it was during the third round when she had scored eight winds that Idaten introduced for this round, appeared to transform their otherwise average performance. It came as a surprise when Gilmour announced that he would be using the earlier boat, Asura for the semi finals. It was a move that failed. Asura scored only four wins from her ten races. Gilmour explained that there had not been time to make the changes to Idaten that they had to Asura, which had improved her speed.

The surprise of the competition was Dennis Connor's Stars & Stripes. Connor stayed largely off the boat, leaving the generalship to tactician Tom Whidden and the steering to Ken Road. It was a low budget, single boat programme that almost pulled off a place in the finals. Losing a point for using an illegal rudder (built at McConaghy's in Australia) was the downfall of Stars & Stripes, otherwise the dark blue boat, designed by John Reichel and Jim Pugh, would have had a sail-off against Prada to meet AmericaOne. Starts & Stripes was also under fire from Prada, for using sails which the Italians believed were designed by someone outside of the Stars & Stripes team. It was a strong allegation, particularly bringing the integrity of Whidden, Reed and North Sails into question. It was dropped when Stars & Stripes was beaten by America True in the final race of the round, but it began speculation that Prada would begin similar mind games with AmericaOne, with particular reference to the design of their mast, which was built, like several of the other boats at Omohundro (another North Group Company).

Prada is the team which has everything - everything that a budget of US$50 million and calculating freely can buy. It has two elegant boats designed by Doug Peterson and German Frers, steered by Francesco di Angelia with Torben Grael calling the shots and has only one hiccup in the entire campaign when the mast of Luna Rossa snapped on the first beat of the semi-final race against AmericaOne. The power of the team was amply demonstrated when Luna Rossa was towed home and was back out testing her spare rig two and half hours after hitting the dock. They lost both races to AmericaOne, the second being the closest when they came from behind to lead at the final mark and lost on the run home when there were more protest flags flown than in any other race of the Louis Vuitton Cup and both boats received a penalty. Her other loss was to Stars & Stripes.

AmericaOne spent more time than most on design research. Led by Bruce Nelson, the design team numbered 38 and first produced a boat (USA-49) which was sufficient to take fourth place after the first three rounds. Their second boat was air-freighted aboard an Air New Zealand cargo 747 as the second round came to a close. It had to be fitted out and trialed but Paul Cayard was convinced, by computer studies, that this boat was considerably quicker than the first. So it proved after the two boats were lined-up, one against the other, on the Gulf waters.

In the semi finals, AmericaOne looked virtually unbeatable. She lost one race to America True when her headsail split while she was leading, and her final race to Stars & Stripes when tactician John Kostecki inexplicably chose the wrong side of the course for the fist shift. It was a move that was to prove terminal and Cayard explained why later when asked if he thought one could come back from a wrong decision at this stage, 'Very remote with such good sailors as Torben Grael and John Kostecki calling the shots. You could go for them making a crew error, but the odds are that they are going to leverage that position to stay in phase and force you out of phase. Then you would fall further behind with boats that are evenly matched in speed. I would put the odds at less than thirty percent of winning the race if you miss the first shift".

Cayard summed up the AmericaOne campaign, "We feel that out programme in the semi-finals made a significant step forward. AmericaOne is a little bit better boat all round and the crew has improved quite a bit. I feel more confident in the starts myself. We did a lot of work, a lot of studying, a lot of reviewing of videotapes and we have just raised our game a whole level on all those different fronts. We put a nice string of races together in the middle of the semi finals - that was the product of some hard work during the Christmas break. With specific regard to the two races we had with Prada, who is now obviously our only competitor in the challenger side - the first race looked like it was getting up to be a good battle. Unfortunately from a getting-to-know-them-better standpoint, their rig fell down. In the second one, also a bit of a non-event, because we got the first shift (correct) and had such a big lead, but they came roaring back at us, and showed good speed. It is shaping up to be a tough battle for the final, one in which I think the sailors will make the difference."

 The way to the final
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