2008 – an excuse for Ernesto to right the wrongs of 2007

Will Ernesto Bertarelli look back on 2007 as his Annus Mirabilis or his Annus Horribilis? For the Swiss billionaire, it must surely have been both. The first half of the year, he presided over an America’s Cup which could claim to have been one of the greatest ever. Not only that but he successfully defended it in a final which produced the closest racing in the event’s history.

A few weeks later, Bertarelli’s great works were in tatters, thanks to a greedy, self-serving Protocol (at least that’s how it came across to most sane people), and a petulant refusal to negotiate with the Golden Gate Yacht Club.

After losing the court battle in New York and seeing Justice Cahn reject the Spanish Challenge of Record for the sham challenge that it was, Alinghi are building up to a second court battle. I quote Kimball Livingston from his excellent blog, because he always comes up with the lines I wish I’d had the wit to think of: “Alinghi’s new lawyers (they used to have ‘the best lawyers’ but they fired them) are presently attempting to convince the Supreme Court of the State of New York that BMW Oracle Racing has challenged in a monohull 90 feet wide – that’s not the way they phrase it; that’s the way it logically parses.” Kimball asked some of the most incisive questions at the press conferences in Valencia last summer, his Emo Philips style of delivery allowing him to ask things that others could never get away with. Read his round-up of the end of 2007 here…

Bertarelli is looking increasingly isolated. This being the season of Christmas and all, I was reminded of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, a Victorian morality tale of an old and bitter miser, Ebenezer Scrooge, who undergoes a profound experience of redemption over the course of one night. Mr Scrooge is a money lender who has devoted his life to the accumulation of wealth. He holds anything other than money in contempt, including friendship, love and the Christmas season.

Mr Scrooge is shown the horror of his future by some ghostly spirits who warn him of what will happen if he continues to live his miserly life. I wonder if the ghosts will do Ernesto the kindness of paying him a midnight visit as the year2008 chimes in, and wake him up to the self-made nightmare that he has created for himself. If Ernesto were to call off his legal attack dogs and finally agree to have that long-awaited meeting with Larry Ellison, then I think the world might yet forgive him for these wasted months.

If the reference to Scrooge is too obscure for you, then perhaps the words of Paul Elvstrom, the greatest ever Olympic sailor, might strike a chord. It was the four-time Gold medallist who said: “If in the process of winning you have lost the respect of your competitors, you have won nothing.”

In the meantime, while we wait for the ghosts to visit Ernesto, let’s enjoy the amazing exploits of the round-the-world sailors out there in the Barcelona Race, and those magnificent Frenchmen in their flying machines, Thomas Coville and Francis Joyon. Whatever happens with the America’s Cup, we do at least have the prospect of an Olympic Games and a Volvo Ocean Race to look forward to. It could be an amazing year for our sport.

A very happy new year to you.

Americans storm the Hobart

Roger Sturgeon has become only the third American skipper to win the Rolex Sydney Hobart Race on handicap, after his new STP65 Rosebud was confirmed as winner of the Tattersall’s Cup earlier today.

This is a massive personal victory for Florida-based Sturgeon, who was competing in his first Sydney Hobart. Not only that, but Rosebud’s performance has put the STP65 firmly on the map. This is the launchpad the class needs to establish itself as the big brother of the TP52 class, of which Sturgeon was a pioneer.

Of course, competing in the ‘Hobart’ also means Rosebud has given the fledgling class some nice marketing images, including this one below, courtesy of the incomparable Carlo Borlenghi, doing his work for Rolex.

Everyone likes to see someone win a hard race like the Hobart with humility, and Sturgeon did just that. “I’m ecstatic beyond belief,” he said. “We had a plan and we stuck to it. It’s unimaginable, the odds were huge.

“It’s [winning the Rolex Sydney Hobart ] infinitely large. I feel like I came to Mecca, meaning Australian boating and yachting, and took away a few trophies. It makes me very embarrassed but very pleased.”

And so he should be. Every other skipper in the top five has at least 16 ‘Hobarts’ to their name, which puts Sturgeon’s virgin performance in perspective.

For the rest of the story, go to the official website here…

Another epic Hobart

The Rolex Sydney Hobart Race is never anything less than extraordinary. Mile for mile, it must be the most hard-arsed yacht race in the world, and I count pretty much all the round-the-world races in that estimation.

A 630-mile race is short by today’s high performance standards. But they are hard-won miles to Hobart. Almost invariably the fleet finds itself battling through severe head winds and giant waves in the Bass Strait. This year, however, has been a very benign (by Sydney Hobart standards), with just three retirements, as I write this.

I was lucky enough to cover this race on behalf of Rolex for 2004 (the year Skandia’s keel fell off) and 2005 (the year that brand new Wild Oats won the race and demolished the course record). After last year’s follow-up victory, Bob Oatley’s canting-keeled superboat – see below Carlo Borlenghi’s photo of Oats passing the Organ Pipes on Tasmania – has done it again, making it a hat trick of line honours wins. The last time that happened was in the 1940s.

Despite the kinder breezes, there has been plenty for the media to get its teeth into. Whenever Grant Wharington brings Skandia out to play, there is always a story. This year it was his top mast snapping off, while the VO70 which Wharington skippered in the last Volvo Ocean Race, now called Ichi Ban, has just limped into Hobart in third place. Fortunately for owner Matt Allen, his VO70 was one of the few to come with twin rudders, so when one snapped he could still get his way to Hobart with the other one.

While the race for line honours went Wild Oats’s way, with the Aussie SuperMaxi beating British entry, Mike Slade’s City Index Leopard, by just 27 minutes, the ‘real race’ for handicap honours has yet to be decided.

The Aussie newspapers and TV stations tend to lose interest after line honours has been wrapped up. But the sailors know that the real stars of the Rolex Sydney Hobart are the winners of the Tattersall’s Cup. Currently it’s Roger Sturgeon’s brand new STP65 Rosebud that is sitting in pole, but there are some smaller boats still barrelling towards Hobart at great speed.

By the way, if you want to see one of the best examples of a regatta website, and get all the latest news from Hobart, click here for the official website…

And if you want to see the work of two of the world’s finest yotting shooters, Daniel Forster and Carlo Borlenghi, go to the Rolex photo gallery here…

Get over it, Love!

“If something goes wrong, women still think about it a week later. For men, it’s easy to go to the bar, get a beer and get over it. It’s done. Women have more emotions and they can spend a long time thinking about it….”

Phewww! Imagine saying that about the fairer sex. We blokes would be hung, drawn and quartered for uttering such blasphemies. But it wasn’t me, guv! It was Marcelien de Koning, three-time 470 World Champion (that’s her on the right, with crew Lobke Berkhout), who lays out her “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” theories in my latest SailingTalk Xpress interview.

Click here to sign up and read the full interview. In the past few months we’ve profiled many of the best sailors in the world, including Darren Bundock, Howie Hamlin, Simon Daubney and Stevie Morrison.

Marcelien, by the way, is heavily engaged in the politics of Olympic sailing too. As if full-time Olympic campaigning wasn’t enough for a girl to do, Marcelien also chairs the recently formed ISAF Athletes Commission, so she has been paying close attention to the fall-out from the Olympic Events vote in Estoril in early November.

She wants to see greater athlete representation on the ISAF Council. Currently there are no current athletes on the 40-person committee, something Marcelien hopes will change very soon.

But this interview is not about politics. It’s about team work. Actually, when you think about it, maybe team work is a form of politics! Funnily enough, when I called Marcelien she was making her way from the Netherlands to Germany for a weekend out in sub-zero conditions with Lobke and their coach, with the prospect of sleeping in a tent.

The idea, apparently, is to toughen the girls up. Whether or not the coach still had his job at the end of the weekend, I haven’t found out.

Click here to read the full interview with Marcelien…

Pressure building for an ISAF Revote

A letter from outgoing ISAF president Arve Sundheim to members of ISAF Council suggests there is unlikely to be a reconsideration of the Olympic events vote taken in Estoril back in early November.

Click here to download a pdf of the letter: isaf-sundheimresponse11dec07.pdf

Sundheim defends the voting procedure and claims that ISAF paid due consideration to the IOC’s requirements.

But pressure is building from national authorities to get a revote next May at the ISAF mid-year meeting in Qingdao. Following Yachting Australia’s and the Royal Yachting Association’s open requests for a revote, Yachting New Zealand is now also looking to do the same, according to a report on Sail World.

The YNZ statement says: “The Board of Yachting New Zealand has resolved to make a submission to the ISAF mid-year meeting requesting that the Events slate for the 2012 Olympic Games be revisited.

“The Board consulted with the Olympic Committee and the High Performance Committee on the matter and made the decision to make such a submission based on the longer term view of the future of sailing at the Olympics rather than the specific medal opportunities at the 2012 Games.”

Hallelujah! Sense prevails after all. Well done to the YNZ board members for being big enough to shift their stance to a more strategic vision rather than the self-serving approach of a few months ago.

Talking of strategy, that is the point that Rod Carr wanted to get across when I spoke to the RYA chief exec earlier today. “We want to see ISAF getting away from ‘sticking plaster’ politics and taking a more strategic approach to the future of the sport,” he said.

“That’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. Even if ISAF said ‘match racing is part of our strategy’, we might not agree with it but we would at least go along with it, if that was part of a strategy that had been properly thought through.”

Carr has had a number of conversations with other national authorities behind the scenes, and is confident that sufficient momentum is building towards a revote next May. Among other nations that are believed to have written to ISAF are Canada, Spain, Austria and Singapore. A few others, like France, have yet to decide whether or not to follow suit.

Meanwhile, the members of the ISAF Athletes Commission are weighing up the possibility of running a questionnaire of all the competitors in the 2008 Olympic class World Championships, most of which are taking place in Australia or New Zealand in the next two months.

If they go ahead with this, it will be interesting to see how Olympic sailors themselves would choose the classes for 2012. We had some indication of that in the SailJuice survey a few weeks ago, although the sample of Olympic sailors was perhaps not sufficient to draw any hard conclusions.

By the way, I’m running an interview with the chairwoman of the Athletes Commission in my newsletter which I’ll be publishing later today. As winner of the past three 470 World Championships, Dutch sailor Marcelien de Koning is arguably the most talented female Olympic sailor currently competing. She has some fascinating insights into teamwork, and believes that sometimes it’s better for a woman to think like a man.

Wow! She could say that, I couldn’t possibly comment!

If you want to find out what Marcelien means, sign up to my SailingTalk Xpress newsletter here, or via the ‘Newsletter’ menu tab at the top of this page.

Shattered Records, Broken Dreams

With IMOCA Open 60s, the old trend was for keels to fall off. Now it’s masts snapping. The Barcelona Race fleet has had a tough week, after the fourth boat retired last night. Roland Jourdain and Jean-Luc Nelias’ Veolia Environnement dismasted after ploughing into the back of a wave at high speed.

This is worrying stuff for mast manufacturers Lorima, although a message on the company website throws it back at other people to ponder. I quote:

“BARCELONA WORLD RACE – TRANSAT B TO B :

4th mast down today.

* Masts are 1.5 m higher than those of the previous generation,
* Boats are 35% more powerful,
* Masts tubes that we get asked to fabricate are still the same weight

(by 10kg) !

Gentlemen who decide and calculate, wouldn’t be time to think about all this ?…”

This has shades of the last Volvo Ocean Race, when keel problems caused a lot of bad blood between Farr Yacht Design and some race teams who pushed the boundaries too far.

Still, it’s by no means all bad news for Lorima, whose carbon technology is driving Francis Joyon singlehandedly round the world at a pace which puts him 2,500 miles ahead of the current record held by Ellen MacArthur.

If that isn’t impressive enough in itself, as Joyon exits the Indian Ocean beneath Australasia and passes into the Pacific, he finds himself just 59 minutes behind the outright record pace set by Orange II!

Great news for Joyon, not so good for Thomas Coville who set off on board the 110-foot trimaran Sodebo yesterday in pursuit of the same record, and whose mast (another Lorima rig!) has already received a good thrashing from the weather gods. Coville commented: “Around 05h30 UTC this morning, we passed under a big cluster of clouds with 45 knots of wind in the squall and the head of the mast was struck by lightning!

“It ‘scorched’ the mast wand but a fuse protected the electronics and the instruments. I can’t understand why but it could have been a lot worse. I will climb up and change the mast wand as soon as conditions allow.”

Origin Thin Down

While his skipper Ben Ainslie was cleaning up in Sydney in his little 15-foot dinghy, Sir Keith Mills decided enough was enough today, and is scaling down operations at Team Origin until there is some resolution to the debacle formerly known as the 33rd America’s Cup.

Sir Keith Mills said: “I remain totally committed to the America’s Cup and to maintaining the competitive advantage that TeamOrigin has built. But I am extremely frustrated and disappointed about the current state of affairs. What we need is clarity and I urge the Defender and Challenger of Record to reach an agreement that provides the prospective challengers like TeamOrigin with the certainty they need to plan future campaigns.

“My principal goal now is to keep Team Origin together so as to be able to compete for the America’s Cup at some time in the future. Without any certainty today as to when, where and how that will be I am reluctantly forced to slow things down and stand the team down from full operational mode.”

It’s that Ben again!

Ben Ainslie has taken round one of his showdown against Ed Wright in the Battle of Britain. The four-time Finn Gold Cup winner dominated the Sydney International Regatta in a mix of conditions, comprehensively beating last year’s World Champion Jonas Hoegh-Christensen from Denmark into second place, with reigning World Champion Rafael Trujillo scraping into third.

The Spaniard finished on equal points with new boy in the class, a 20-year-old Brit called Giles Scott who missed out on a medal after the countback system came into play.

Ainslie’s selection rival Ed Wright had his moments, but not the consistency, and managed just 5th overall. The reigning Olympic Champion has never been happy about having to do a selection trial, a point he emphasised earlier today. “I’d hope that with this win and with the results from China this year and last year that it’ll make things quite clear, but that’s really up to the selectors now so I’ll just have to wait and see!”

I think the main reason why the RYA selectors made Ainslie go through this trial was because of the 30-year-old’s appointment as skipper of Team Origin, but with the British America’s Cup team’s announcement today that it is standing down its main operations for the time being, it looks as though Ainslie has plenty of time to focus on winning that medal in China next year.

Lots of drama elsewhere at SIRS, with up-and-coming 49er team Nathan Outteridge and Ben Austin beating Paul Cambell-James and Mark Asquith for overall victory. Darren Bundock and Glenn Ashby (pictured above) won the Tornados from Leigh McMillan and Will Howden.

And a show of Canadian dominance in the Laser class, with Michael Leigh beating local favourite and reigning World Champion Tom Slingsby to gold, with another Canadian Bernard Luttmer finishing equal on points with Slingsby but 3rd on countback.

Some great photos (including the ones above) on Jack Atley’s website…

A recent Q&A interview with Ben Ainslie here…

And if you want to know more about new kid Giles Scott (plus what Ben Ainslie thinks about him), there’s an old but good interview here…

Full results of SIRS are available here…

Vive La Difference

If someone who knew nothing about sailing were to ask you what is the pinnacle of the sport, what would you say? Is it the America’s Cup, the Olympics, the big round-the-world races? Or something else?

Sometimes it can be difficult – particularly for us media types – to explain the complex web of grade one sailing events in the world. Whereas Formula One is the undisputed Everest of motor racing, competitive sailing is a whole Himalayan range of different pinnacles.

At times like these, it makes you thankful that sailing offers more than one mountain to climb. Right now, the America’s Cup is a disaster, the future of the Olympic Regatta is not as assured as it could be, but at least the offshore racing scene is in rude health.

Ian Walker has just announced the launch of the Irish campaign, Team Green, for the next Volvo Ocean Race. A double Olympic medallist, Walker is another Star sailor who finds himself following in the footsteps of other Star champions Paul Cayard and Torben Grael who have made a successful transition to a seemingly unrelated part of the sport. It just goes to show that a great sailor is a great sailor, no matter how long or short the race course.

Meanwhile, plenty of racing and excitement in the IMOCA Open 60 scene, with broken masts and broken records aplenty (499 miles in 24 hours for Hugo Boss) in the Barcelona Race.

But what about Francis Joyon, who is hammering around the world singlehanded aboard his multihull IDEC 2, shattering the singlehanded 24-hour record with a new distance of 616 miles and almost 2,000 miles ahead of Ellen MacArthur’s record-breaking pace after just 20 days at sea! Amazing stuff from the 51-year-old!

In fact, as my mate James Boyd has calculated at the Daily Sail website, Joyon was this morning only 250 miles behind the fully-crewed record pace set by Orange II, which holds the outright record of 50 days (and a bit).

And there’s more to come before the winter’s out.

Thomas Coville is soon to set off in pursuit of MacArthur’s (or will it soon be Joyon’s again?) record.

Franck Cammas intends to bust the 50 days aboard his giant tri, Groupama III.

Who knows, the way the America’s Cup is headed right now, and if the rumour is true that Cammas has been signed to BMW Oracle Racing, then the talented young Frenchman could become the new round-the-world record holder and winner of the America’s Cup in the space of a year.

Ex-Wife pleads with new Couple: ‘Get on with it!’

With the marriage of convenience between the Swiss Defender and Spanish Challenger of Record having been annulled by Justice Cahn two weeks ago, Desafio Espanol issued its own version of the ‘let’s-get-on-with-it’ press release which Golden Gate Yacht Club has been pumping out over recent days.

The Desafio statement is careful not to apportion blame in the current impasse, but between Larry Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli, who do you think this message is aimed at? Life as the Defender must always feel a little lonely, but never more so than now.

How things have changed. A few years ago, Bertarelli threw the Kiwis the lifeline of a loan worth a few million dollars to keep them in the game after the 2003 collapse of Team New Zealand on the Hauraki Gulf. He made the memorable comment that an America’s Cup without New Zealand would be like a Football World Cup without Brazil.

But if things keep in going the way they are going now, then it will be Bertarelli who owes money to Team New Zealand, according to Grant Dalton. Dalton says he secured an agreement from Bertarelli that if the Kiwis would be compensated to the tune of US $24 million if it was postponed to 2010, and $37 million if postponed to 2011.

The current mess somewhat puts into perspective the nationality rule spat between Bertarelli and Dalton in the days leading up to the 32nd America’s Cup Match. Right now, arguments as to the pros and cons of a tighter nationality rule pale by comparison to the disastrous tangle in which the Cup finds itself now.

By the way, Chris Clarey’s interview with Bertarelli for the International Herald Tribune made waves when it was published back in June, and it’s pretty interesting now in light of the present predicament.

click here to read the interview with Bertarelli….

 

and the Desafio Espanol press statement in full…

 

Statement from Desafío Español

It is with great concern that the Desafío Español views the current situation regarding the America’s Cup. The delay in making decisions about the format and dates for an event in which teams can participate other than the Defender and the new Challenger of Record is alarming. Without wishing to point the finger or apportion blame anywhere precious time is being lost.

With this loss of time comes undue uncertainty, which is dramatically affecting all teams, their families and sponsors, saying nothing of the image of the event as a whole. Desafío Español implores both parties to use common sense and basic sportsmanship to resolve this conflict now. Put aside personal agendas and think of a greater good.

The Defender and the Challenger of Record must assume their respective responsibilities within the America’s Cup community, including the potential challengers of the 33rd America’s Cup and all other parties involved. They must find an exit to this conflict that will allow the finalisation of a schedule for the competition.

The lack of certainty today and into the future is only of both parties’ making. The damage that is being wilfully done can only be blamed on them both. Maintaining today’s situation into the future is a serious irresponsibility which they may have to assume.