For their comeback campaign following 1983 Conner and Whidden chose Hawaii as a base that offered a good approximation of Fremantle’s big wave conditions. Out of the plan came a big-breeze ready crew, deeper sail designs and four Chance/Nelson/Pedrick designed 12-Metres culminating in the long, high-prismatic S&S 87 (above). This was a brave – but confident – call as the heavy-air design struggled through the light airs start to the Louis Vuitton Cup. But once the breeze was up… Conner’s crew even stole a race off Kookaburra after a jib blew out the foil during a takedown (above) necessitating a bare-headed change in an America’s Cup Match
Whidden estimates he still sails about 50 days a year and after 50 years in the sport he hasn’t stopped learning. In April he sailed aboard a new Wallycento at Les Voiles de St-Barth. The lesson from that regatta? ‘Pressure is more important than the shift,’ he says. ‘The first day there was plenty of wind but the next few days it was light. So no matter the shift, sail to the wind. We did very well on the last day, beat Comanche boat for boat…’ Whidden lists St Barths as one of his favourite places to sail. ‘I know it well, have sailed there a ton. I also know Porto Cervo well, probably sailed 50 regattas there; won the Maxi Worlds there five times with Kialoa V and Magic Carpet. ‘Also, I like Newport for the intellectual challenge. It’s got everything going on, multiple wind directions, current. Any- body who underestimates all the things going on there doesn’t get Newport.’
The America’s Cup
Although Whidden lists Newport as one of his favourite places to sail,
it would be
understandable if he considered it a place of horrors, a venue where he might never want to sail again. It was there in 1983 where Whidden, Conner and the Liberty crew lost the America’s Cup to Alan Bond’s Australia II, thus ending a 132-year winning streak… possibly the longest in all of sport. But Whidden believes the Liberty crew gave the Australians hell during that seven- race series. ‘We were very tough on them,’ Whidden says. ‘We port-tacked them in one start – that should never happen in a match race! We got them all tangled up another time when we gybed at them on a run. Every time I looked over at John Bertrand, and he’s a great sailor, he looked sick to his stomach. We sailed damn well.’ It’s common theory that Australia II
30 SEAHORSE
was a superior design to Liberty, but Whidden believes the Australians also had better spinnaker designs (from Tom Schnackenberg) as well, certainly, as a better light-air boat. In his acceptance speech for the America’s Cup Hall of Fame in 2004 Whidden said the crew’s perfor- mance in Race 7 was the best race Liberty sailed during the 1983 match.
‘We had got so far ahead of them on the second upwind leg,’ Whidden recalls. ‘We tacked to starboard after rounding the first leeward mark because we saw pressure and a shift to the left. Halfway up the leg I had us leading by about 1:40. So far, a brilliant race. ‘As we got two-thirds of the way up the beat we gave up the left,’ Whidden contin- ues. ‘Of any mistakes I made in that race, that’s the only one that I think was bad. We coughed up 30 to 40 seconds. We let them get to the left and they gained a similar amount to what we had gained at the bottom of the leg.
‘We still went around the windward mark about 50 seconds ahead, but we knew we had 42-45 minutes to survive on the run. About 25-30 minutes later we gybed in front of them and that’s where we got into trouble. They squared up and just sailed through to leeward of us. ‘We could’ve gybed at them again but we
had so little speed. I don’t think we imag- ined they’d ever go by. I don’t think our spinnaker was very good and I feel regretful about that. It wasn’t the right one to put up at the time. It was 43ft wide and theirs was 41 or 42ft. Ours was sagging compared to theirs. That was a mistake. But they had better spinnakers than we did at the end.’ Whidden remembers speaking to Conner
on the tow back to the dock. ‘Dennis and I were upset; we certainly didn’t want to be the ones to lose the Cup after 132 years.
There were regrets about how some of the races went, but not about the way we sailed. I said to Dennis, “You know, this isn’t great, but there’s an opportunity here and we’ve got some more Cups in us. Count me in if you want.” You probably learn more from a loss than from a win.’ The two crews returned to Newport Harbor with darkness descending and the Australians in full party mode. With the boats safely tucked into their slips, ‘Bondy’ raised his hands above his head in a gesture to hoist Australia II out of the water and reveal the winged keel that had been kept shrouded in secrecy all summer. Not too far away at the Liberty base a barbecue was underway when the phone rang. ‘Our bases were fairly close and we could see what was going on over there,’ says Whidden. ‘So we got the call from the White House and they asked for DC. I answered the phone and we didn’t know where he was. So I got on the loudspeaker and said, “Hey, Dennis, there’s a phone call for you. It’s the White House. They want to tell you that you screwed up.” It was kind of a funny moment and quoted in Sports Illustrated that week, but the truth is that everybody was pretty bummed out.’ One of Whidden’s most memorable sailing venues is Fremantle, western Aus- tralia. For anyone who doesn’t understand why, you can put this article down now. Let’s just say, Stars & Stripes 4, Kook- aburra 0. ‘Fremantle was fantastic for a lot of reasons, not just because we won back the America’s Cup,’ he says. ‘Fremantle and the Australian people embodied what’s great about the Cup, perhaps better than any other Cup before or since.’ The victory vindicated Conner and Whidden from the painful loss to Australia II, but there were times during the training that Whidden wondered if they were on
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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