Old dog masters new trick
Switching from heavy monohulls to light M32 cats has so far done little (or nothing) to slow down six-time World Match Racing champion Ian Williams
Fremantle was the last place we ever witnessed the great 12-Metres racing for the America’s Cup. It’s almost 30 years since Dennis Conner wreaked his revenge on the Australians, seizing back the Auld Mug from the Aussie upstarts aboard his unstoppable blue boat, Stars&Stripes. The winged wonder that started the revolution down under, Australia II, resides in a museum not far from the water’s edge here. She would have been proud to see the
44 SEAHORSE
Boxing Kangaroo emblazoned across one of the M32 catamarans shipped in for World Match Racing Tour Fremantle, the first event of this year’s Tour.
Some of the young home-grown talent had been training hard, aiming for a shot at competing on the Tour for the first time by taking part in one of the qualifying regattas during the build-up to the main event. For the likes of up-and-comers like Sam Gilmour (son of 12-Metre Peter), Matt Jerwood and Steve Thomas, this would be a rare opportunity to go up against the big guns – world champions such as Ian Williams and Taylor Canfield. Just as Fremantle 1987 marked the end of the 12-Metre era, Fremantle 2016 would mark the start of a new era in the Tour, with the M32s replacing the keelboats that have been the traditional choice of the match-racing world. The aim is to realign the Tour more closely with the modern America’s Cup, both in terms of the boats and also the course configuration, which is
now pretty much identical to the Cup, including the high-speed reaching starts. With the new format, this season has been billed as a game-changer. That’s cer- tainly what Canfield and US One have been banking on, having invested a full season’s racing on the M32 during 2015. The young US Virgin Islander quickly rose to prominence in 2013 when he won the Tour at his first attempt, narrowly beating Ian Williams to the world title that year. However, Williams upped his game to win the next two seasons, making him a record-breaking six-time world champion. But surely not this year, in a new style of boat and a new format, in a compressed season that concludes in Sweden this July. Surely the old dog – well, 38 years old – couldn’t learn new cat tricks that quickly. Certainly there were some names less familiar to the Tour hoping to take advan- tage of this game-changing moment, looking to apply their experience from other parts of the sport. Sally Barkow, for example,
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