Left: (very) big bucks being spent on some relatively small boats. Larry Ellison may not have enjoyed being yelled at by employee Russell Coutts but it worked – Ellison’s RC44 seen here racing in Miami in 2010 and just about to clinch the season championship. Coutts made sure ‘his’ RC44 fleet was stacked with America’s Cup names – owners and sponsors like Ellison, Vincenzo Onorato (Mascalzone Latino) and Torbjörn Törnqvist (Artemis) and AC tacticians like Jimmy Spithill and Ray Davies. In preparation for what was looking increasingly likely to be a Deed of Gift Cup in multihulls both Alinghi and Oracle rushed off to borrow suitable practice platforms. Of course, unlike their Cup challengers at Oracle Team USA, Alinghi already had considerable cat experience racing their overpowered Bol d’Or winners on the Swiss and Italian lakes but the big DoG boats would require a new set of skills. It did not take hard-driving Alinghi skipper Ernesto Bertarelli (above/inset) long to find the limit onboard Alain Gautier’s borrowed Orma 60 Foncia
‘The first time I raced with Russell was in April 2008, at the Cagliari Cup in Italy,’ Ellison says. ‘But I had got to know Russell in his engineering/leadership role when he was rebuilding our team after 2007. ‘He’s a very methodical engineer, well-
liked, organised, extremely smart. But the second we got into a race Russell went from calm, cool, collected to just – on the edge. He is so competitive, and he wants to sail so well that if I do anything that’s slightly off, he’ll yell at me. He’s, you know, smooth it up, Larry, smooth it up. ‘Our trimmer Ross Halcrow told him to
stop yelling at me because it was scaring the hell out of me. But it took until the end of the regatta for him to stop. All he said was, “Well, that’s pretty good, OK, OK, you’re OK.” He’s just hyper-competitive. ‘But let’s be honest here, that’s a com-
mon denominator among all the world’s truly great athletes.’ Jobson: ‘So is Russell as competitive as
you?’ Ellison: ‘Yeah, easy.’ Larry Ellison told me that in his first
match-race series in RC44s it was blowing 22kt. They blew out a chute and were playing catch-up to the strong Polish team. ‘Running in to the finish we were both
going 18kt,’ Ellison told me. ‘There was perhaps a metre or two between the boats, we were absolutely side by side. And it was a port-starboard situation. I bore away a little for the finish, and Russell starts screaming, “No, hit him, hit him!” ‘We went screaming across the line,
missed the Polish boat by a metre. Turns out he also beat us by a metre. Russell was furious. He looked at me. “I told you to hit him!” ‘I looked at him calmly and said, “It’s
your boat. Next time I’ll hit him.” The trim- mers, Ross Halcrow and Cheese [Dirk de Ridder], were giving me those looks: yep, he’s crazy.’ Russell’s just a little competitive. ‘In another regatta our last race was
against the Japanese team that wasn’t very good. Russell says, “OK, Larry, we have to beat these guys to win, but no problem, be conservative, drive well but conserve the assets, we’re about to put the trophy on the mantle.” I keep away from them in the pre-start and we get a nice lead, four or five boat lengths. It’s pretty breezy so I take a conservative angle downwind. Russell comes over to me and says, “What the fuck are you doing? Have you forgotten how to sail? Come up and let’s get going.” ‘So I wound us up as far as I could. The
Japanese were now 16 lengths behind us. Russell says, “That’s better.” He’s out of his mind. Preserve the assets? ‘Ashore he’s another person. The guys
love him. He’s thoughtful, a good leader, a very good engineer who makes well- informed decisions. His thought processes are clear, understandable, disciplined, and he almost always comes up with the right answer. He’s as good as our best engineers at Oracle, a remarkable guy. I understand why we lost to him at Alinghi.’ Jimmy Spithill says the many regattas
they sailed in the RC44s and the TP52 class were important for bragging rights around camp as well as the training they provided. At that first regatta in Cagliari Spithill learned that his competition were serious. While Spithill’s crew would win the season Ellison and Coutts won the match racing portion of that regatta with an 8–1 record. Spithill posted 7–2. ‘It was pretty impressive,’ Spithill says,
‘for someone to come in and sail that well in windy conditions. It’s hard enough for a pro to do that, let alone someone with Larry’s commitments. He jumped on the boat with minimal sailing time and got up to speed quickly. He’s a good sailor.’ Ellison quips that Spithill is pretty good
himself – ‘for a young guy. But,’ he says, ‘every time you sail with Russell you have a good chance of winning. But I hate it when he yells at me.’
Feet wet – multis Jimmy Spithill says the day in December 2008 Coutts committed to the big multihull he started thinking about finding himself a boat to sail. ‘The team had a little break over Christmas,’ Spithill says. ‘I was in Australia and there was a Formula 18 race on. I rang up my brother-in-law, who sails multis, and asked him to find me a boat. ‘I had a go, pulled the trigger, put my
head down and went multihull sailing.’ As a kid Spithill had learnt to sail on a Hobie 18 his father borrowed from a neighbour. But that was a dim memory. He’d been
SEAHORSE 57
JACQUES VAPILLON
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