Phenomenal phenomenal phenomenal


   


‘It was just a yacht race, right?’ When I asked Tom Whidden to sit down and talk about the 1987 America’s Cup win in Fremantle I added that we would start the discussion with the loss in New- port in 1983 – and that was his seven-word reply. To be honest, with images of Ben Lexcen, Alan Bond, John Bertrand and Australia II swirling around my head, I was slightly wrong-footed at how quickly he’d summed up the historic loss. As he smiled back at me waiting for my next question, I think right then I had an inkling of just how mentally tough the Stars & Stripes tactician Thomas A Whidden really is.


Seahorse Magazine:How knocked about were you after the 1983 loss in Newport? Tom Whidden: The interesting thing about the loss is that I think it was one of the best things that happened to the Amer- ica’s Cup. I say that because had it contin- ued in Newport I think it had become so lopsided, at least in everyone’s mind. There was a common mindset that the USA was going to win every time, and the


52 SEAHORSE


challengers didn’t really have much of a chance – even though that wasn’t really true. There weren’t many things that the challengers could get away with inside the rules set by what was perceived to be the big bad boys at the New York Yacht Club, and so for that reason I give the Aus- tralians a lot of credit for looking outside the box and finding a way to win. So that was a great plus but, to answer


your question, of course at the time we were obviously extremely disappointed for a lot of reasons. We were ahead three-one at one stage, and we didn’t find a way to win at least one more race. And there was a reason why we lost each of those last three races, and so it almost seemed like it was meant to be… In race 5 we had a second breakage of


the jumper struts on the mast when we were ahead of them after winning the start – which we did almost every race. The irony is that followed one of the best races, race 4, which we won by 18 seconds, by doing a masterful job of holding Australia II off with classic match race stuff. After


that one, race 5 would have done it for us. But the best race was probably the


deciding seventh race. We raced that bril- liantly, except for the end of the second beat when we gave up the left side which had been good to us earlier. I blame myself for that; I felt the left was good going up that beat and we had played it quite hard, but as we got towards the top I said ‘Let’s protect the right side now’ and we let them get to the left of us and they gained a lot. The problem then was the wind died,


and the Australians were quite a bit better than we were when the wind dropped. Everyone onboard Liberty had a differ-


ent level of sense of regret, but to be honest the people most upset were John Marshall and Halsey Herreshoff. With all that family history Herreshoff was in disbelief, sitting there with his head in his hands. It takes just as much work to lose the


Cup as it does to win it, so the irony is you do all this work and your report card at the end is win or lose. That’s it. A lot of times you know the result ahead of time, but not in 1983. We fought


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122