News Around the World
Right: for the first day of the Prada Cup semi-finals American Magic brought out their smaller and higher aspect batwing mainsail that had proved efficient during heavy-air testing. Whether or not it was fast enough against Luna Rossa we will never know since the dire control problems on Patriot, a result of their near-sinking, meant it was all the New York YC team could do to get around the course. Nothing left in the tank (above) for Paul Goodison and Dean Barker after the Italians had seen them off 4-0 to take on Ineos Team UK in the final. It was not for a ha’p’orth of tar that this particular vessel was lost, but has one wrong turn at a mark ever been so costly?
success the teams see on the water, with the remaining 20 per cent in the decisions and executions made by the team… an unusually big slice in an historically speed-driven event. And here is where he sees some clear differences between the US team and the others. ‘With a new boat like this each team has to figure out how to find
the best balance of speed and manoeuvrability on a very tight race- course,’ he said. ‘Getting the most out of everyone is really important, and each team has some significant talent. Yet I see that some teams have opted to have a higher percentage of proven talent in dinghy or skiff classes than others.’ Holmberg reckons the speed and the fast reactions needed on
these boats favours those who have what he calls the ‘twitchy muscles’ common to those whose heritage is in Olympic and/or high-performance classes. And while the Magic team has some significant depth of talent in this and other areas, he thinks other teams may be stronger in this regard to give them a slight intuitive edge. Other AC pundits have speculated on this too, and on how the US may now lack the depth that other cultures have, but Holm- berg thinks this is too simplistic. There is certainly some significant young US talent that has been bypassed in this cycle – Taylor Canfield, Bill Hardesty and several others come to mind. Another US-based Cup veteran watching the AC from afar is Ed
Baird, who has a similar competitive background to Holmberg but in Lasers rather than Finns, and was a consistent champion on the match race circuit in the 1990s and 2000s. This success was also translated for others with his highly regarded coaching skills: he helped coach several US teams to Olympic medals, Team New Zealand to America’s Cup victory in 1995 and then came back over a decade later as helmsman with Cup winners Alinghi in 2007. Like
34 SEAHORSE
Holmberg, he too has been more recently active in the TP52s, notably helping guide Quantum Racing to multiple victories, and has also been kept busy on the RC44 circuit as well. Something Baird sees is the larger picture of this Cup cycle and
how fundamentally different it is from nearly all past AC events due to the brutally short, fast duration of the races… plus the deleterious effects of the pandemic. ‘The racecourses are so short they remind me of what we had
on the match race tour,’ he said. ‘In other Cup cycles the races were longer, and there was the time and space to work the shifts and the boat to close gaps, pass or extend leads. There is a much different rhythm to these races, with a high priority on getting the set-up right for a place with complex weather and few opportunities to pass if you’re behind.’ Besides this Baird believes the Covid-cancellation of the events
leading into the Cup deprived teams of the time needed to learn real-time decision-making on set-up strategies, team dynamics and the like. He credits Alinghi’s win in 2007 with having a large race- ready squad who could field two teams to compete against each other, and push themselves for months in real-time racing. Cancellations in this cycle deprived all teams of this benefit to
learn and evolve towards having better racing. Holmberg noted this too: determining winners advancing to the next stage in only a first- to-four series was unprecedented. On the personnel side, Baird has an interesting observation about
each team’s heritage, not in which boat types they sailed previously, but in what effect that has on communication effectiveness within the team. The Kiwi, Italian and British teams are fairly homogeneous, having team members who come mostly from each country’s sailing
GILLES MARTIN-RAGET
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