INGRID ABERY
Update
experience on AC34 or AC35 foiling catamarans for Oracle Team USA or Team Japan. This experience showed when they won at SailGP Sydney and San Francisco, sailed into second place in New York and proved too strong in the severe conditions in Cowes winning all three completed races. Close behind them was Team Japan skippered by another
Australian, Artemis America’s Cup skipper Nathan Outteridge, sail- ing with fellow former Artemis crew plus grinders from SoftBank Team Japan. Outteridge provided stiff competition, second in Sydney, San Francisco and Cowes and winning in New York. Across the season Australia won 11 fleet races, Japan 10. And
behind them, daylight, as the other teams spent much of their time simply trying to keep their boats the right way up. But there were two things that made the catch-up task of the
B-fleet less intimidating. In a yacht racing first, all teams had to share their performance data, which meant newbies could choose just to copy the settings the leaders used while they got up to speed. So Team GBR, after little more than 24 hours’ training, was tacking and gybing in light conditions more effectively than some of the AC50s had done after two years leading into Bermuda. However, when wind and waves came up the two experienced
teams stayed on their bucking broncos and raced. Not so all the others. Here is the end-of-season story from the bottom up. Team USA 163pt After a much filmed bear-away capsize in
Cowes, the Rome Kirby-skippered Team USA had impressed every- one by winning the final race on the Solent and were third overall going into Marseille just ahead of Team GBR. But Marseille was a disaster. Kirby explains: ‘Coming into the
bottom of the first race we broke a board upline, going downwind we thought we could keep racing but quickly discovered on the first beat you can’t sail effectively with both boards in the water. It then took longer to fix than expected, so we missed two races and never recovered. We led in a few other races but always came up short. Painful lessons learnt and we’ll come out fighting in Sydney.’ Team France 164pt Billy Besson: ‘Mostly we are just happy that
SailGP came to France! We still have a great deal to learn, as our results show, but we were delighted to win the last race in Marseille. We could hear the crowd cheering on the seawall. It felt like a stadium on the water, it was amazing. A magical moment for us.’ Team Great Britain 169pt With Dylan Fletcher on the helm, his
49er partner Stu Bithell (now selected for Tokyo 2020) on flight control and SoftBank Team Japan veteran Chris Draper as wing trimmer, the British team routinely shone in training. They finished a solid third in San Francisco but then had two challenging regattas with a painful capsize in New York and backed that up with a vicious nosedive in Cowes which put them out of the event. Yet going into Marseille they were still podium prospects ahead of two teams with zero America’s Cup experience, Team China and Team France. Stu Bithell: ‘After the disappointment of Cowes we came here
ready to push hard. That’s not how it worked out... Day 2 here was our worst day on the water all year. We let the Chinese catch us up, then on the final day we were slow to react to the drop in pressure
and paid the penalty with a really dreadful start...’ Team China 171pt Former World Match Racing Champion Phil
Robertson skippers this podium team. ‘This final regatta we broke through unexpectedly on the second day. With one of the grinders ill we were effectively a man down, so we focused on sailing more smoothly, smarter and with fewer manoeuvres. That worked out really well for us! We’ve been increasingly competitive at the front of the fleet, regatta after regatta – we showed that with our first race win and consistently better placings. We earned our place on the podium.’ Team Japan 223pt Then came the final. A match race for a million
dollars. And the first three rules of match racing are cover, cover, cover. As Outteridge remembers: ‘Australia had a penalty going into the box two seconds early, so at the start they dropped in behind us to extinguish the penalty. ‘We kept ahead on the run when they gybed off early, we took
the right-hand bottom mark which is a good defence strategy and then stayed in phase with them upwind. Then, unfortunately, we created the split at the top mark when we should have covered… They had a fantastic bear-away, found more pressure and then suddenly at the bottom mark they were on our stern again. ‘Still, we just needed to execute a good gybe directly in front of
them, but we went exactly 8m too far and they sailed inside. We tried to luff; it was a penalty chance but we missed by a fraction of a second… the boat race. Tom [Slingsby] is a good mate of mine. I know how good his skills and his abilities are, that is why he pushed everything to get through, that was his avenue to win a million bucks. It’s a cool event to be part of, it sucks being on the losing side but it’s a lot of fun when you are doing it.’ Team Australia 229pt Slingsby: ‘The important thing for us was
to stay ahead on points in case the match race was blown out – when the series leader takes the prize. On Day 2 we cemented our place in the final, then we were barred from the last fleet races so we couldn’t influence who we’d have in the final... ‘Iain Murray shifted the match racing course just minutes before
the start – but it was still virtual, with no physical marks. In all the racing I’ve done it takes a lot to rattle me but, in all honesty, in the pre-start I was rattled. We threw away the start, being early into the box but we kept fighting, we were right on them, always pushing. ‘Around the top mark they got away from us a bit when we had
to do an extra tack, but we got a little more pressure on the opposite side and closed on them. We were on a fast layline into the bottom mark and when they went into the gybe I could see they were late and would have to luff us when they came out to keep the advantage. But then they didn’t come up straight away, we got our bows forward and we were a faster boat, no penalty. ‘On our final tack into the finish I was worried we’d opened the
game again and I remember looking down at my hands… and they were shaking. I had not had that, not coming into the finish line, including winning a London 2012 gold medal and the America’s Cup. So obviously it means a lot to myself and my Australian team. ‘It’s been an unbelievable season. We won four out of five events,
we felt as if we deserved the match race prize. We start our 2020 defence in Sydney and we will not be easily beaten down there.’ Season two and there’s another million dollars at stake. The
seventh boat will be launched in December for a new European team, expected to be Danish. It will not be a surprise if there are two new venues: Aarhus and a Chinese port. Watch this space.
FESSING UP – Carol Cronin I’ve been a good citizen for several years now, painting a rosy picture about progress made by US Olympic sailing – partly because I prefer writing positive articles, but mostly because I believed we were working in the right direction. Today, though, I’m abandoning that approach. Enough is enough. As Dobbs Davis writes elsewhere, it’s been a tumultuous month
If you go gold then go large. All the other toys, plant pots (sic) and furnishings are just as understated. But c’mon, you’d swap…
18 SEAHORSE
for US Olympic Sailing. After winning seven Pan Am Games medals but failing to win a single medal at a 2019 Olympic class world championship, the organisation lost COO Greg Fisher and dispensed
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