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as much information as we can where it’s relevant. For the nutrition and training programmes of our athletes we try to see if we can learn as much as we can, particularly from the cycling team. SH:Artemis technology created the powerful simulator that the Sail GP crews have been using. How much emphasis have you placed on developing your own sim? GS: ETNZ led the way in the last Cup with their simulator. BAR (now Ineos) were also developing a simulator that was well advanced but Oracle didn’t build a simulator at all. This Cup all the teams will have simulators and they will all rely heavily on them. The quality and accuracy of the sim depends on the physics models that drive them and we are all investing substantially in that. We are not making a toy, we are making a tool that is relevant to the develop - ment of the boat and the sailors. SH: What is the programme now in terms of boats? GS:You are allowed two hulls, three rigs and six foils, so essentially that’s three ‘port and starboard’ sets if you like. Our focus is really going to be on sailing our AC75 as much as we can, but we will start building a second boat quite soon and that will be the product of what we’ve learnt on boat 1 and everything else we’ve done since the rule itself was finalised. We already know of many things we would do differently in our
second boat. That’s just a product of the amount of time it takes to design and build one of these yachts.
and with our sailing team with Iain Jensen and Joey Newton on point. We’ve got a very strong team to develop the soft wings, plus the jibs and the code zeros… I’d also highlight the trimming system needed for the new main
as being a major development focus. SH: Time is ticking here for all the teams. What are the most critical things on your desk right now? GS:Maximising sailing time and the development of our first boat. But as well as analysing the consequences of our own design decisions on boat 1 there’s also a lot of work studying the design decisions of the other teams. Together with what we learn from our first boat, all that third party information also has to be compiled and distilled before it can influence the shape of our second boat. Bottom line, Blue… the America’s Cup is as always full on!
Blue Robinson
USA The US has in the past been a powerhouse in producing Olympic sailing medals. This nation still has the highest overall medal count in sailing, with 19 gold, 23 silver and 18 bronze medals out of a total of 60 awarded since the sport appeared at the Games in 1900 (GBR in comparison has won 54 in the same period… but they are catching up fast!). Of 36 sports that have had US participation in the Summer Games, sailing ranks ninth in the overall US medal count. Yet in the four quadrennials since 2004 that medal count grew by just four com- pared to 19 over the previous four quads. US Sailing’s Olympic committee are
painfully aware of the numbers and repeat- edly pledge to find ways to turn the ship around. One much heralded move was to hire Australian two-time 470 gold medallist Malcolm Page – who is also a product of Victor Kovalenko’s legendary ‘medal maker’ programme. Yet a few weeks ago he was sacked, and only possibly because so far the US has qualified for Tokyo 2020 in only six of 10 Olympic classes. And two of those classes were qualified by good results at the recent Pan Am Games where no European teams were competing. Three-time 470 Olympians Stu McNay and
Britannia… a super-shallow bow treatment for low windage plus powerful Imoca-style stern sections suggest Ben Ainslie’s first AC75 may rely partly on boat heel to secure the endplate beneath the hull during lift-off in place of the mini-keels of Luna Rossa and TNZ. Certainly this one looks like a particularly potent force in non-foiling conditions…
SH: The twin-skin mainsail is an interesting concept, which ETNZ and Prada were fully aware reduces R&D costs versus a solid sail. Is the sail an area for teams to throw a lot of research at or will the answers be relatively straightforward? GS: There will be a lot of research going into the new mainsail, it’s still a very expensive part of the programme. I think they decided not to go with the semi-rigid wing, as we had in the last Cup, more because of the logistics of handling the wing. It’s not a decision that we particularly agree with, because a wing is a lot more efficient than the double-skin mainsail idea and all of us are spending a huge amount of money developing it. We are allowed to have 10 of these, so in the end we will probably
end up spending more money on ‘mainsails’ than we would if we were allowed to buy two semi-rigid wings. SH: Who is running the sail programme for you this time? GS:Gautier Sergent from North is our lead sail designer and Jarrad Wallace of Southern is our lead spar designer. They work together with a couple of our own designers here, including Simon Eatwell,
30 SEAHORSE
Dave Hughes were the first US team to qualify in the Men’s 470 Class, and Hughes says, ‘You need to peak at the end of the cycle, not within it, so right now we’re OK.’ But Page points out there has not been a gold medallist in any class for a long time who was not also a world champion. You have to be at the top consistently to win medals, especially gold. It is sobering to reflect that in the Men’s 470
there were US teams on the podium every quad but one for 20 years (1984-2004) and not one has been on the podium since. So since 2004 have US teams got worse, or everyone else just
got better? And if there has been any progress why did the pro- gramme chief get sacked and the COO ‘resign’ a year before the next Games? The answer is that it’s complicated. Let’s start with the players. Greg Fisher joined the US Olympic
effort in August 2018 as COO. Fisher is a multiple national and world champion who also ran a small sailmaking company in the midwest. He joined North Sails in 1991 before then moving to Charleston in 2010 to head the intercollegiate sailing programme at the College of Charleston. Under Fisher’s leadership the talent that this pro- gramme attracted has made them perennial national champions in this uniquely American sailing scene for 18-22 year olds. Fisher suggests the collapse in medal count reflects the move
in Olympic sailing away from measurement-based classes to man- ufacturer one-designs, where most now favour body types and sailing styles less common to the US sailing culture (hmm). No longer were
CHRISTOPHER ISON
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