From first to last spectators at the 1987 Cup knew that they were seeing something special. Four years previously there was national celebration when John Bertrand’s Australian crew on the nimble ‘little white pointer’ finally toppled New York YC defender Liberty – the clearly slower US 12 Metre only hanging in until the last minutes of the Match simply because Dennis Conner and his gritty crew refused to roll over as the numbers said they should. The vitriol at the 1983 Cup ran deep between the New York YC and Alan Bond’s tight little team, but as representatives of a great sporting nation the Aussies left Newport full of respect for Conner’s efforts on the water and full of disgust for how the New York YC humiliated their losing skipper whose team had given their all. So when Conner’s Stars & Stripes arrived in Australia to try to regain the Cup (and their pride) they immediately got a warm welcome from the people of Perth. As Conner scraped though the challenger eliminations the Australian welcome steadily turned to a respect which increased even as the Cup steadily slipped away, appreciating that they were witnessing a great sporting performance regardless of outcome
the Bond camp both became very good at that close-quarter, ‘in your face’ stuff. SH:So you had good competition to get you sharp with those skills? IM: Sure. We definitely had good match racing skills, but when we finally raced Dennis and the Stars & Stripes guys we just got burnt off. We then tried to push harder to get a bigger advantage off the start and engage Dennis, but as you saw in almost every race they would start below us to leeward, then sail around our bow and finally tack and cross us! There was only one race they couldn’t cross us approaching a layline, so they ducked us and took control after that! SH: Tom Whidden has said they were very wary of your turning ability on Kookaburra III and your match racing skills… IM: We were very proficient in handling our boat, turning it and playing the classic, tight, tactical match race at the start where we could engage them. But those guys are so solid at playing the America’s Cup long game – so they said, ‘That’s great, you can have that, but we aren’t interested!’ They sailed away from the startline in every pre-start, then made a timed run to the leeward end, and really that gave us not a whole lot of options to play with. SH:So when you became the actual Australian Defender to face Dennis Conner did you receive assistance or resources from the Bond camp when they were eliminated? Did you want any! IM: I think there was the offer of some sails, and so we may have taken one of their gennaker downwind sails, but we were pretty well sorted and happy with our sails and rigs. The only thing we lacked was time. We had been forced to sail this final series against Australia IV only because there was this big rivalry between Bond and [Kevin] Parry – and that had become our
focus, meaning our racing style had been built around beating Australia IV. But unfortunately that wasn’t the racing style or boat type that we needed to compete against Stars & Stripes. SH: And how was your mood going into the Cup itself? IM:We were very wary of the speed Dennis had. We had watched Stars & Stripes struggle to get into the semi-finals in the lighter air… then when the breeze was up go about obliterating everyone including New Zealand on KZ-7. And so for them to dominate those challenger finals like that was obviously really eye-opening for us. We had sailed against KZ-7 quite a lot – and we didn’t have
I was once standing next to Benny [Lexcen] on the Royal London balcony at Cowes and asked him how he enjoyed sailing on the Solent. His reply was, ‘As far as I’m concerned you can fill it in and use it as
a football pitch!’ – Barry Dunning
anything on them! So we knew we were going to have to race our skins off to compete with Dennis and his crew, and if it came down to sheer speed we would have problems. We were confident in our equipment, highly confident on how to throw it around and race, but equally Dennis Conner was very confident with the strengths of his boat and said, ‘To hell with all that match-racing stuff!’ SH:Who would you have preferred to meet in the Cup: Chris Dickson on KZ-7 or Dennis Conner on Stars & Stripes? IM: We would have had a real race with Chris Dickson. They didn’t have the speed to sail around us, and we had a hard summer of really physical, tough, boat-on-boat match racing, which would have held us in good stead. Plus I don’t think Dickson had the benefit of that extensive competition and so it would have been a much closer contest had it been against the Kiwis. That was borne out the following year in Sardinia at the 12 Metre Worlds: Kookaburra won the fleet racing and KZ-7 the match racing – so they were more matched boats in around 15kt+ of breeze than against Stars & Stripes. In that later event in the Mediterranean Stars
SEAHORSE 21
AJAX/ALAMY
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