Taming the talent
Most Seahorse readers know of legendary America’s Cup helmsman Charlie Barr. Fewer will be aware how much that level of competitiveness on the water needed channelling in order to deliver the required results. John Rousmaniere
There were three motivations for me to write a short history of the New York Yacht Club Race Committee. First, although a beneficiary of race committees for many years, I have long considered them to be mysterious. Second, I was intrigued by a request to contribute to a project honouring the club’s 175th anniversary this year. As for the third, I’ve long been nagged by
a yachting history mystery. On one day in 1901 the boat sailed by Charlie Barr, one of the very greatest racing sailors, was disqual- ified from the final race of the America’s Cup defender trials – and yet on the next day he and his boat were chosen to defend the Cup, which they did successfully in one of the closest matches in Cup history. Today the club’s race committee’s 110
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women and men run races of most types for boats ranging from 20-footers to ocean racers to J-Boats. But when it was founded as the Regatta Committee in the club’s second year, 1845, there was just one race. Commodore John Cox Stevens issued this vague instruction: ‘Arrange the Annual Regatta.’ How this was to be done was up to the
three officials. Sometimes the committee was a judiciary body making decisions on shore, and sometimes it was an umpire calling fouls and assigning penalties on the water. A dramatic example of the umpire role appeared at the start of the first race in the 1885 America’s Cup, when the club’s Cup defender Puritan attempted a start on port tack and succeeded only in poking her long bowsprit into the mainsail of her star- board tack opponent, the challenger Genesta. ‘She fouled us!’ the Puritan syndi- cate chairman shouted at race officials. ‘We claim the race. We will sail the course’. Hearing this, the committee’s 38-year-
old chairman, J Frederick Tams, replied, ‘No, you won’t, not by a damned sight!’ Following a brief conference with his two committee members, Tams announced that Puritan was disqualified and then instructed Genesta’s owner, Sir Richard
Sutton, that he had time to make repairs and sail around the course. Sutton declined: ‘We want a race. We don’t want a walkover.’ In 2018 the America’s Cup Hall of Fame instituted an award in Sutton’s name ‘to encourage and recognise the spirit of the America’s Cup’, as set down by the founding Donors in their Deed of Gift ‘to promote friendly competi- tion between foreign countries’. Person- ally, I think Fred Tams also deserves an honour… for insisting on law and order. Puritan’s aggression was not atypical at
that time, in the 1880s, when competition was so fierce and undisciplined that one sailor complained, ‘We are consumed by a madness for speed and everything is sacri- ficed to that quality.’ The NYYC Regatta Committee responded in 1888 with a long list of new rules and procedures. Crowd- ing on starting lines was eased with smaller classes and the English two-gun starting system, which allows more time for boats to start. To encourage identifica- tion of culprits and protests boats were required to display sail numbers and be prepared to fly bright red Bravo flags. The most radical new regulation was
Rule 19: ‘A yacht which shall be disquali- fied twice in one season shall be debarred
Artokoloro/AlAmy
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