Yacht Racing World Newsletter – Issue 23
Stuff – America's Cup: Team NZ boss Grant Dalton heads to Europe to seal hosting deal
Team New Zealand boss Grant Dalton has headed to Europe, looking to seal the America’s Cup hosting deal – writes Duncan Johnstone.
The Cup holders have set a March 31 deadline to name the venue after initially missing last September’s date to reveal where the 2024 Cup will be sailed.
Working through the negotiations has been a frustrating experience with New Zealand’s tough MIQ regulations preventing any assurances of key personnel being able to get to see the shortlisted venues - Cork in Ireland, Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and now Malaga in Spain - and then return home.
But New Zealand’s relaxation of quarantine rules has finally allowed the champion syndicate to get some feet on the ground up north and take a first-hand look at what is on offer.
Dalton, the master negotiator and fund-raiser, has taken on that responsibility.
Team New Zealand and their international brokers at Origin Sports in Britain have been having daily digital briefings over the progress of the hosting situation. That can now ramp up with Dalton’s keen eye going over the facilities on offer and having the benefit of face-to-face meetings with the relative authorities.
It comes at a difficult time with Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine escalating and fears it could envelop other areas of Europe.
San Francisco Examiner – Data-driven sailboats to whip through the S.F. bay at record-breaking speeds
Eight lightning-fast computers will sail across the bay this month at speeds of up to 60 mph in pursuit of a $1 million prize – writes Jeff Elder.
The F50 sailboats of the SailGP racing league are among the fastest boats to ever sail the seas — and they are also super-fast computers crunching 30,000 data points a second with artificial intelligence that helps to sail the boats.
SailGP held races off San Francisco in 2019, and will hold its championship race March 26-27 off Marina Green, with the Golden Gate Bridge as a backdrop.
Captain of industry and founder of Oracle Larry Ellison co-founded SailGP in 2018 to challenge the America’s Cup sailing race, founded 167 years earlier in 1851. SailGP is faster — about 10 mph faster — and the boats that crews use are identical. That replaces the proprietary information about each boat that is closely guarded in America’s Cup with a level playing field that gives every team the same high-tech tools — and puts a focus on action.
Five-member crews scuttle across the twin-hull boats which can lean precariously — sometimes too far, capsizing — as they “fly” above the water, the boats’ hulls lifted up by hydrofoils.
Yacht Racing Life – America’s Cup: Powerhouse grinder Matt Gotrel re-signs for Ineos Britannia
Matt Gotrel, Rio 2016 Olympic gold medallist rower, has re-signed with INEOS Britannia as a sailor for the team’s 37th America’s Cup campaign. This is Matt’s second consecutive America’s Cup campaign for the British team, having previously been a grinder onboard the AC75 during the 36th America’s Cup in Auckland.
After representing Great Britain at the Olympics, it has always been a point of pride for Gotrel to continue to represent his home country. Reflecting on re-joining the team, Gotrel stated:
“It’s a huge honour and a thrilling challenge to be part of INEOS Britannia’s America’s Cup campaign again. Our goal is clear, to make history and be a part of the first British team to win the Auld Mug.”
Matt Gotrel has had a rich sporting background. From a young age he was a member of the British Youth Sailing Team competing in the 49er and 29er class. At that time the British Sailing Team had just topped the medals table at the Beijing Olympics and were going from strength to strength and so, with competition for the one Olympic spot at an all-time high, Matt decided to take some time out to study engineering at Loughborough University.
It was during his first year at university that Matt began rowing and started a remarkable journey from novice to Olympic champion, ending his university days by winning the illustrious Henley Royal Regatta and joining the British Olympic Rowing team. From team spare in his first year, he went on to win two successive World Championship gold medals as part of the British Men’s Eight, in 2014 and 2015 before realising his dream of Olympic gold in Rio 2016.
Cup Insider – Peter Burling to lead Emirates Team New Zealand America’s Cup defence
America’s Cup holders Emirates Team New Zealand have confirmed the core sailing team line up for their campaign to defend the America’s Cup for a second time.
The sailing squad is based around six key sailors including the 36th America’s Cup winning helmsman Peter Burling in the skipper’s role.
Racing alongside Burling will be ETNZ regulars Blair Tuke, Glenn Ashby, Andy Maloney, and Josh Junior, as well as newcomer Nathan Outteridge who joined the team several months ago.
According to a press release from the team, for the 37th America’s Cup campaign these six sailors will focus on boat performance and development, along with the all-important strategic decision making process.
The ETNZ sailing team lineup will be further bolstered when the powerhouse grinders or cyclors begin full time training to provide the power for the third generation of AC75s.
Emirates Team New Zealand COO Kevin Shoebridge has been instrumental in assembling what the team believes is one of the strongest line ups in the syndicate’s history.
“Clearly we are very happy to have the depth of talent that we have in the sailing team right now,” Shoebridge said. “The strength of our core sailing team is clear to see, there aren’t many things in sailing that haven’t been achieved by this group of guys collectively.
The Yacht Racing Podcast – Phil Robertson
Justin Chisholm’s guest on the latest episode of The Yacht Racing Podcast is the New Zealand high performance foiling supremo, Phil Robertson.
Robertson made his name as a professional sailor on the international match racing circuit where he twice won the World Match Racing Tour World Championship.
Now though he is fully fledged disciple of the high performance foiling revolution and best known for his role as a helmsman and skipper on the SailGP regatta circuit – where he specialises in developing new teams as they join the circuit.
After working with the Chinese and Spanish teams to good effect in the first two seasons of SailGP Robertson has just been announced as skipper and helmsman of the newly announced Canada SailGP Team for Season 3.
Afloat – Is leaky America's Cup flagship shaping course for Cork again?
Leaks in boats are generally not considered a good thing, even if the recent case of a patriotic Ukrainian crewman trying to sink his Russian arms-manufacturing oligarch employer's superyacht in Mallorca as a protest against the Putin invasion drew widespread approval, particularly when the crewman then returned to Ukraine to join the defence army, despite being a longtime sailor some 55 years old with no military experience – writes WM Nixon.
However, carefully-positioned information communication leaks in politics, both national and international, are part of the negotiating process. So when geo-politics and sailing get intermixed, the sailors find themselves having to accept something they would normally consider unseamanlike at the very least.
The America's Cup New Zealand supremo Grant Dalton has shown that he can be a tough street fighter, right up with the most ruthless of them when it comes to judicious use of leaks in working towards a conclusion. With the March 31st deadline for the announcement of the 2024 America's Cup venue coming up on the horizon, he had a letter to the authorities in Valencia in Spain recently leaked in such a way that attention now re-focuses intensely on other potential venues.
These still include Cork, despite a very mixed reception when the idea was first floated last year, while a rapidly deteriorating international political and economic situation must now make America's Cup promotion a surefire vote-loser at grassroots level.
Sailing World – The Rise and Fall of John Kolius
On June 21, 1976, there was a report buried deep on page 54 of The New York Times; the results of the US Olympic Sailing Trials. The standings in the three-man Soling keelboat competition might have come as a surprise to some; the winner was a 25-year-old Texan by the name of John Kolius, with his crew, Walter Glasgow and Richard Hoepfner. They had beaten (among others) Robbie Haines (with Lowell North aboard), Buddy Melges, Dave Curtis and Bill Buchan – writes Mark Chisnell.
Kolius recalls the experience 44 years later: “The day after the trials, Melges said, ‘Come to Zenda, Wisconsin—let’s get you really going fast.’ That’s how it was. I was so lucky with mentors, so lucky. I beat this guy at his own game—barely in the last race—and the next day he says, ‘Come to Zenda… How’s that?’ That’s awesome!”
Most of the top Soling sailors had a few years on Kolius (the younger Robbie Haines being the exception), and given the age gap and their stellar reputations, it would have been easy to have been over-awed.
“It’s part self-confidence, it’s part arrogance, and it was part naivete because I was too young to be scared,” Kolius says.
There were no mind games?
“If there were, I was too stupid to figure it out,” he says. “I was just racing sailboats. I really was fast and really could get the most out of a boat.”
The boatspeed was enough for a silver medal in a desperately tight Olympic regatta, with less than a point between the top three boats at the finish. Kolius had come a long way in a short time, but none of it would have happened if his two older sisters hadn’t tried sailing at a Girl Scouts camp.
“I’m thinking my father must have had a bad day at the golf course,” Kolius says. “All of a sudden, he just decided to take up a different sport. As soon as they finished that camp, my dad said this looks like a great thing for the family and bought an O’Day Day Sailer. And that’s kind of how we all started together. And I really took to it. I just loved it.”
The family joined the Houston YC, and after a year of sailing the Day Sailer, Kolius’ parents bought him a Sunfish to start racing. He had the kind of sailing education that doesn’t happen so much in these days of junior fleets and intensive coaching.
Emirates Team New Zealand – Production challenges
In the world of the America’s Cup a lot of emphasis is placed on design, innovation and sailing. But one of the unseen challenges for every team is the ongoing battle of production. The high pressure high stakes, make or break stage of physically producing the endless parts required.
Taking the designs from a page or computer file and creating a working reality.
The man in the middle of the production for Emirates Team New Zealand has been a familiar fixture with the team for around 20 years, Sean Regan who summarises the production at ETNZ, “There is never a single part produced that isn’t made under pressure. It’s just how we work.”
And the same goes for the Emirates Team New Zealand Landspeed Yacht build, an already tight timeline paired with a build team that are walking on thin ice with Omicron ominously looming with the prospect of forcing personnel into isolation at home and off the tools in the yard.
“We have a build completion date on paper still. Easter is the middle weekend of April and right now that's still our target to basically have this craft ready to start testing. The final tool is the wing tail and flap detail, which Guillaume is going to release that surface this week to start building.” explained Regan
“We're doing the cockpit as well, It’s getting machined later this week, over this weekend so we are charging right now, but I haven't got contingencies for these things to make those dates right now. We are supposed to have 14 guys next week and then 18 the week after. So if guys need to isolate then we aren’t going to be there. Unfortunately, we need to accept we’ll be a few men down over the next couple of weeks.”
This is just the reality that the whole of New Zealand is having to deal with right now. All businesses are under pressure with staffing or interrupted supply chains because of the Omicron outbreak. “But as usual we have to deal with it and try to make up for any lost time as best as we can.”
Like any best laid plans the expectation is they tend to change, so flexibility in the program will be important to the Emirates Team New Zealand ‘Project Speed’.