America’s Cup – How to fix the world's most prestigious sailing race

by Angus Phillips on 11 Jul 2017 Veteran Editor, Angus Phillips shares his thoughts on the 36th AC...

Well, that was quick! The 35th America’s Cup was over in a heartbeat. It took barely a month for Emirates Team New Zealand to buzzsaw through a fleet of four challengers before shellacking the U.S. defender, Oracle Team USA, 7-1, to snatch yachting’s oldest prize.

This was not your father’s America’s Cup—the boats were 50-foot dragonflies skeeting across the water on hydrofoils at nearly 50 mph and the sailors wore armor, not Izod Lacoste.

Now what?

As a proud senior member of SINS, the Society of International Nautical Scribes, a group that historically holds just one beer-infused meeting every three or four years on the first lay day of the America’s Cup match, wherever it is, I think I deserve a say, even if I did miss the last meeting. I say let’s Make America’s Cup Great Again.

As a reporter for the Washington Post, I covered every Cup from Dennis Conner’s successful defense in Newport, R.I., in 1980 to Larry Ellison’s weird win in Valencia, Spain, in 2010. I watched the America’s Cup sail off to Australia in 1983, come back in 1987, then go away again (to New Zealand) in 1995. I even sailed in some Cup trials, on Team New Zealand in 1995 and Ellison’s Oracle in 2000, as nonparticipating 17th man.

The most exciting events I saw were in 1983, when Australia II, the wing-keeled wonder from Down Under, beat Conner’s Liberty, 4-3, to end the New York Yacht Club’s 132-year stranglehold on the Cup, and 1987, when Conner went to West Australia in Stars and Stripes and won the “Auld Mug” back from a fleet of 16 other entrants in the wild winds and churning seas off beautiful, breezy Fremantle.

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