America’s Cup – Over it? But watching it!
by Brendan Maxwell on 9 Feb 2010
Alinghi 5 squaretop mainsail, BMW Oracle - America’s Cup 2010 Day One Guido Trombetta/Team Alinghi
For the last two years the common theme amongst sailors everywhere has been ‘I’ve lost interest in the America’s Cup. All that legal stuff is boring.' But story after story, month after month, there has been a morbid fascination with the legal shenanigans.
Sail-World.com detailed stats show that like it or hate it, sailors just keep reading everything being written about the America’s Cup and Sail-World has been running lots of news and images.
The fact is the two biggest baddest multihulls, Larry Ellison’s trimaran with the 200 foot high solid wing sail USA-17 and the lightweight 90 foot catamaran Alinghi 5 will be fighting over the coming days and that has certainly drawn a giant audience.
Sail-World has again wheeled out the big guns, with the iconic British yachting commentator Bob Fisher adding his observations to Sail-World New Zealand’s Richard Gladwell’s perceptive analysis.
Additionally Sail-World is running the official TV feed, courtesy of BMW Oracle Racing, who is adding their own preview and post race analysis.
Last night in the Asia-Pacific, early morning in the America’s and daytime in Europe and Africa, was the scheduled start for the 2010 America’s Cup.
Once upon a time, this was the stuff of sailing magazines, but not any more. The web went into meltdown, with the official America’s Cup site amongst those that fell over.
Sail-World recorded twice the traffic of the Sydney to Hobart Day 2, the traditionally largest day each year in just six hours last night.
And we could easily see 35-40,000 unique visitors when racing actually happens.
‘We had massive traffic last night and are expecting even larger spikes when racing actually starts. We’ve been working hard to increase our capacity,’ explained TetraMedia’s IT guru Daryl Krasu. ‘We did a server upgrade last week and we’ve been improving our load balancing between the servers ahead of the rescheduled AC33 Race 1 on Wednesday night’.
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