America's Cup - a waste of time, or will I benefit?

by Sail-World/Aaron Kuriloff on 22 Feb 2010 Was the America's Cup a waste of time? Years of wrangling and then just two races? Were you 'over it' by the time of the tenth court visit? Aaron Kuriloff suggests that cruising sailors might benefit in the future from the extravagances of the lead up to the race:

The America’s Cup boats —products of a technological showdown between billionaire sailors—may bring wings, ultralight hulls, and computers to the next generation of sailboats.

The two-year legal battle between billionaires Larry Ellison of Oracle (ORCL) and Ernesto Bertarelli, who sold his family’s Swiss biotech business to Merck (MRK) for $13.3 billion in 2007, has produced two racing yachts that are a decade ahead of any boat built previously, even as the legal tussle has dogged and delayed the 158-year-old regatta, finally held off the coast of Spain. The innovations, which came about as they forced race organizers to abandon longstanding rules, may one day benefit sailors on weekend jaunts.

Designers for both Ellison’s BMW-Oracle Racing team and Bertarelli’s Alinghi syndicate say building and learning to sail these boats, each at least 90 feet long and among the fastest yachts ever built, has meant gains in everything from data collection to sail technology.

'We’re like kids in the candy shop,' says Dirk Kramers, chief engineer for the Cup-defending Alinghi catamaran. 'During the last Cup, it was all about trying to squeeze another 1/100th of a knot out of the boat. Now we’re really in discovery mode, learning huge lessons every day. We get to work on boats that are just so much more exciting than anything that’s ever been done.'

A Decade of Advances in Two Years:

Pete Melvin, a U.S. Olympic sailor and world champion, co-founded Morrelli & Melvin Design & Engineering, which has designed multihulls, including Steve Fossett’s record-setting PlayStation, and has consulted for BMW-Oracle. Multihulls are much faster than monohull boats, because they are lighter and have less drag.

'It’s been a hugely concentrated development, with all the best people in the industry, plus outside experts in every field, all focused on pushing the edge of the envelope,' he says. 'It normally would have taken eight or 10 years to do what’s been done in just two short years.'

The America’s Cup has long featured yachting’s cutting edge. The 1983 victor, Australia II, used wings on its keel to reduce drag and increase performance. Such wings, so secret at the time that it took two undercover frogmen to spot them, are now common on sailboats worldwide.

Are you on your way to being convinced? Click http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/dec2009/id20091218_236990.htm!here to read more of the argument in Bloomberg's Business Week.

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Letter from Reader:

Sender: John Riise

Message: The question should not be whether some sailor will benefit some few years down the road from gear or technology developed on the two giant multihulls. Of course they will. Nor is it whether the boats were fantastic. Of course they were.

The big question should be:

* Is the America's Cup still a viable entity as the 'signature' event for sailing? 'Signature' in this case meaning the one event that even non-participants in the sport will follow - like the Kentucky Derby or Indy 500. The answer? No - the America's Cup outgrew that role a long time ago. Now it's like one of those movies whose trailers portray lots of action, but when you go to watch it, it is - just like the America's Cup, too long, too boring, too slow and with rules and a plot that are all but incomprehensible, even to someone who does sail. Plus the IACC boats are the most expensive useless, slow boats ever built.

The premier event of sailing should be sailed in modern craft and fleet format - forget match racing - and should consist of a maximum of one week of racing from start to finish - say one race a day for five days - not 50 or 60 or 70 match-ups over two or three months. And the venue needs to have LOTS of dependable wind, and there are no cancelled races because of too much of it. Long round-the-bouys courses (with reaching legs) would work fine, as would one round-the-island race or even short point-to-point ocean race. This way it would be more understandable to non-sailors - whoever crosses the finish line first wins - and fleet racing would insure that even the also-rans had a chance at winning if something happened to the top teams.

To answer one question implied in the article, the recent America's Cup bout was a joke. All it amounted to for this sailor is that Larry Ellison finally found a way to buy the Cup, since he couldn't win it the conventional way. And wow, what a price tag. I think 60 minutes should do an expose on the wretched excess of matches like the one just completed. The figure bandied about the most was $400 million - which I believe referred only to the deep pockets of BMW/Oracle. With all the problems the U.S. and world economies are going through right now, and all the good people who are out of work, two fat cats spending anything near that amount on a stupid sailboat race is THE story that needs to get more air time.