Yours or Mine?

by John Curnow, Editor, Sail-World.com AUS on 19 Jun 2017 The origins of this headline were in a Facebook post that went along the lines of, ‘My Aussies are going to beat your Aussie!’ To be honest, it was kind of sad moment, for it was a clear and present reminder that we have not played in the space as a country since One Australia. Hoodoo Gurus moment right there – ‘Like wow. Wipeout.’ Following that revelation on FB, there were some clever cartoons that appeared during the week, too. Rod Emmerson summed up one side of the equation pretty smartly with our hero pic.

Elena Achilli also chimed in with a good one that certainly highlighted a very key point in it all. Given the results to date, the exhausted Eagle could well be the telling tale! Alas, for us, it is all about whether Ashby will beat Langford, Spithill, Hurst, Newton, and Slingsby (who as the dual passport holder is the designated Seppo)? From there, the questions continue. Did OTUSA buy Softbank to have it available to become Oracle Two, as it were? Only Oracle can have a second boat, and its hulls are the same as OTUSA, for what it’s worth.

They could leave the ‘Japanese’ grinders on, and buy putting Spithill and Slingsby on board, get back out racing should there be a prang or other issue. Equally, OTUSA put a cyclor on the first boat inside two days, so it would not be outside the realms of possibility to be doing that in a shed right now. You could almost expect the wheel and controls to be same between the two boats as well.

Right oh. The next point will be to see which recently unemployed AC sailors show up at Lake Garda for the Moth World Championship. They expect to have 200 go into the mix, so it will be a grand affair like no other. Given the extremely low output of Exocets produced to date, which have dominated the results since their arrival not that long ago, a fun game might be to find them inside the armada of Mach 2 foiling Moths on the glorious and oh-so-picturesque lake in Northern Italy.

Last week we looked at the reinvigorated Sail Melbourne that will run from November 29 to December 3, 2017. This week, news of the Tasman Project surfaced. One of the comments from last week was, “You never know, perhaps an Asia Pacific Cup or similar could get up… With the Euro circuit now dwarfing the SWC, it is more than pipe dream stuff.”

So if the Tasman Project had arrived a year earlier it might have kept a SWC event Downunder. Remember, once upon a time Sail Sydney and Sail Melbourne were both ISAF Grade 1 events, only one step below the Olympics in world ranking, which is important to note. However New Zealand chose not to support them and equally the AST similarly ignored NZL events. Of course, these two countries won an impressive eight medals in sailing at Rio.

Now here’s the thing. Had they supported each other, then many other countries would have been motivated to campaign down under in recent years, for the Antipodeans are clearly at the pointy end of many a fleet. With team GBR and USA under Aussie management, as it were, could we now see some of the Euros and Seppos come to play? As one industry legend said to me, “Evidently it appears that after the SWC has been lost in the Southern hemisphere, they realise what they have forsaken. Olympic campaigners learn how to think two steps ahead. Seems now like the athletes need to coach the administrators?” Cannot argue with that, and we’ll certainly cover it on Sail-World.com and see what goes down.

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