America's Cup: Ted Turner, Captain Outrageous, dies at 87yrs

by Richard Gladwell/Sail-World NZ 6 May 22:38 PDT

Captain Outrageous, Ted Turner, America's Cup champion and winner of the Sydney Hobart and Fastnet races, died on Wednesday. Outside his colourful sailing career, he founded the global broadcasting network CNN, which revolutionised the industry.

A Southerner by birth, and with a drawl to match, Robert Edward Turner III was one of the most colourful figures in sailing, known for his disdain for the yachting establishment.

Top sailing journalist, Bob Fisher, gave him the headline of "Captain Courageous" on the eve of the 1977 America's Cup, after he came from behind to win the US Defence trials, sailing the chartered 1974 America's Cup winner - one of only three yachts to have won successive America's Cups, in the event's 170-year history.

Born in Ohio, his parents moved to Georgia, when he was 9yrs old. Turner began racing dinghies on the coastal waters of Savannah, competing in Penguins, Lightnings, and Flying Dutchmen.

He contested the 1964 US Olympic Trials in the highly technical Flying Dutchman class. but did not win the berth for the Tokyo Olympics. However he went on to win the World Championship for the class a year later. Turner won the 5.5 Metre World Championship in 1970 before shifting his attention to the America's Cup and then international Offshore racing, beginning with the Southern Ocean Racing Conference (SORC).

He purchased the Sparkman & Stephens-designed 12-Metre, American Eagle. Originally built as an America's Cup contender for the 1964 Defense, the boat was converted for ocean racing. Turner saw the potential in her design and retrofitted the yacht to withstand the rigours of offshore racing.

His most audacious offshore foray with American Eagle occurred in 1972 when he took the yacht Down Under for the gruelling Sydney Hobart Yacht Race. In his signature move of starting as an underdog, but emerging victorious, Turner, in his red-hulled 12-Metre, not only won line honours but also claimed the overall handicap victory - one of just six boats to achieve the "double" in the event's 80-year history.

He backed up that win in the notorious 1979 Fastnet Race, skippering his own boat, the 61ft Tenacious, to an overall win in the worst conditions in the race's history, in which 15 lives were lost.

He won Line Honours again in the Sydney Hobart race, a decade later in 1983, when he returned to skipper Bob Bell's maxi yacht, Condor.

Turner’s overriding obsession was with the America's Cup, and taking on the New York Yacht Club committee, described by Bob Fisher as "a uniformed brigade of social register caricatures in their Panama hats, blue doeskin jackets and red trousers."

"They epitomise wealth and position. Turner is an anathema to them. He talks too much, drinks too much, he is rarely seen without a spectacular-looking woman in his company, and to cap it all, he beats the best that they can pit against him.

"Two million dollars went into the New York Maritime College to provide Lowell Noth with the latest 12metre Enterprise. North had it all running for him, except that Turner was there with Courageous. And that sank Enterprise just as surely as if she had hit one of the jagged rocks that lie in the entrance to Newport harbour."

Turner's initial America's Cup attempts were marked by sharp learning curves and public failures. The most notable of these was the disastrous 1974 campaign aboard the radically designed, Britton Chance-designed Mariner.

Mariner, with her experimental stepped transom, was notoriously slow and practically unsteerable downwind. Turner famously remarked of the failed design, "Even a turd is pointed at both ends." That comment encapsulated the frustration of a campaign that saw him dismissed from the helm mid-summer. It was a humiliating setback.

Turner's vindication came in the 1977 Match, and preceding Defence trials, setting the stage for what is arguably the most famous summer in American sailing history.

Turner was tapped to skipper the legendary Sparkman & Stephens 12-Metre, Courageous. The boat was a proven commodity, having already defended the Cup in 1974, but many considered her past her prime against the newer designs of the era.

Turner and his tactician Gary Jobson's entrée to the Trials began, according to Fisher, when Turner was encouraged by sailmaker and leading Cup skipper, Ted Hood, to charter Courageous. Hood, very much a favourite son of the NYYC establishment, "sailed it last time and who saw in Turner the ideal sparring partner for his new 12, Independence. The US Merchant Marine Academy, a tax-avoidance charity of the syndicates of the New York yacht Club members who put up the money".

"Like anyone else who tries to manipulate Turner for their own ends, Hood failed in this major ploy," Fisher wrote.

"Turner was not content to play second fiddle. He pulled his crew together and convinced them that Courageous was faster than Independence and then proved it by beating Hood's newer yacht on almost every occasion that they met; certainly enough times to have the New York Yacht Club selectors thank Hood for his assistance - their way of eliminating him from the possible defenders - early on in the Trials."

Turner faced off against Lowell North, an aeronautical engineer and sailmaking genius who steered the highly touted Enterprise. Outside the Defence trials, Hood headed up the pre-eminent East Coast-based sailmaker, while North was his West Coast-based sailmaking archrival. It was an arm wrestle for more than the Cup.

What Turner lacked in cutting-edge sail technology, he made up for in sheer willpower, aggressive match-racing tactics, and a masterful handling of the media to unnerve his opponents.

Crucial to the success of Courageous was the remarkable crew Turner assembled, famously described as a ragtag bunch of blue-collar sailors. At his side was the brilliant tactician Gary Jobson, whose calm, analytical approach perfectly counterbalanced Turner’s fiery outbursts. Together, they forged an unshakable team dynamic that optimized every ounce of speed from the older Courageous.

After winning the right to defend, Turner and the Courageous crew met Alan Bond’s Australian challenger, Australia, in the 1977 America's Cup Match. The result was a comprehensive 4-0 sweep. The victory was definitive, but it was Turner’s raucous, champagne-soaked post-race press conferences that truly captured the world's imagination.

Turner's 1977 triumph briefly elevated the sport of sailing from the back pages of niche yachting magazines to the forefront of mainstream American sports. Turner graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, a rare feat for a sailor, cementing his status not just as a sporting champion, but as a pop-culture icon whose charisma brought unprecedented visibility to yacht racing.

"Turner is a reporter's ideal sportsman," Fisher wrote on the eve of the 1977 America's Cup Match. "He has a quip to match every question, and undoubtedly one of the favourites is that made to a cub reporter at Cowes in 1973 after the third race in the Admiral's Cup when the German team had a healthy points lead. In reply to what he thought of their chances of retaining their lead in the Fastnet came: "They were ahead in 1942, weren't they?"

Turner returned to Newport in 1980 for one final America's Cup defense campaign, again at the helm of Courageous. However, the era of the gentleman amateur was closing, and the hyper-professional, scientifically driven campaigns pioneered by Dennis Conner and Freedom were taking over. Turner yielded the stage, but he did so as a universally acknowledged titan of the sport.

In 1993, Turner was inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame. 18 years later, in 2011, he was again honoured as part of the inaugural class inducted into the National Sailing Hall of Fame, recognising a lifetime of extraordinary achievement on the water.

Behind the Turners' bravado was a fundamentally brilliant owner, skipper and helmsman with an intuitive grasp of tactics, rather than sailing technology.

Married and divorced three times, Turner is survived by five children. In 2018, he revealed that he had been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia.