Third Cup for Morgan Larson

American sailor joins Victory Challenge

This will be his third America’s Cup. American Morgan Larson, 35, is the most recent recruit to Victory Challenge. After AmericaOne and OneWorld Challenge he has now, for the first time, chosen a non-American team. “I stayed with a sort of national sense. But my heritage is from Sweden, so I still feel I’m with a national team,” he says.  
 
Morgan Larson was strategist with AmericaOne sailing with Paul Cayard and John Kostecki, and had the equivalent position with OneWorld Challenge, with Peter Gilmour and James Spithill in the afterguard.
 
“I have a unique experience from sailing with them and if I could take a little piece of each of them and bring that to Victory Challenge I think it could be quite helpful,” says Morgan Larson.
 
He is employed as strategist/tactician for the Swedish America’s Cup challenge as well. The recruitment of further competence even in the afterguard, the on-board decision makers, is a natural consequence of the ongoing two-boat training.
 
“We have made our previous strategist, Mattias Rahm, second helmsman. We are sailing with two boats, so we naturally have to strengthen the afterguard. Morgan Larson has a perfect background and I’m very pleased that he has decided to join us, bearing in mind how many he’s previously turned down,” says Magnus Holmberg, skipper and helmsman.
 
Morgan Larson was contacted by more than one America’s Cup-team ahead of Valencia 2007. “I said no to quite a few, I was in the middle of my preparations for the 49er Class in the Peking Olympics," said Larson. "My partner is on a course in economics just now, so that joining Victory Challenge this late doesn’t disrupt my Olympic plans. The only thing that can disrupt them is if Victory Challenge reaches the America’s Cup Match.”
 
Morgan Larsson has broad experience from a number of classes, where he has focussed on 49er during the last few years. He has three World Championship bronzes in this class. His other achievements include three World Championship golds and being a 20-time US national champion.
 
His Swedish heritage is apparent in his surname. Larsson (with a double s) is the sixth most common surname in Sweden. His grandfather’s grandfather left Malmö for Minnesota and the family later moved on to California.
 
Morgan Larson grew up in Santa Cruz, south of San Francisco. He is the seventh of the sailors recruited for the two-boat training that has previous America’s Cup experience. Victory Challenge is a Swedish team, but on-board there are sailors from a total of eleven nations: Sweden (ten sailors), Great Britain (five), Australia (five), New Zealand (five), Denmark (three), Spain (two), USA (two), as well as one sailor from each of Argentina, France, Finland and Germany.