America's Cup vision

Some progressive thinking about sailing's pinnacle event

For us one of the highlights of London Boat Show last week was BMW Oracle Racing's USA 61 Cup boat being there. Despite the absence of a British challenger, the America's Cup is being held in Europe this year for the first time since 1851 and it was good that the event was so well represented at the principle boat show in the country that first hosted the Cup.

With BMW Oracle Racing, comes leading Cup spokesman Tom Ehman. Ehman not only sits on the BMW Oracle Racing executive committee where his responsbilities are for 'rules and external affairs' but is a recent head of the Challenger Commission where he remains one of its chief mover and shakers.





Ehman's main message is that this year's Cup is going to be the toughest, hardest and best sailing competition in the event's formidable 156 year history. "The truth is in the Acts this past summer in Valencia with eight of the 12 teams the boats were being well sailed and were quick, at a level you would expect to see half way through the round robins of the Louis Vuitton Cup in the past. And now you have almost everyone training all winter and making further developments. Plus you have Act 13 to give everyone one more tune up just before the LVC."

Despite the smart money being on an Alinghi win in the America's Cup, Ehman says he will be surprised if it goes 5-0 their way. Right now for example, he is very happy where BMW Oracle Racing are. "Chris [Dickson] has been very aggressive and very innovative and we continue to be. And in my experience, like Dennis [Conner] did in 1987 or Bill Koch did in 1992, it is the team that kept developing, kept trying, kept moving forwards, that goes the distance."

Since the last Cup, there have been some fundamental management changes within BMW Oracle Racing with Chris Dickson now firmly in the CEO role. "Last time you’ll remember Larry [Ellison] was the CEO and he was involved day to day, not so much in person but by email and phone. He was much more involved with the campaign, helping to guide Billy Erkelens, our General Manager. This time Chris is very much in charge. He makes the decisions with the advice of his top guys and we have got a much better process.

"As Bill Packer used to say back in the America 2 days ‘you have to make your mistakes in a hurry because then you can fix them and get on with the next thing’. Last time we were paralysed - we couldn’t make decisions and Larry was in San Francisco and we had too many people. This time it is very clear - if a hard decision has to be made Chris will make it with the advice of his top people and it is well managed."

Chris Dickson runs an executive committee of eight including Ehman, Laurent Esquier, Russell Green (admin), Ian Burns (design), Murko Groeschner (marketing), Craig Monk (sailing with Dickson), Pete Isler and Mark Turner.

Currently the team are in New Zealand training and have just taken delivery of their second new Version 5 Cup boat, USA 98.

Louis Vuitton Cup 2007

Wearing his Challenge Commission hat, Ehman has recently finished conjuring up the Notice of Race for April's Louis Vuitton Cup challenger selection series along with several of the other challengers legal and rules experts such as Emirates Team New Zealand's Jim Farmer and Bruno Finzi from Luna Rossa.

For this Louis Vuitton Cup there is much more flexibility in how much teams can change their boats through each segment of the series. Effectively this time round you are allowed to make three 'minor' modifications (ie a change that doesn't require a reweigh or a refloat) or two 'major' modifications (which will require a reweigh or refloat). Teams can even change boat midway through any of the series (round robins, quarter finals, semis, finals) although this comes with at the expense of a one race penalty. "The reason for that is to stop people having a light airs boat and a heavy airs boat," explains Ehman. "If one of these teams sails in round robin one and they’ve just got a new boat and they haven’t had time to work it up and it turns out to be a lemon, there is no point in their sailing because none of us wants to race a lemon. So it is better for them to change the boat out, put it in the shed and carve it up whatever they have to do it - immediately."

The racing format is similar with two races per day in Round Robin One, one race a day in round robin two and then on into the quarter final, semis and finals.

The wind limits of 7 to 23 knots remains the same, although Ehman stresses this is a guideline and ultimately down to the discretion of Race Officers Peter Reggio and Harold Bennett. "They will not start below seven, but if it is a stable breeze they might start in 6 or it is flat water and people are happy they might go if it is more than 23."

Ehman is keen on the idea of keeping to a schedule with the LVC so that the media and VIP guests can plan in advance what they will be seeing on any particular day. For this reason under the new Notice of Race if a race day is lost due to the weather then instead of this being rescheduled the next day (as has happened previously) it will be shoved on and held at the end of the series.

For the same reason Ehman wishes they had come up with a system that allowed the pairings for the round robins to be known much further in advance, but unfortunately this hasn't happened. At present the pairings won't be known until the end of Act 13 on 7 April, just over a week out from the start of the first round robin. While it will be hard to change at this late stage Ehman says they will at least be addressing this issue at the next Challenger Commission meeting at the end of this month.

Under the so-called 'Valencia Plan' the Challenger Commission came up with, the Acts also have a heavier weighting the closer they are held to the Louis Vuitton Cup. So Act 13 has a 3x weighting and with BMW Oracle Racing trailing leaders Emirates Team New Zealand by just two points and with Luna Rossa in third just five points short of BMW Oracle, there is still plenty of opportunity for movement in the leaderboard among the challengers in the Act 13 fleet racing.

Aside from dictating the pairings, a team's position after all the Acts are over will also determine the points they take through to the LVC. The overall winner of the Acts gets four points, which equates to two race wins in the LVC round robins. The next three teams take three points through, boats five to seven take two points through and the remainder one. "We wanted the bonus points to be worth something but not too much," explains Ehman of how they tried to make the Acts 'relevant'. With this system the overall results from the Acts represent 10% of the 40 points available in the round robins. This overall ranking from the Acts will be also used to break ties in the round robins.

Radical notions

Already occasional meetings are being held to brainstorm what each team might do next time if they win this year America's Cup. Ehman thinks the next winner should not go for a new boat.. "It has worked well. We have three first time challengers with South Africa, Germany and China. And now we’ve got the Brits back in. And we have all these boats of which perhaps 25 are competitive."

A possible class change after the 33rd America's Cup seems more likely, but Ehman finds this of questionable merit. "Why change? A whole new class is expensive, it is difficult. Why throw away all this inventory? Should we modify the class? No doubt. We should continue to make it challenging to sail. Continue to come up with ideas that can be developed by the designers that can flow into mainstream sailing. But I don’t see what reason there is to change the class. The general public don’t care. You could argue that the class could be bigger because now you have these 100 footers kicking around. Canting keels? I don’t think that would be good for match racing."

Ehman also believes that the next America's Cup cycle be shorter -- ideally just two years. "It reduces the spend because you can only spend so much per year and you get another revenue hit sooner," continues Ehman. "Almost everyone is talking sooner and hopefully that will be the case."

The introduction of the Acts for this Cup cycle, has gone done a storm. Ehman says that even sceptics like Luna Rossa's Patrizio Bertelli or Mascalzone Latino-Capitalia Team's Vincenzo Onorato have come around. "To ACM’s credit they have figured out how to do it and they have become much more efficient about transporting us around. Trapani was a wonderful event."

But Ehman feels there should have been more Acts in this Cup cycle - the event in Kiel BMW Oracle competed in with Team Shosholoza and United Internet Team Germany last summer, should have been an Act, he reckons, ideally followed by one in north America. He hopes there will be more Acts during the next Cup cycle. "Personally I’d like to see it get going as soon as possible once people have had a break after the Cup. Alinghi has proposed doing one in Newport, as soon as possible, for everyone. I would love to see something in Kiel in August, Newport in September, San Francisco in October, Auckland, Malaysia, China, Dubai and back to Valencia for example. I think we need to get organised to do that." He also advocates going back to venues that have already hosted Acts, where they have already learned the lessons of how to host them.

A more radical suggestion of Ehman's is that next time round these Acts should take the place of all or part of the Louis Vuitton Cup with possibly only the America's Cup match itself, or possibly the LVC finals and semi-finals, being held at the Cup venue.

The merits of this depend upon whether or not an America's Cup village is considered a good thing. How many potential venues have the space for a village the size of the one in Valencia? Where would you put it in the UK? If BMW Oracle won it and decided to stage the main event in San Francisco Bay where would 13 teams put their bases?

In addition to this Ehman is against the idea of teams having to go to the expensive of building a large base that ultmiately ends up being handed over to the host city. With the emphasis placed much more on the Acts - please can they come up with a different name for them next time? - then it becomes possible for teams to operate from a base in their country of origin, but spending more time flying around to the Acts. Thus the physical infra-structure required for the Cup venue is considerably less and Ehman imagines it being more of a temporary affair as seen at the Acts held this cycle outside of Valencia such as Trapani and Malmo.

Wouldn't this devalue winning the Cup for the winner - we put it to Ehman. "No, when you have an enormous event is when there’s a huge television show and you bring a huge television audience to your final match and have the huge turn out come watch you Keith Mills defend it in Weymouth. If he wins the America’s Cup and runs the LV final and the match in Weymouth then for four weeks the whole sailing world shows up and half of the non-sailing world that are interested or that aren’t watching it on TV: Fabulous and way better than what we’ve got at the moment."

One reason for taking the emphasis off the Cup venue is one of personal logistics he maintains. "We are all older and we all have families, so the idea of uprooting families and taking them from San Diego to Auckland to Valencia doesn’t make sense. If my wife and my daughter want to go to two or three Acts a year, like they used to go to the odd grand prix, that’s great. For the final final, if it is in San Francisco Bay and it is going to be an LV final and the match, that’s all going to happen in four weeks. So take the kids out of school."

Another radical idea, but one which many will welcome, is limiting the amount of time teams are allowed to train. "It is a case of spending the money where there’s the best value," continues Ehman. "Chris Dickson and all the sailing team say it over and over - 'we’re here to go racing. The more racing we can do the better'. That is what Larry [Ellison] and Ernesto [Bertarelli] want to do. They are not around when we are doing all this other stuff and they are paying the bills. They don’t want to test and train. It is probably good for the sport as well because it forces us even more to develop the virtual design tools rather than the full scale model testing you do when you are two boating."

The solution to this, Ehman suggests, is for there to be a 'dark period' where teams are forbidden from training or developing anywhere, just as happens in Formula 1. "Teams should not be permitted to two boat at their leisure. It is too expensive, the sailors don’t like it, it does nothing for the media, nothing for the fans, nothing for the sponsors - so why do we do it? Because we’ve always done it. It is time to somehow limit that."

Under this model teams should only be allowed to train in venues two weeks prior to each Act, Ehman recommends. So with this proposal, the emphasis is taken away from the 'Cup venue' and it is more likely a team will set up a base in their home country and the sailing team may be able to treat the America's Cup in more of a part time way, flying into each Act two weeks before it starts and going home or off to a TP 52 regatta or an Olympic regatta in the intervening period.

And even more radical suggestion and the only one of these that would require a change to the Deed of Gift would be a suggestion of Ehman's whereby the winner of the America's Cup rather than getting to decide on the competition for the next America's Cup, gets to decide it two events hence. If in 2003 Alinghi had announced where the Cup will be held in 2009 and the winner this year where the Cup will be held in 2011 for example then it would dramatically improve everyone's ability to plan ahead.

Carrying it on

Other possible developments Ehman sees are to do with the roll-over between Cups. In theory if one of the challengers successfully lifts the Cup off Alinghi then for the 33rd America's Cup they have the right to set the Cup up how they want (within the constraints of the Cup's Deed of Gift) and this could mean a new boat, a new style of racing, the events run by an entirely new organisational body.

Fortunately over the last two or three decades there has been more continuity introduced. A fledgling international jury indendent of the New York Yacht Club for example was introduced for the first time in 1974 led by a Beppe Croce and a team from the then IYRU. Then independent measurers Ken MacAlpine and Tony Watts were brought in. Now Bryan Willis has chaired the jury for the last couple of Cups. Dyer Jones this time has been brought in as a Regatta Director of both the America's Cup and the Louis Vuitton Cup - previously they were treated separately.

Where will this go from here? "Next time around the marketing people should probably be appointed by mutual consent as well and be working for all of us," says Ehman. "There can be no doubt that some of the guys who have been working for ACM [America's Cup Management] should continue on in various capacities because they will have corporate memory and they will have learned things and they will do a better job next time with the next ACM type organisation."

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