Your Feedback

Reader's thoughts on the recent America's Cup ruling and more on the Olympic sailing events debacle

The following feedback relates to the Golden Gate Yacht Club's win in the New York Supreme Court over the Societe Nautique de Geneve (ie Larry Ellison/BMW Oracle Racing beating Ernesto Bertarelli/Alinghi) Read about this here. Generally we are getting the impression for our readers that boredom is setting in when it comes to billionaires bludgeoning each other and now it is time to iron out the wrinkles and get on with the business of some serious yacht racing.

If you wish to contribute your opinion on these topics - email us here

From Mario Sampaio:

Sportsmanship is an attitude that strives for fair play, courtesy toward team mates and opponents, ethical behaviour and integrity, and grace in losing

No Mr. Bertarelli, this is not written in the Chinese language… it is English!

Sportsmanship is an old concept that has been around and leading sports people have followed for many generations indeed!

Aren’t we are all tired of Mr. Bertarelli’s ‘wise ass’ statements and actions? Does he really honestly think he can fool others on the basis of deceiving, omitting, creating false issues, and acting all powerful, authoritarian, influent and dishonest? These are the ‘qualities’ we presently associate with the America’s Cup since Bertarelli has been calling the shots… he thinks ‘if you have the money and the power you can do anything’!

Let’s not forget the 32nd America’s Cup: the venue had been decided to be Cascais on the basis of merit and after months of study and hard work, but also and perhaps primarily, due to it’s world class sailing grounds with constant winds all year around. The Wednesday, two days before the formal announcement, Cascais was confirmed as the venue for the 32nd America’s Cup…

But on the night before Friday’s public announcement, and due to a huge personal business deal made by Bertarelli in Valencia just a few hours before and not related to the AC, the whole thing got shifted to Valencia at the very last minute… catching all involved by total surprise, including public officials, governments, etc. even ACM was caught off guard!

And then we watched the windless 32nd America’s Cup, which did wonders to get sponsors running away from sailing… or was it Bertarelli trying to prove we can hold the America’s Cup in a windless sailing ground? No further comments on the sporting criteria Mr. Bertarelli has showed us so far….

Mr. Bertarelli has already proved to us all, over and over again, that he doesn’t have a single gram of education or ethical principle for every million he owns in money. His lack of sportsmanship has been a disgrace to the reputation and tradition of the America’s Cup where honour, sportsmanship and other human ethic values were respected and pursued for centuries...

I am certainly very happy with the ruling by the New York Supreme Court… no that my comments on Mr. Ellison would differ much from the comments I’ve just made regarding Mr. Bertarelli….

But at least and for the time being, the truth has prevailed.

“There is no point in winning if you don’t win your opponents’ respect and admiration…” (a quote from Elvstrom?)

These ‘boys’ just haven’t gained our respect and admiration, quite on the contrary!

So, until honour is regained, the America’s Cup will flounder and perhaps even totally disappear from the public’s interest!

Ed: At this point we should insert the legal phrase about correspondence in our Feedback articles expressing the viewpoints of our readers and are not those of thedailysail.com or its staff... etc

Brian Gamlin adds this snippet:

Oracle have accused Alinghi of not having the best interests of the cup at heart, what about Oracle? Larry Ellison does very little unless he gets the most out of it! Does he have the AC at heart or just LE!!

From Australia, David Eastwood sends us this:

Scrap the AC 90, crank up the V5 boats and get moving.

To the uninitiated (ie most of the world, the people who need to get engaged for the event to be commercially successful) the current AC boats are no more or less exciting to watch match racing than the 12 Metres they replaced, despite being a shit pile faster. It will be the same for this new class, so what's the point?

The excitement of Cup racing is in the on the water dueling between hot teams sailing evenly matched boats. The racing in the last Cup and the LV series was breathtaking to watch, I was there.

The new AC 90 rule puts us back in design-land where the focus moves off the water and into the zone of uncertainty around what is a faster boat, yet the differences will be invisible to most of the audience. And, the course has to be structured so that the race lasts about 90-120 minutes, and it will still go upwind and down - meaning the winning boat is upwind-optimised, i.e. heavy and stable. So it won’t be any more or less interesting than it is now despite the new boats. Sure, all us sailing types will get a kick out of watching big dinghies plane around the course for 5 minutes here or there, and of course the designers will have a pile of (profitable) fun working through the options (but it won’t take long to get into diminishing returns territory – VPPS and simulations take care of that), the equipment manufacturers will make a pile out of the new R&D required, but chances are that the deltas will be much greater than they were last time and the racing less interesting.

Keep it simple and get on with it, build on AC32’s momentum now there’s once again a chance to do that. Obvious.

From London, Tanya Balasingam writes:

Technicality = The quality or condition of being technical. Or even something meaningful or relevant only to a specialist. Rule = An authoritative, prescribed direction for conduct, especially one of regulations governing procedure in a legislative body or a regulation observed by the players in a game, sport or contest.

Hmm......not sure how a Harvard Business School graduate could get this mixed up.
Might be a language thing. Anyone in Swiss French please?

From Jim Dowling:

There we were, thinking that the AC was a sporting contest. It had all the elements - amazing boats sailed by the best sailors with state of the art media coverage – a sponsors dream.

Unfortunately, all we got was a glimpse of how good it could be if the powers that be allowed it to evolve into something that was worth watching.

This case demonstrates how ridicules the AC can be – spoilt brats with more money than they will ever need in a ‘win at all costs’ spend fest – yawn!

So congratulations Larry, you won the battle, let’s hope that your ‘war’ is worth a watch.

From our esteemed Italian collague, Andrea Falcon:

With his decision, Justice Cahn is giving Bertarelli (and also Ellison) the great opportunity to start everything again, this time with good ideas.

After all it is not so difficult to organise a successful 33rd America's Cup starting from everything good has been done in the 32nd edition. No matters if in 2009, 2010, 2011, no matters if with 90 footers or any other boat. Just keep things simple as they were (e.g. more than everything, the format that had been studied with acts, trials, repechages, selections and all the rest, was something produced by sick minds).

On the topic of ISAF's controversial decision over the Olympic events for 2012...

From Scott MacLeod, President of F10 Marketing – the organisers of the World Match Tour:

I find the rub on match racing in the Olympics pretty interesting and naïve. As someone who actually puts on independent commercially viable events that have TV coverage, spectators, sponsorship and prize money I hope that I am somewhat qualified to pass along my humble opinion. In addition I am not totally biased towards match racing as in my own personal sailing I actually like team racing best of all of the disciplines. But unfortunately, Match Racing is the only form of the sport that I have seen that has ticked all of the boxes that the IOC says will help keep sailing in the Olympics and yes, men’s match racing should have been put up as a discipline for 2012 but wasn’t for political reasons. The same politics that voted it out in the first place. So welcome to the real world!

Why does match racing work:
1. It’s easy for the non sailing media to follow
2. It packages itself for the media and public (course, rules, umpires, etc.)
3. It is easier and more affordable to produce for television
4. It has a developed a professional series with prize money, television and yes, spectators – please name one class that can claim the same
5. It doesn’t have to be class reliant – sorry to you class associations, MNA’s looking for technology edge, designers and builders looking to cash in. You can run an event in any boat. All you need is 2 of them.
6. The pinnacle event in our sport, the America’s Cup is a match race

Ok, that is why match racing works and why it doesn’t really need the Olympics to be successful. So you look at the other boats in the Olympics. Why is the 49er so great? Does it get a lot of TV coverage? How many spectators were on shore watching the last 49er event? Is it living up to the promise that it made as a new Olympic class 8 years ago? And Cats? Great boats, fast but I ask the same questions.

What these classes should be focusing on is how to make their events more relevant and packageable to the consumer (the IOC, media, public). Two cats drag racing side by side along the beach or shore with the winner taking the gold? I’d watch that? 49er racing with a downwind slalom set along the shore may be exciting.

Remember, what was one of the top TV moments in Olympic sailing? Ben Ainsle “match racing” Robert Schiedt for the Gold Medal in Sydney! One race, two sailors, no second, winner take all! The media loved it! So if that is what we as a sport are being asked to produce as a product for the IOC then I believe we should listen and have a serious look at how we package and present our sport.

It’s not about the boats!

J/24 ace Chris McLaughlin sends this:

Congratulations to ISAF on perfect timing in dropping the multi hull from the Games and introducing the female yachting equivalent of watching paint dry - women's match racing in mono hulls..

High quality, knowledgeable, prescient thinking if the America's Cup goes Multi hull. Can any of your readers explain how to match race a catamaran?

Perhaps a race around the Isle of Wight for a large silver wine pourer might be a more suitable test for 90 foot multi hulls...

Phil Lawrence adds:

Just a couple of points on your interesting article today:

Removing keelboats won’t necessarily save on construction costs as those facilities are needed to service the Paralympics. Not that the cost of a couple of small cranes is significant anyway against the huge overall cost of the event.

Also if you take out the keelboats you lose some the spectacle, as you just have a small dinghy regatta and you could run that off a beach over a long weekend!

It will be interesting to see what happens at next year’s council meeting when they choose the actual classes….. Will they dig themselves further into the mire by trying to manipulate the class selection to respond to all the well earned criticism they have received?

Following on from our interview with Mark Turner prior to the start of the Barcelona World Race, Volvo Ocean Race Race Director Andy Hindley wrote to us:

Your story about Mark Turner has the following:

'To this end, another satellite of OC Group, OC Technology, has been responsible for developing a video conferencing system that doesn't require a computer. "It is a videophone system with one button dial that on land you can receive on an ISDN line and an off the shelf video phone, removing the need to configure software running on a computer at each end," describes Turner .

'Interestingly comms of this type is set to undergo a revolution in around 18 months time with the advent of Inmarsat's latest satellite system that will allow a 400k/s connection rather than the laborious 128k/s one at present. Sadly this will not be ready for the next Vendee Globe or Volvo Ocean Race but is set to transform the media side of offshore races beyond this.'

Well the 432Kbs service is available from December this year and we will be using it...in fact the land version of this srvice has been running for some time.....

Apologies - we'll be having a look at this this technology and what it means for offshore races in due course