Zero to hero in one year

We speak to the Alinghi crew about how they have become the best multihull sailors in the iShares Cup

Three years on from when we first sailed the new Extreme 40 catamaran with Mitch Booth and Herbie Dercksen, the iShares Cup has this weekend completed its second season following a dramatic three day regatta in the confined waters of downtown Amsterdam’s IJ Haven.

While Rob Greenhalgh and his Team Origin crew of Pete Greenhalgh, Julian Cressant and Matt Cornwell fought valiantly to defend their 2007 iShares Cup title, it was Ed Baird and his Alinghi team of Rodney Ardern, Lorenzo Mazza and Pieter Van Nieuwenhuyzen who have been unquestionably the class act of 2008. They won the final four regattas of the season in Hyeres, Cowes, Kiel and yesterday Amsterdam and the only reason that Greenhalgh’s team was able to remain in contention up until the final regatta was due to Alinghi’s capsize and subsequently lowly score at the first regatta on Lake Lugano.

Alinghi’s performance is doubly impressive considering that to a man their crew were not multihull sailors before this season. However this is one meticulous America’s Cup team... Prior to the start of the season Alinghi acquired two Extreme 40 catamarans, including Rob Greenhalgh’s 2007 winner (the former Basilica) and at the start of the year were able to put in months of two boating to learn what was fast and what was not. The primary reason for this was to glean data for Michel Richelson and his CFD team to work up a multihull VPP to assist them with the design of their new big America’s Cup multihull.

So what did they learn? “We did what anyone would do at the beginning of learning how to sail a new class,” says Ed Baird. “We asked a lot of stupid questions, we went out and made a lot of dumb mistakes, but the one thing we did which we know works no matter where you are - is that we had a second boat and we just side by sided and experimented. Interestingly without either team knowing that much about what we were doing, we figured out enough ways to go well enough that when we got together with the other boats we were on the pace and from there it was just a matter of communication and decision making, like any other kind of race. At the end of the day it is a sail boat, it’s just that they handle a little differently and the distances that your good and bad choices make are pretty significant.”

Baird cites as examples having to learn about the way one ducks other boats in a high speed multihull and how to overtake over competitors and a wealth of tactical know-how.
“If you slow yourself down to try to fight with another boat, someone else will be going a lot faster and they will just zip around you. It is a bigger percentage of boat speed when you start manoeuvring and messing around with other boats than it is in a monohull. A little bit of pinching in a monohull for 30 seconds is no big deal, but on these things you’ve just lost ten boatlengths, so you have to think a little differently.”

Very evident watching the racing in Amsterdam from the shoreside comfort of the media centre has been Alinghi’s unorthadox starting tactics, which on this course with downwind starts seemed to be always the same: Rather than roaring towards the line on a second-perfect timed run, Alinghi instead prefered to hang back and deliberately get a second tier start. While hardly being textbook, this unique approach seemed to work.

“You’d never think to do that in a ‘normal’ type fleet race event, but it puts us into a stronger position a minute down the race course,” explains Baird. “It has to do with the way the courses are set up and the wind direction we have. As soon as we start on these downwind starts you sail for 30-40 seconds and you sail into a big hole under some buildings and you want to gybe out, but you can’t because all the boats behind you are on starboard and you can’t get out. So the leaders become the trailers and vica versa. It is a really scary strategy because every once in a while someone will escape out of the front group, but on average the odds have worked out well.”

Aside from their unusual start tactics, Baird’s team also seem to have been good at keeping out of trouble. This has partly been due to Baird's ability to find lanes, but also to their handling of the boat. For example when it is light Alinghi always seems to continue moving and they have become equally accomplished at handling sails and helm while tacking when it is light so that they don’t get stuck in irons or end up going backwards.


Left to right: Pieter Van Nieuwenhuyzen, Ed Baird, Rodney Ardern and Lorenzo Mazza

“You can lose a lot quite easily,” continues Baird. “That has been the cornerstone of our training: knowing that we want to minimise parking up time. We spent a fair amount of time learning how to tack and gybe and start and go on the start line. All year we have had a strategy at every event of picking the tactic or strategy which gives us the best chance of finishing in the top half of the fleet. There is no way you are going to win or come second all the time, so we look at getting into the top four at the first mark and then see what happens from there.” And witnessing today’s six final races of the 2008 iShares Cup season, this is exactly what they achieved scoring a 3, 3, 2, 4, 9, 1 in the ten boat fleet.

Having learned how to sail their boat to the extent that it became second nature also allowed all of the crew to have their eyes out of the boat, in order to feed their observations back to Baird. Another way of staying out of trouble was that they constant were trying to anticipate where this would happen, thinking two or three moves ahead.

Rodney Ardern says that their crew responsibilities were also slightly different to other teams. On some boats the skipper pumps the main sheet hydraulics but on their boat Ardern mostly handled both this and the traveller. While on some boats the biggest guys would be the main trimmer, on Alinghi Ardern, Mazza and Van Nieuwenhuyzen are all strong guys but the biggest, Van Nieuwenhuyzen, was bowman/pitman. Among his responsibilities was also manning the daggerboards – often in Extreme 40 races both boards are kept down for the short course races, but not so on Alinghi.

As to whether or not Alinghi will return to defend their title in 2009, obviously depends upon the outcome of the present America’s Cup debacle. If the New York court deem the next America’s Cup will be a Deed of Gift match in large multihulls then Alinghi may well return for practice in 2009, but the latest rumours are that a deal is being brokered between Bertarelli and Ellison which may possibly see a return to a multi-challenger event sooner than most imagine.

In the meantime the Alinghi Extreme 40 crew may have problems going back to slow monohulls. As Rodney Ardern recounts: “After doing a few of the regattas earlier in the year I went and sailed on Numbers in the Bermuda race and when we lined up for the start I was on the traveller and I just started easing it because we were heeling at 20degs and it didn’t feel right! So I got told off for that!”



So do they speak the truth? Some other skippers gave us their views on Alinghi's performance .

Tommy Hilfiger skipper and multihull racing legend Randy Smyth shared his thoughts: “We watched them start out at a high level at the beginning of the season and they are at a much higher level now. Before the very first race in Switzerland they had had at least 40 days tuning with two boats and a whole team of 25 people working on it. We are not that different from all of these other teams, which come into these events, open the box, tune up for a day or two, but they aren’t improving they are catching up with where they were at the last event and re-learning routines so that they are halfway ready to go.

“You see the differences [with Alinghi]. It is not one guy, its all four of them when you go by and hear them whispering. The team has graduated from the mechanics of turning winches handles, setting jibs and mains and mast rotation - all eight eyeballs are out watching the water, the tactics, some are looking back, looking forwards, looking at the wind, it is like playing chess. They are two or three moves ahead of the guys who are just reacting to each puff. ‘That next gate is favoured that end, let’s starting the right side to get there’. Ed seems to be getting information other teams don’t get because their team members are so focussed on pulling strings.”

Oman Sail skipper Chris Draper agrees - Alinghi’s performance has been a wake-up call. “The way they have approached everything is pretty incredible. The boat is immaculate, they have a great organisation team behind them, you’d never see them looking for a screwdriver. When you look at Ed Baird sailing and their team they are relaxed the whole time. They are fast and stay out of trouble and sail around the bun fights. They have very good foresight on things developing. It is such a small fleet and they are racing around such small courses that it is almost match racing each boat at a time. They literally pick each boat off with match racing positioning.”

Draper, who is also having his first season on two hulls having lost the British 49er slot for this year’s Olympics, says that they will be going to Oman for three months with their 40 during which time they will attempt to up their game. “We know what we want to do for next year. Next year we are going to put everything into practice that we learned from this year.”

Tomorrow we look at what lies ahead for the iShares Cup and Mark Turner's plans for global domination