Last November I went to the America’s Cup World Series event in San Diego to see the extraordinary technology being used to manage and broadcast the racing, and it worked so well that I came home a full-fledged fan. But don’t presume that you have to be a tech enthusiast to appreciate the 34th Cup as it plays out around the world over the next 18 months. This time the tech innovations are more about building a fast and fair playing field, which focuses on pure sailing skills. Forget that sailboat races are like watching paint dry; AC34 can be as gripping and intimate as high-definition close-ups of the Patriots and Giants battling for Super Bowl rings.
Before you pull up the America’s Cup YouTube channel to see some of the footage already generated, it helps to learn a bit about the technology behind the scenes, and the history too. The Cup has always been an unusual competition, because the winner gets to manage the next round of racing. Many of the unsuccessful challengers would argue that the New York Yacht Club maintained its dominance by manipulating the rules, but worse things happened once the Cup started bouncing around the globe in 1983.
View a complete photo gallery of the America's Cup World Series here.
The event hit bottom during the 2007-to-2010 round, when the Swiss defender couldn’t or wouldn’t come up with boat design and racing rules the American “challenger of record” thought reasonable. As a result, the competition took place mostly in courtrooms and culminated with dull racing held far offshore in mismatched and teched-up multihulls. It didn’t help the sport’s popularity that the two small yacht clubs involved were obvious fronts for aggressive billionaires. In retrospect, though, one can picture how challenger Team Oracle — led by Oracle Corp. founder and serious yachtsman Larry Ellison — used the agonizing delays of AC33 to get charged up about what it could do with AC34.
In fact, as soon as Oracle had won the Cup off Spain, Ellison’s crew rapidly created large, talent-rich and well-funded AC34 management organizations, which reconceived the next round in every way. The concept, more NFL than NYYC, is unapologetic professional racing in extreme boats on tight courses close to shore, stadium style. The main San Francisco event in 2013 — to be raced in custom 72-foot catamarans capable of speeds of more than 30 knots — would be preceded by a first-ever AC “World Series” fought in a fleet of matching 45-foot carbon cats so lively that the athletes on board, including many veterans of Olympic small-boat racing, often work at maximum pulse rates. There’s also a challenging tactical component to short-course racing this fast, plus a dash of NASCAR, since the AC45s can suddenly nosedive, flip or even cartwheel when seriously powered up. Hence the crash helmets.
This concept took, and by the time the ACWS reached San Diego after races in Portugal and England, it included eight sponsored teams representing perennial challengers like New Zealand and France along with new ones like China and Korea. And crack teams from Italy and the UK will join the starting lines when the series makes port in Naples and Venice, Italy, and Newport, Rhode Island, in the months ahead. AC34 chartered a cargo ship to cart the 45s, 25 support vessels and umpteen containers of gear. The kit even includes tall cranes to put the ultralight cats to bed on windy evenings lest they fly off their moorings! So, yes, Larry Ellison and company have proved themselves darn serious about reinventing the America’s Cup. Here’s a look at how technology is helping.
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