No race at all, thanks to no wind off Valencia this morning, and no desire on the part of the defender, Team Alinghi (SUI) to convert to an afternoon schedule, when winds typically are better this time of year.
Thousands of U.S. fans staggered out of bed at 3:30 a.m. this morning – after the biggest U.S. television night of the year for sports fans – the American football Superbowl XLIV (New Orleans Saints 31, Indianapolis Colts 17).
After the first race of AC33 was postponed, most of them went to work, or back to bed, grumpy or crabby, depending on where you went to school.
For the next first race of America’s Cup 33, the opportunity is – yet again – boot up your computer at 3:45 a.m. (EST) on Wednesday, February 10.
If you plan to get up early, watch online, and create an exciting multi-media AC33 experience that you control, here are your best choices:
ESPN360.com
This is ESPN’s streaming online sports feed, offering a diverse mix of live and recorded U.S. events, including America’s Cup live. AC33 coverage is hosted by veteran AC sailor and commentator, Gary Jobson (USA), one of a handful of classic America’s Cup commentators. Connect>
Sailing Anarchy’s Layline 33rd America’s Cup
This is for grown-ups. The reason is that critics believe members of this highly informed and highly opinionated discussion forum are, well, children. We disagree. They are adults who should know better.
Nevertheless, you won’t find better informed sailors, better able to express themselves, anywhere else online. Yet viewer discretion is advised. Commentary is spontaneous, unedited, and at times, profane. That’s not necessarily standard operating procedure for discussion forums, but it is for this one.
Sailing Anarchy – a free site – is working hard to make AC33 fun for their community. Alan Block, a lawyer and sailor known to the community as Mr. Clean (his language is anything but) is on the water in Valencia, interviewing participants, looking for opportunities, and struggling to connect online from his boat offshore, following the action.
This morning, he ‘borrowed’ an online connection from the crew of Larry Ellison’s amazing and extraordinarily beautiful yacht Rising Sun, designed by the late Australian naval architect, John Bannenberg, seen here in 2007 during the Louis Vuitton series, off Valencia:
Connect here > to be part of SA’s Layline 33rd America’s Cup forum and scroll down for the links to content. SA is picking up BMWOracle Racing’s video feed, which you can watch on the site. You can also log into SA’s discussion forum (use the lo-res option offered at the bottom of the forum page) to follow comments by members.
If you have the nerve, become a Sailing Anarchist member, join the discussion, and enjoy the perspectives and perceptions of sailors who both know – and don’t know – what they are talking about. Don’t tell your mother.
BMWOracle Racing
The America’s Cup 33 Challenger racing team has its own video link (already co-opted by Sailing Anarchy) providing info-streams on the BMWOracle team, special interviews by respected America’s Cup commentators like Martin Tasker (UK) and Peter Lester (NZL), and once racing starts, the so-called World feed live from the water and from the air. Same video as Sailing Anarchy, but no forums, no discussion online, and no profanity. Connect >
MarineTraffic.com
This is an amazing website. It collects and presents AIS data (maritime collision avoidance data) from merchant vessels all over the world, as well as from private vessels who elect to participate in the system – essentially, data that identifies the vessel, its port of origin, heading, speed, and other factors, and then pictorially displays the data on a searchable website that refreshes every 90 seconds.
This morning, we watched vessels around the start line off Valencia, including Vava, Ernesto Bertarelli’s private yacht. We also noted Rising Sun, farther offshore, probably at the buoy mark, probably also ‘anchored’ by its GPS positioning system – no pick, no chain. Connect >
These four sites are more than enough to make your AC33 real.
Just sleep first.
BMWOracle Racing’s USA (top) and Alinghi’s Alinghi 5
training off Valencia
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The extraordinary thing about Sir Russell Coutts (NZL) is how low key he has been throughout the entire debacle of America’s Cup 33.
Literally.
Dismissed as Alinghi CEO by Ernesto Bertarelli (SUI) prior to AC32, Sir Russell was ultimately hired by Larry Ellison (USA), and helped rebuild BMWOracle after the team’s AC32 disappointments under Kiwi CEO and Skipper Chris Dickson (NZL).
Sir Russell skirted controversy, avoided controversy, and every time controversy emerged, moved on to other topics, other issues, other events, other races. Deftly. Very deftly.
Which is what you expect from chief executives who know how to use their power.
Sir Russell certainly has power, has influence, and is a major factor for BMWOracle. Now he is leading the offense.
Despite his corporate coolness, Sir Russell’s ambitions must be focused not just on winning, but on destroying – in the nicest possible way.
If he has a statement to make about AC33, it must be that. For a lot of reasons.
But that’s not the defining reality of this amazing sailor.
Given the opportunity to helm his way into the record books in America’s Cup 30, he made a decidedly different decision. On that last race in 2000, he handed the helm to his junior, Dean Barker (NZL), who brought the boat home a winner.
Russell Coutts has proved it isn’t about him. It’s about his mission, as he sees it.
Next week, he has an extraordinary mission.
We wish him every kindness for success in AC33, and our best wishes.
Go win, Russell.
Alinghi’s Flickr picture shows true Kiwi Brad Butterworth in classic style: thoughtful, candid, and as always, sincere
Maybe you have to be a Kiwi to love Bradley William Butterworth (NZL), skipper of Alinghi (SUI).
He is not the picture-perfect-portrait of the America’s Cup skipper, make no mistake. Whatever that means.
He is from Te Awamutu in the Waikato, for goodness sake. He is himself. He is BB.
What he says is what he thinks, and what he says, he believes.
‘Media management’ means nothing to Brad. He shows up. He speaks his mind. Typically, he does it with candor and respect.
But he can sail, and he has an uncanny ability to read and process a lot of things, in nano-second increments, and make decisions that win big races. Like America’s Cup.
One of the big factors in his life is his friendship with Russell Coutts (NZL), skipper of BMWOracle (USA).
Soon that friendship will be tested in huge raptor-like vessels currently rehearsing in the waters off Valencia, Spain.
Will Brad be aboard Alinghi’s amazing catamaran?
We would love to see him there. But frankly, he’s an older, tender, more gentlemanly mass. Perhaps the strategy has other ideas.
Nevertheless.
Brad Butterworth influences his team, their ethos, their competitive spirit, and their will to win.
We wish him the best in America’s Cup 33.
E hoa, ka whawhai tonu ahau ki a koe, ake ake!
More debate, more noise, more memos, more letters, more slanging matches, more briefs, more complaints, more court filings, more wasted energy, more money, more waste.
Both Larry Ellison (USA), chief of BMWOracle, and Ernesto Bertarelli (SUI), chief of Alinghi, are billionaires who should know better – so should their yacht clubs – but as you know, and I know, there is pathology at work here.
Depending on who you are, Ernesto is totally obsessive – and worse, he is European, you know, born to decide and to rule. On the other hand, he just wants to sail his boat and win America’s Cup 33.
Depending on who you are, Larry and his cohorts have consistently said the same thing and made the same demands – notably, fair, objective rules for AC33, and a level playing field for all. On the other hand, all he wants to do is win this event in the New York courts.
You have your view.
The fact is, everything has gone far, far beyond that.
Curiously, however, as bad as this is – and it is indubitably bad -- there is nothing that mutual discussion, mutual agreement, and mutual consent can’t fix.
Which is exactly what both teams were trying to engineer in Singapore.
According to the little voices swimming in the shallows, the participants actually had reached a workable agreement – yes, they actually did. All it needed were a few signatures, and for those signatures to be confirmed – and for one signature, or one assent, in particular, to be attached.
As we all now know, Ernesto Bertarelli woke up in Geneva the next morning and deep-sixed everything.
TO THE TUNE OF: ‘Here we go again!’
The ugly facts of the matter are that Larry Ellison absolutely and definitively won’t budge on scrupulous fairness and fidelity to the Deed of Gift.
And Ernesto Bertarelli, absolutely and definitively, refuses to grant Ellison anything, not even mutual consent.
That’s the standoff.
It’s manic. It’s pathological. It’s what it is.
Of course, The Big Elephant in This Room of Mammoths is the removal of Société Nautique de Genève as a Cup Trustee.
Whatever happens this spring, this summer – or never – in the waters off Valencia, unless someone can persuade the Swiss to parley – and soon -- major activity in the New York courts, along very uncomfortable lines, is likely to be the next big casino on the world agenda.
Happy New Year.
