Barker provides early highlight
chris.rattue@ nzherald.co. nz Someone could have died during the Bermuda tangle which left a hole in brilliant Brit Ben Ainslie’s reputation while restoring Dean Barker as a sailor to be reckoned with.
Get the America’s Cup while it’s hot. The sport cannot tolerate many repeats of the extraordinary crash which saw Ainslie’s eponymous campaign climb aboard Softbank Japan, literally, almost wiping out Barker’s crew in the process.
There could have been serious injuries, or much worse. It was dramatic, thrilling . . . then on reflection, very scary. Miraculously, bones were not broken.
A lot of factors have come together to produce this powder keg in Bermuda. Great sailors, obsessive winners, a few Auld Mug mugs like Barker and Grant Dalton desperate to restore their reputations, and technology/design advances which have made a quantum leap past easily controllable safety limits.
Either the sailors will have to make it safer, or the rules will. Which will be a shame in one way, but it’s inevitable in another.
The day one salvos were among the best in America’s Cup history. This dramatic style of sailing means the America’s Cup sailing has caught up with its controversies.
There are old dogs who would love to see the old tricks associated with traditional sailing boats return. But for now, we are in a hot bed of a sea bed.
And sailing skill won the day at the Great Sound, where Oracle’s Jimmy Spithill mounted a superb comeback against Team New Zealand’s wunderkind Peter Burling, and Barker outsmarted Ainslie in the prestart leading to the smash.
The crash — with Ainslie failing to react to Barker’s audacious move — left both boats damaged, and Ainslie cast as the Impaler Sailor having also poked his boat’s nose into Team New Zealand’s business during practice just over a week ago.
Who knows what’s coming next? And could Dean Barker win it?
Probably not . . . perhaps. But he’s already proved a massive point.
Barker’s reputation was left submerged in San Francisco four years ago, and it re-emerged rather dimly for the 2017 America’s Cup as an Oracle mini-me with a boat from Japan.
He was an outcast from an outpost, until he launched a brilliant attack against Ainslie which forced a massive mistake out of the famous and extremely well funded Brit.
Barker may have endured more nightmares than any famous Kiwi sportsperson, an object of derision whose services at TNZ were no longer required. The phrase 8-1 and its loser connotations will live on, and well beyond the America’s Cup boundary.
The San Francisco disaster suggested Barker lacked toughness under pressure, that he blinked again and again when Jimmy Spithill stared his way. Sport is cruel like that.
We put him down, counted him out. He was the boy next door who had to move overseas. We completely forgot how tough, and good, anyone who gets to his level must be. He deserved some sort of comeback.
And he threw one hell of a punch during an opening day of amazing drama in Bermuda. Barker’s renaissance moment was the highlight for me.