Time for America’s Cup to set sail again AUSSIES PACK A PUNCH, EVEN WITHOUT A TEAM IN SAILING’S GREATEST PRIZE
racle Team USA’s quest for an America’s Cup three-peat in Bermuda next weekend will begin with Australian Jimmy Spithill at the helm.
Then there’s the Australian who claimed Olympic gold in London and backed it up four years later with a silver medal in Rio. Yet for the duration of the America’s Cup regatta in May and June, Lake Macquarie local Nathan Outteridge will be steering the hopes of the Swedish entry, Artemis Racing.
Meanwhile, Team New Zealand has another Australian, Victorian skipper Glenn Ashby. A world champion sailor, Ashby might hail from Bendigo, but is tilting towards trans-Tasman sailing in search of glory. With Australia failing to mount an America’s Cup challenger for the last three decades and an entrant for the last 17 years, a generation of the nation’s finest sailors have long had no alternative other than to be flexible.
“There is no Australian challenger, however there are a lot of Australians in the teams. Ironically out of the six teams — there are three Australian skippers and even more personnel manning the boats on and off the water,” says the Sydney born Spithill, a world champion sailor for Australia and, for Team USA, a two-time America’s Cup conqueror and the youngest ever America’s Cup winning skipper.
“Probably a lot of people think back to 1983 and when Australia II Won. The next memory is Alan Bond going to jail and then followed by that is our boat, One Australia, sinking.”
The oldest sporting trophy in the world, the Auld Mug, is also perhaps the most tightly held. Since the first edition in 1851 only four nations can lay claim to having captured the silverware: the US, Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand. Australia famously shattered the stranglehold of the USA but since then support for another “boxing kangaroo” styled entrant has dwindled.
Since the halcyon days, there’s been a dip in public and corporate support for an Australian tilt. That has dented the hopes of home-grown talent.
“The America’s Cup hasn’t been in the spotlight for a long time because Australia hasn’t had a team. This is the pinnacle of sailing. It is the Formula 1 of sailing. We are in the fastest boats of our sport and we are on the cutting edge,” says Tom Slingsby, yet another Aussie and the Oracle Team USA tactician.
A proud Sydney sailing graduate, Slingsby has a yachting pedigree that is the envy of all six of the international teams competing in Bermuda.
Crewing talent
A Sydney to Hobart victor, a World and Olympic champion and a former America’s Cup winner — the 32-year old dreams of one day being able to race for an entry bearing the flag of his country of birth.
“I would love to compete for Australia in the America’s Cup. If anyone was curious about could we win the Americas Cup, you just have to look through these teams. They are littered with sailors from Australia,” Slingsby says.
With global powerhouse companies such as BMW, Panerai and Airbus investing millions of dollars in sponsorship and engineering expertise to keep the international teams at the forefront, Slingsby fears it might be hard for Australian players to match the corporate outlay.
Although he is less worried about the crewing talent who he insists are more than capable of propelling lesser-funded teams to the top.
“We have to get an Australian team somehow, and we are working through trying to find ways to do that. When we do, we will win this thing eventually,” believes Slingsby.
Australia did have a flutter of hope with an entry for this edition of the cup, a team championed by the Hamilton Island Yacht Club. The backers of Sydney to Hobart champion Wild Oats XI submitted a contender before financial pressures forced the syndicate to withdraw their bid in 2014.
Extremely competitive
To pretend nationality plays no factor belies the truth. For Australians like Spithill and Slingsby, nothing beats defeating the New Zealanders. The Sydney duo did it aboard Oracle in San Francisco four years ago — winning eight straight races to defend their crown.
In 2017 it would seem the Australian connections would love to inflict another defeat on one team more than any other. “I hope we race Team New Zealand in the final again.
“A lot of people don’t think we should have won the last one. They thought it was a fluke. I am an extremely competitive guy and I want to prove to everyone that we are the better team. So let’s have a rematch,” says Slingsby.