Charting course for a three-peat
Skipper confident U.S. can win America’s Cup
America’s Cup yachts have been compared to sleek Formula One cars in part because of the millions of dollars involved and the desire to push the limits with technology and engineering. But Oracle Team USA skipper Jimmy Spithill likes to compare sailing America’s Cup boats to flying an airplane. After all, he is a licensed pilot, and Airbus is one of the team’s partners.
“We’re essentially trying to fly a boat with no engine,” Spithill said.
For those watching the America’s Cup, which begins Friday in Bermuda with the round-robin qualifying series, the boats will appear to fly across the top of the water. The boat hulls are lifted out of the water by carbon-fiber hydrofoils. Instead of an engine, the boats have a hydraulic system powered by sailors who grind with their arms. And in the case of Emirates Team New Zealand, with their legs.
Oracle says in its media kit that its boat is expected to reach an estimated top speed of 60 mph, but Spithill says it can go even faster.
“Straightaway there are so many similarities between sail- ing and aviation. It’s all about lift, drag, balance,” Spithill said. “In a boat like this, you’re heavily reliant on instrumentation. If you get in a plane, and you’re in clouds or bad weather or nighttime, you have to have full trust in some of the instruments; same with this boat.”
There are several changes from the last America’s Cup held in San Francisco four years ago.
There’s a smaller boat, a smaller crew and the continued evolution of foiling.
But one thing hasn’t changed for Oracle Team USA. Spithill, the team’s confident and determined skipper, is hungry for a third consecutive victory in the America’s Cup. For Spithill, the pressure he puts on himself drives him to succeed.
“I don’t like letting people down, that’s for sure,” Spithill said in an interview at Oracle’s team base at Bermuda’s Royal Naval Dockyard in February. “I’ve always been a fan of special forces. They have a similar sort of mantra: ‘You don’t let your brother down.’ In our case, you don’t let your teammate down. That’s motivating. You put the team first and yourself second.”
At 30, Spithill became the youngest skipper to win the America’s Cup in 2010 in Valencia, Spain. Three years later in San Francisco, he led Oracle to an incredible comeback, rallying to win eight consecutive races after trailing 8-1 to beat Emirates Team New Zealand.
“I just draw on the strength from my teammates,” said Spithill, an Australian who grew up in a sailing family. “I’m fortunate I work with people who are a lot better than me. That forces me to sort of work harder.”
Spithill will compete in his sixth America’s Cup, which claims to have the oldest trophy in international sports dating to 1851.
The Louis Vuitton America’s Cup Qualifiers begin Friday. Artemis Racing from Sweden, Emirates Team New Zealand, Groupama Team France, Land Rover BAR from Britain and SoftBank Team Japan will compete for the right to challenge Oracle in the America’s Cup Match, which begins June 17. Oracle also is allowed to race in the qualifiers and will see how it stacks up.
THE BOATS The America’s Cup boats, called AC50s, have the speed and spectacle that make for high-drama television.
Oracle’s wing-sailed catamaran is nearly 50 feet long (15 meters) with a wing height of about 79 feet (24 meters). The AC50 is a smaller boat than the 72-foot catamaran raced in the last America’s Cup. This year’s model also will require a smaller crew — six instead of 11.
Technological advances have accelerated how foiling has evolved in the America’s Cup boats, says Grant Simmer, general manager and chief operating officer of Oracle Team USA. Foiling began in America’s Cup racing in 2013.
“It’s moved a lot, a lot more than we anticipated,” Simmer said in February. “Our priorities when we started this campaign at the end of 2014 have changed dramatically, which is great because that’s the evolution.
“We think the New Zealander foils are good, and the same with Artemis. Some of the other teams we’ve been a little surprised with the geometry that they’re using.”
Emirates Team New Zealand hopes the game changer will be cycling pedals it has installed on its boat to power the systems. The team announced during the winter that it had designed its AC50 with cycling pedestals instead of the traditional grinding setup that sailors use their arms to power.
Oracle has looked into cycling grinding in the past but decided its main source of power will come from traditional grinding pedestals, said Peter Rusch, the team’s communications director. However, the team has explored moving Tom Slingsby, its tactician who also grinds, farther back in the boat so he is directly behind Spithill. There’s no room for a traditional pedestal, Rusch said, so the team was experimenting with a pedal station.
The cycling pedals aren’t a new concept, says three-time America’s Cup sailor Ken Read, an analyst for NBC’s broadcast coverage of the Cup. During the 1976 America’s Cup in Newport, R.I., the Swedish boat Sverige had foot-pedal grinders.
The pedals won’t be the deciding factor in who wins the America’s Cup in Bermuda, Read says. In fact, he says, winning the Cup won’t come down to one design decision.
“The America’s Cup is traditionally won by the team that hits a whole bunch of singles and very few home runs and just pounds everybody by little things. All the right decisions add up to a home run,” he said. “I think this is a decision that’s another good, solid single but not necessarily a home run.”
THE VENUE As the 2013 champion, Oracle had the right to pick the venue and decide the format for racing.
The 2013 competition in San Francisco drew more than 1 million spectators to official public sites and hundreds of thousands more to the waterfront to watch the racing, according to the America’s Cup website. The venue for this year’s Cup came down to San Diego and Bermuda before Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison made the call to bring the racing to the small island (about 01⁄2 square miles) in the Atlan2 tic that is a British territory.
Simmer says he’s not worried about the sailing conditions in Bermuda during May and June. The weather in those months is much more stable than it is in the winter.
Wind speeds from 6 to 25 knots is the range for sailing in those months, he says. But 25 knots is “seriously sketchy in these boats ... quite difficult to control,” Simmer said.
“At the lower limit, the spectacle is not so good,” Simmer added. “People want to see these boats go fast on foils. When you bring the Cup to a venue, you try to select a venue that has more stable weather conditions so you can get a better percentage of good racing.”
THE SAILORS The athleticism of the crew is one thing that has changed over the years. These days, America’s Cup teams are looking for multisport athletes, Read says.
“They’re at a fitness level that the sport of sailing has never seen before,” Read said. “I think that is great for our sport. It helps sell our sport as athletes and not in that traditional old rich man’s sport, the old-style sailing.”
Among the Oracle sailors is an Olympic gold medalist in the Laser class of sailing (Slingsby) and an Australian Ironman champion (grinder Ky Hurst), plus a four-time All-America sailor from Georgetown (tactician Andrew Campbell) and two whose fathers were America’s Cup sailors (Campbell and tactician/ trimmer/grinder Rome Kirby).
There also are youngsters hoping to make their America’s Cup debut such as grinders Louis Sinclair and Cooper Dressler.
No one questions the fitness of Oracle sailors who spend hours daily training in the gym. The team also has used boxing for fitness, with Spithill leading the charge.
“You need new energy and new creativity coming in,” Spithill said. “Certainly this is the youngest team we’ve ever had. I think it’s a reflection of the physical demands. I think having a younger team, there’s definitely a lot of hunger out there.”
And as his résumé shows, no one is hungrier than Spithill.