That was no mere yacht race; it had it all!
WELL now, what the hell was that? We loved it but what was it? Let us start with what it was not. It wasn’t yachting. We know yachting. Sails billow or sag, are run up and down masts. Booms swing and spinnakers bloom. Hulls are single and they are the shape of birds’ bodies and they cleave the sea just as Viking longboats clove the sea, just as all boats always have cloven the sea. That is yachting.
And it’s slow. In a standard breeze a race takes hours. In a light breeze days. It may be fun to do but it isn’t to watch. If ever a sport wasn’t made for television it is yachting. But this wasn’t yachting and it was emphatically made for television. Television spawned it. Without television it would never have happened.
And it delighted us.
This is the age of entertainment, of limitless entertainment, of nohouroftheday unentertainedness, so we want wham and we want bam and we want a result in half an hour or we’ll go elsewhere. And that’s what we got. This was to yachting what Ttwenty is to test cricket, what McDonald’s is to Escoffier. It was yachting on fast forward. It was also technomagic. Give it 10 knots of wind and the boat went at 30. How was that? How can you treble the speed of what propels you? Who knows and who cares? It entertained. That was its job.
It also had ingenuity, that old Kiwi standby. Yachts have crews. Our boat had cyclists. Cyclists for muscle. Cyclists because legs are bigger than arms. Cyclists as the galley slaves of the ancient quinquiremes. Only these galley slaves wore wet suits and motor bike helmets and had thighs like Christmas hams. And they were heroic hunks of Kiwi manhood whom we could cheer on fatly from the sofa.
They were Hillary and the All Blacks and Snell. And every so often they leapt from their bikes to bounce over netting like blackened moon walkers. Why were they crossing? Why indeed were they pedalling? What did it do? How did it help? What’s a knot? Do we care? Hell no.
It was racing. And we all love racing. Give kids a task and they may or may not take an interest. Make it a race and see them ignite. They’ll grin and go to it, especially the boys. Racing is fighting made nicer, is warfare with rules. And warfare excites us whatever we pretend. We’re competitive beasts, congenital scrappers. And here was the best of all scraps, a proxy one, a fight without effort or danger. All you and I had to do was to get out of bed and cheer. The worse that could happen was mild disappointment. The best was we’d take all the credit.
And what a lovely fight it was, the best of all fights if you win it, little us against big them. Plucky windswept islands in the South Pacific against the richest continental landmass. Four million Davids against 400 million bloated Goliaths. Never mind that very few Goliaths even knew the the thing was happening and fewer still cared. Never mind that the two top Goliaths were Australian hirelings. Never mind that the Oracle boat was a corporate indulgence, the whim of a bored billionaire. It was framed as midget against superpower. And the midget won. Nothing could be nicer.
Never mind either how the midget went about it. Never mind that the midget sold bits of us to an Arab airline and a Japanese automotive firm and a Swiss coffee maker, let them tattoo themselves on our flesh, let them conflate themselves with the plucky and windswept. That’s the corporate globe we inhabit. That’s the reality of promotional unreality. Victory costs. Someone’s got to pay. We haven’t the money. All we’ve got to sell is soul. Everyone does it. And nobody cares.
Least of all the Government. They bought in too, bought in with our dollars, took our dosh and spent it for us. Rarely can tax bucks have bought more joy, however ephemeral. Never mind that it’s an election year. Never mind that every polly in the land will act like a corporate and try to get in on it, get into the photo, be seen with the winners, glow by association. Never mind all that. We won. It was fun. The boys done good. The tribe was bolstered. The people feel good.
The people, wrote Juvenal 2000 years ago, the people hope for just two things, bread and circuses. This may not have been yachting but it also wasn’t bread. And oh, how we still love a circus.
❛ Racing is fighting made nicer, is warfare with rules. And warfare excites us whatever we
pretend❜