Ben Ainslie’s triumph on home waters
B ritain’s chances of winning the America’s Cup for the first time were given a boost in July when Sir Ben Ainslie’s team topped the leaderboard with a victory on their home waters of Portsmouth.
Two days of action-packed racing on foiling One Design AC45 catamarans on the Solent attracted around 150,000 fans on the shoreline and 6,000 boats viewing from the water. Ainslie’s Land Rover BAR team emerged as overall winners for a second time following their America’s Cup World Series (ACWS) victory in July 2015, ending up one point ahead of current America’s Cup defenders Oracle Team USA on the six-boat ACWS leaderboard.
Overall ranking position in the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series, which began in 2015, will determine the starting points score of the teams in the America’s Cup Qualifiers in 2017.
The America’s Cup was first held in 1851 in the Solent, and was named after the winning schooner. Since the cup left British shores 165 years ago it has never been won by a British challenger, something Ainslie’s team hope to remedy next year.
Among the hundreds of thousands of supporters that turned out to cheer the British team on were the Duchess of Cambridge – Royal Patron to the team’s official charity, the 1851 Trust – accompanied by the Duke of Cambridge. Ainslie, who also celebrated the birth of his daughter Bellatrix with his wife Georgie on 16 July, said it was ‘the most amazing week of my life, no question.’
The America’s Cup World Series action now moves on to Toulon, France in September and Fukuoka, Japan in November before the final of the America’s Cup in Bermuda next year. Ainslie said: ‘The ultimate goal is to bring the America’s Cup back here. We’ll be giving it everything.’