Sailor’s goggles give Kate the giggles (... but William isn’t quite so sure!)
ON a day when the biggest sailing event ever staged in Britain turned into a washout, it was perhaps the next best thing.
As rain and gales blew this weekend’s first round of the America’s Cup, the greatest prize in yachting, off course, the Duchess of Cambridge was still able to get a taste of life on deck.
A keen sailor since childhood, she put on virtual reality goggles and tried out the in-house simulator at the state of the art headquarters on the Portsmouth quayside that are home to Sir Ben Ainslie’s £100million campaign to reach the final in 2017.
The duchess was full of giggles as she and Sir Ben, the greatest yachtsman in Olympic history, tried out the simulator. It comes complete with rolling deck effect and was, she declared, ‘weird’.
The Duke of Cambridge did not appear quite so thrilled, but until now he has been a man with little interest in boats (what his fellow Etonians call a ‘dry bob’).
His wife seems to have changed that, and yesterday the royal couple were wearing matching his’n’hers team fleeces with their titles on the back.
The America’s Cup remains the one great international sporting trophy which Britain has never won, and Sir Ben’s attempt to change that had attracted hundreds of thousands to Portsmouth. Having a victory and second place in Saturday’s opening races, the quadruple gold medallist was at the top of the scoreboard ahead of yesterday’s action. And there he remains until the next round because all racing was then cancelled.
It’s not often that rain stops play at a sailing event. But the vast spectator
‘It’s not often rain stops a yacht race’
zone on Southsea Common was waterlogged. And gales made conditions too dangerous for catamarans, which ‘fly’ on hydrofoils faster than a waterskier thanks to a combination of Formula One and aviation technology.
The duchess, who as a girl loved sailing and once had a job with roundthe-world legend Sir Chay Blyth, was there in her capacity as patron of the 1851 Trust, Sir Ben’s charity for bring- ing young people in to the sport. But it goes much deeper than that. As recently as February, she came to inspect this place when it was just a building site. Here she was again just five months later, with her husband and spending nearly an hour and a half meeting the full 80-strong team.
Sir Ben told me: ‘The America’s Cup is the one major sporting trophy we’ve never won. It’s about time.’ His royal patron could not agree more.
He turned two last Wednesday, but Prince George thinks he is older, the duchess revealed. Talking to a twoyear-old boy at Sir Ben’s HQ who told her he was three, she said: ‘George says that. He thinks that he’s older.’