AINSLIE’S £110M FLYING BOAT
Golden Olympian goes for biggest target yet, but is his America’s Cup dream already dead in the water?
‘IT’S hugely frustrating,’ says one of Britain’s sporting knights, and even amid the complexities of America’s Cup sailing it is painfully simple to understand why.
Sir Ben Ainslie commences racing off Auckland this Friday in a boat that is a sight to behold, but considerably slower than he had hoped. More to the point, the crew of Ineos Team UK had six warmup races last month against their rivals from New Zealand, the US and Italy and lost all of them.
The mystery is whether improvements made across the past three weeks of ceasefire are good enough or, as appears far more likely, the 170-year wait for a British winner of sport’s oldest trophy will be extended.
Dead in the water before the real racing has started? Even by Ainslie’s remarkable standards, it will require an extraordinary turnaround to take any scalps in this week’s Prada Cup challenger series, let alone beat the defending champions, Emirates Team New Zealand, should they somehow progress to the final match for the America’s Cup.
‘I still believe we can win, but it is a huge challenge,’ Ainslie told
The Mail on Sunday. ‘We have had a big reality check.’
Ainsli e, t he f i gurehead of Britain’s £110million campaign, has been admirably frank about the situation ever since the wider sailing public saw what he already knew duri ng t he warm- ups between December 17 and 20.
While those races offered a first chance for each of the teams to assess one another up close, the heavy defeats only served to reinforce a fear that had developed within Ainslie back in November, a month after his new 75ft yacht was launched.
Their performance numbers in lighter winds during those first weeks of testing were not what they needed to be, considering these astonishing machines are meant to rise out of the water and onto their foils in as little as 6.5 knots of breeze.
Troublingly, the British team’s yacht seems to drag itself in a sorry manner in anything less than 10 to 12 knots, and the gut punch was learning that none of their three rivals appear to have similar deficiencies.
After 30 months of preparation, with s i z eable backing f r om billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, Ainslie’s second campaign as skipper of a British boat was not meant to look this way five days out from the big start.
‘It is hugely frustrating because everyone has put so much effort into it and you want to be hitting the start line with an advantage over the opposition, not a deficit,’ said Ainslie. ‘It certainly wasn’t what we were working towards. But what are you going to do?
‘You can either stick your head in the sand and give up or say, “Come on, we have seen this before in the America’s Cup where there have been big t urnarounds i n performance”. We have to turn this around. ‘ The issues we have seen around the world [with the pandemic]
puts things in perspective. That reality check helps you to realise, yes, we might be moaning but we have an amazing opportunity here so let’s move heaven and earth to get the boat to where it should be.’
Time will tell if those words amount to more than defiance in the face of an enormous obstacle. But when Ainslie talks of comebacks, it is worth recalling he was key to one of the finest in 2013.
That was the year Oracle Team USA found themselves 8-1 down against Team New Zealand in this event. Ainslie was drafted in as t actician and t hey won 9- 8, although such a British-centric simplification tends to overlook the fact that the team made the technical and mechanical adjustments Ineos Team UK need now.
‘This challenge is certainly as tough if not tougher than that but we love a challenge and will go for it,’ said Ainslie. ‘You have to keep pushing. I know we have made performance gains.’
The hope is those gains are sufficient to bridge the gap, or that stronger winds roll in and negate the yacht’s main weaknesses. Otherwise it could be a slow death of the dream.