America’s Cup is going back to New Zealand
Emirates Team New Zealand helmsman Peter Burling and skipper Glenn Ashby (right) celebrate with teammates after winning the America’s Cup in Hamilton, Bermuda, on Monday. The Kiwis beat Oracle Team USA 7-1, avoiding a collapse similar to that of 2013 on San Francisco Bay when an 8-1 lead devolved into a 9-8 loss to Larry Ellison’s Team USA crew.
HAMILTON, Bermuda — Redemption for a gutty crew of five New Zealanders and one Australian came on the turquoise waters of Bermuda’s Great Sound, four years and 3,000 miles removed from one of the most brutal collapses in sports.
With a mixture of ingenuity and national pride, Emirates Team New Zealand got back up after a gut punch for the ages, came to the Bermuda Triangle and ripped the America’s Cup out of tech tycoon Larry Ellison’s hands.
“We’re on top of the world,” helmsman Peter Burling said Monday after steering the Kiwis’ 50-foot foiling catamaran to the clinching victory in the 7-1 rout of twotime defending champion Oracle Team USA, representing San Francisco’s Golden Gate Yacht Club.
As the red-and-black Kiwi cat crossed the finish line, the normally reserved crew began whooping and jumped up onto the trampoline netting and into a joyful group hug.
Magnums of Champagne arrived and Burling and crewman Blair Tuke, who won Olympic gold and silver medals together, sprayed the crew. They later enjoyed beers together before going ashore.
About an hour later, with the America’s Cup set on a podium, Burling and skipper Glenn Ashby grabbed it together and lifted it over their heads. As the silver trophy was passed around, some team members poured Champagne into it and took swigs.
It was sweet atonement for the Kiwis. In 2013 on San Francisco Bay, Team New Zealand, then led by Dean Barker, reached match point at 8-1. Oracle then won eight straight races to retain the Auld Mug.
At 26, Burling becomes the youngest helmsman to win sailing’s greatest prize in a competition that dates to 1851.
The only non-Kiwi on the crew is Australia’s Ashby, 39, a multihull whiz and Olympic silver medalist who controlled the space-age wingsail.
There were no Americans on Oracle Team USA’s crew, which included five Australians and one member from Antigua.
Ellison watched the defeat from a chase boat and later shook hands with his crew. He was joined by New Zealander Russell Coutts, the CEO of Oracle Team USA who suffered his first defeat in six Americas Cup finals. It was Coutts who first won the America’s Cup for the small sailing-mad island nation, skippering Team New Zealand to a five-race sweep of Dennis Conner’s boat off San Diego in 1995.
Team New Zealand started this match with a negative point because Oracle won the qualifiers, forcing the Kiwis to win eight races to return the Auld Mug to the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron in Auckland for the first time since 2003.
Thousands of sleepy New Zealanders got up at 5 a.m. to watch the race on television.
The nation’s prime minister, Bill English, posted a short video of himself celebrating at home: “We are so proud of you,” he wrote on Twitter.
The Kiwis’ boat was powered by a revolutionary grinding system in which the traditional arm power was replaced with leg power. The Kiwis installed four stationary bikes in each hull, with the “cyclors” powering the hydraulic systems used to trim the wingsail and control the daggerboards, which are tipped with hydrofoils.
Among the crew was Simon van Velthooven, who won a bronze medal in track cycling at the London Olympics.
“We knew with this format that we had to be extremely innovative and extremely aggressive with our design philosophy,” Ashby said. “We sort of all as a group agreed and recognized, I guess, where the bar will eventually get with our sport, and we tried to fast-track that learning process as fast as we could.”
In Race 9, skipper Jimmy Spithill put Oracle in the lead rounding the first mark. But the Kiwi cat overhauled the American-flagged boat and sailed into the lead on the downwind second leg. The Kiwis won by 55 seconds.
“Full credit to Team New Zealand. I mean, man, what a series,” Spithill said. “They made fewer mistakes and they fully deserve it, so our hats are off to them.”