The America’s Cup is the Academy Awards of sailing, with big boats, big money and some of the biggest egos in any sport. It’s also become a meeting ground of jocks and nerds, where the skill and experience of the sailors must be matched by the high-tech design of the yacht. “It’s as much a technical event as a sailing event,” says Tom Whidden, the tactician on Dennis Connor’s Stars & Stripes, which lost in the Vuitton semifinals. Since 1988, when the America’s Cup rules changed, a new boat has emerged that’s longer (about 75 feet long), higher (masts reach 11 stories), faster and sleeker–“the Ferraris of the seas,” as yacht designer David Pedrick puts it.
The format is the match race: two boats competing over a course that takes about two hours to navigate but is often won or lost by less than a minute. To fine-tune a racing yacht, designers rely more and more on computer modeling–using software to analyze the boat’s performance in a variety of simulated wind and wave conditions. But design and testing are enormously costly, and much of the buzz around the Auckland waterfront has been about money: the two winning finalists were the ones with the biggest budgets, AmericaOne spending $30 million and Prada $50 million.
But the role of technology doesn’t mean the talent of the yachtsmen doesn’t count. Because the boats are so close in speed, argues Dawn Riley, who skippered the coed semifinalist America True, “this is the first America’s Cup in a long time when the sailing can win the race.” That’s what Paul Cayard, 40, is depending on. His vast experience includes skippering two America’s Cup campaigns for the Italian syndicate Il Moro, racing with Dennis Connor in the 1995 Cup and winning the grueling round-the-world Whitbread race in 1998. In the Connor model, he’s also AmericaOne’s CEO and fund-raiser, who’s hustled sponsorships from such companies as Hewlett-Packard and Ford. Cayard, who starts each day at 5:30 in the gym with his crew, describes himself as “driven,” with “a very big ego.” “Type A would be an understatement,” he says. One Auckland newspaper called him “the man to fear.”
The toughness and experience of Cayard’s crew–several of them have also raced in previous America’s Cups–are certainly the greatest fear of Prada. But Prada has advantages, too. Unlike AmericaOne, whose team polo shirts are cluttered with corporate logos, the Italian boat has chic gray shirts that sport only a discreet prada because Bertelli is bankrolling the whole shebang. Prada got an early start three years ago when Bertelli bought two of Koch’s Cup yachts, so the crew could begin intensive practice; much of that time the crew’s been sailing the challenging waters off New Zealand. Their boat may be even a little faster than AmericaOne, concedes Cayard. And the team has a certain Mediterranean spirit of taking things as they come. “I think where Italy has been a surprise,” says Laurent Esquier, Prada’s manager of operations, “is the ability to come back and thrive under pressure.” Its skipper, Francesco de Angelis, who’s never raced in the America’s Cup before, says, “The tougher the final gets, the better for the challenger.”
Yes, and for the Vuitton winner who gets to challenge the New Zealanders, there are big unknowns. While the Vuitton regatta has been going on, the two black Team New Zealand yachts have been slipping away each morning to practice. No one knows exactly how good they are, but doubtless they’re very fast and the crew is first rate, with the home advantage. Their only disadvantage is that they haven’t had the hardening that comes from match racing in the challenger series. Sailing their boats against each other is “like dancing with your sister,” as Esquier has put it. “That’s sort of a fair comment,” muses Sir Peter Blake, the head of Team New Zealand. “But I don’t have fears at all. You don’t know what will happen until the final gun goes off. Until then, it’s anyone’s game.”
