Richard Gladwell - Lone Wolf: How Emirates Team New Zealand stunned the world

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

ISBN

e: 978-1-988516-14-1

m: 978-1-988516-15-8

A Mower Book

Published in 2017 by Upstart Press Ltd

Level 4, 15 Huron St, Takapuna 0622

Auckland, New Zealand

Text Richard Gladwell 2017

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

Design and format Upstart Press Ltd 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Ebook by www.CVDgraphics.nz

Contents

Preface

My first encounter with the Americas Cup happened in a draughty school hall at Westlake Boys in November 1967 during a School Certificate English exam. One of the questions was to write about a significant sporting event.

Suddenly I had this flash of inspiration: Id write about the 1962 Americas Cup between Weatherly and Gretel when the Australian Challenger surfed past the Defender to give the crew from Down Under their first race win.

Since late 1983 I have covered the Americas Cup for various publications, and since mid-2005 for Sail-World.com, the worlds largest online sailing news network.

The shift to online media has meant that the days are gone of getting a scoop and carefully guarding it for a couple of weeks while your magazine goes through the print and distribution process. Now it is instant.

The next Americas Cup competitive cycle starts as soon as the current match is over.

Part of that cycle is getting the money together as soon as you can. Hiring the best design, sailing and engineering teams you can afford, and getting sponsors and investors on board. They are all harbingers of the outcome of the next match.

The Cup is a game of chess. One team makes a move. The other either responds to counter, moves in a different direction or does nothing. Spotting those moves and putting them into context for Cup fans is the role of the sailing media, knowing that a team will tell you exactly what they want you to hear.

The Americas Cup is a time-management exercise a test of who can develop the fastest boat within the prescribed time in the Cup cycle. All of the teams in the 2017 Americas Cup ran out of time. The team that won stuck to a simple and effective campaign strategy and made the best use of the available time and resources.

This is the story of that team and the 35th Americas Cup.

Richard Gladwell

August 2017

Introduction

At 2.33 pm on the afternoon of 26 June 2017, Emirates Team New Zealand crossed the finish line in Bermudas Great Sound to win the premier trophy in sailing. The 81 win in Bermuda was the third for the most successful professional sailing team in history.

New Zealands Americas Cup legacy was born in late March 1984, when Marcel Fachler, a Sydney-based, Belgian-born businessman, lodged a challenge with the Royal Perth Yacht Club on behalf of a New Zealand club the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron.

The Squadron was unaware of Fachlers move, but took up his offer of funding a feasibility study and establishing an organis-ational framework for a challenge for the then 133-year-old trophy.

That started a 30-year involvement by New Zealand, which has spanned three iterations.

The first was New Zealand Challenge, headed by Sir Michael Fay from 1987 to 1992, which also covered the Big Boat challenge of 1988. New Zealand fell in love with the Americas Cup in Fremantle and all its drama.

That love affair continued with the 19952000 Team New Zealand led by Sir Peter Blake and Alan Sefton, who twice won yachtings premier trophy. Emirates Team New Zealand is the current team and since March 2003 has been led by Grant Dalton and Kevin Shoebridge, winning for the third time in June 2017.

Although New Zealand is the smallest country to have contested the Americas Cup, the Kiwis have been the most innovative. First with the fibreglass yacht in 1987, then the 120-ft Big Boat in 1988, and the tandem keel in 1992.

NZL-32 , the winner in 1995, was simply a very well-designed yacht which took her synergy from a lot of small design and engineering nuances, along with an outstanding crew and a superbly led team, to produce New Zealands first win.

The same formula was repeated for the second win in 2000. Key design innovations included the Ice Breaker bow to get more speed from a longer effective sailing length plus the Millennium rig from Southern Spars together with a top sailing crew and a well-led team.

New Zealand brought foiling to the 2013 Americas Cup and changed the sport. The 2017 match saw a repeat of the 1995 and 2000 formula design and engineering innovation, a top sailing crew and a well-led team.

The Americas Cup does have its dark side. Learning to cope, innovate and succeed in the face of adversity is another of the vital lessons of success and was no more so for the team that won the Cup in Bermuda on 26 June 2017.

Chapter 1

Poised on a knife edge

D ay 2 of the Challenger Final was reckoned to be the turning point of the 35th Americas Cup for Emirates Team New Zealand.

The Kiwis came away with two wins from three races, despite being caught out with their light-weather daggerboards in a breeze that rose and fell during the afternoon.

After their Americas Cup win, Emirates Team New Zealand skipper Glenn Ashby picked that crucial day as being a major confidence booster for the campaign, its direction and capability.

My thinking was that if we could race well against Artemis in breezy conditions given that they had beaten Oracle in 17 races in a row then we possibly might have a chance at the Cup, he said.

As the only crew member with previous Americas Cup experience aboard the New Zealand Challenger, Ashby says he knew they were going to have a big battle with Artemis Racing in the Challenger Final.

If we could outsail them in these conditions, we could keep on our path and keep improving ourselves and the boat, said the 2008 Olympic Silver medallist and multiple world champion in several multihull classes.

It was a dramatic day on the Great Sound in Bermuda, which is formed from the sunken inner crater of a 30 million-year-old volcano, located 640 nautical miles off the US coast in the Atlantic Ocean.

Three races were scheduled.

After being treated to almost a month of fine weather, the skies opened over Bermuda as a front passed over the Atlantic Ocean archipelago dropping much-needed rain. The downpour was preceded by a spectacular thunderstorm overnight with lightning and it was still raining as the boats left the team bases located in the historic Royal Naval Dockyard, a few hundred metres from the race course.

Team meteorologists, critical to making the correct call on foil selection, were perplexed with the change in weather system, with a front set to pass over Bermuda.

On the morning of the second day of racing with the New Zealand team poised on a 21 lead in the best of nine series, rain was falling, and winds had been up to 25 kts in strength beyond the upper limit for racing.

Everything is on the table, Race Director Iain Murray told the mid-morning media briefing. When the team forecasters are ringing us and saying What do you know? I think that is indicative of the situation out there.

Murray put up an overhead showing two weather sources predicting winds from the south-west, and explained that forecast was the thinking of the teams. However, as he spoke the wind was blowing at 20 kts from the opposite direction north-east.