In these weird times when sports are played sporadically and in mostly Covid-free countries (say Kiwiland and Ockerspace) — or under strict conditions such as the Australian Open in Melbourne, the mention of "text book" competitive tactics re-enters the vernacular of commentators.

 

 

Of the main sports on choice now is the cricket — Australia versus India, drown by rain yesterday (16/01/2021) — the Australian soccer league where it’s usually Sydney versus Melbourne once-again-once-more-one-all, and of course the preliminary races for the America’s cup in New Zealand. 

While the Aussie sports are on free-to-air TV, the AC is on Foxtel… 

Not having subscribed to cable/pay TV (I run a cheap budget), I watch the highlights on Youtube. It looks like yesterday’s races in light air was a painful affair as to which boat could “foil”. At one stage the Italian boat managed to fly at nearly 40 knots in an 8 knot puff of breeze. In the second race, the UK boat managed to finish and win the truncated 4-leg race with barely 2 minutes before the time limit expired. While the cricket and the soccer extensively makes the news daily, the AC seems to have been forgotten by the TV and other media outlets, possibly because sailing is a "rich man’s sport” and our annual Sydney to Hobart event was Covid-cancelled. 

Sailing for the America’s Cup is a “massively rich person’s sport”. Only Bob Hawke, on the win of Australia II against Dennis Connor in 1983, managed to bring this amazing victory down to an ockerdom level by saying that "Any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum”...

So far, the Yankee boat, named American Magic, with the subtitle of “Patriot", has won nothing. Here, this sport for the rich and for sponsors of mostly exclusive products, who are after the fame of failure such as the Lipton tea baron and Baron Marcel Bich or grab the victory that befell Alan Bond in 1983 when his team wrestled the cup from its 132 year-old dusty glass housing in the New York Yacht Club, to soon find himself in prison for having embezzled HUGE amount of money from his companies. 

Not only Alan Bond won the America’s Cup — which the Schooner “America” had won in Cowes, 1851, ("M’am, there is no second!") in a friendly race that became the "deed of gift” (a gold mine for lawyers that both prevented and encouraged cheating on the various challenges) — Bond had also embezzled enough cash to start building a true replica of the Endeavour, Captain Cook’s boat. This magnificent ship was finished by subscription and lotteries as Bond was in jail, bankrupt.

Bankruptcy in Australia is a serious affair with penalty of prison and heavy fines, while in the US, bankruptcy is a way to make money — exhibit A being Donald Trump and exhibit B being now the NRA. 

The America’s Cup, the Holy Grail of sailing, also became a boon for clever inventions — hull shapes from flat-bottomed to knife-like and bigger sail plans, aluminium hulls that would rot quickly in sea water — with changing “deeds of gift” rules and limits, according to who could afford the price tag of technological advancements — advancements that are these days mind boggling, especially in the carbon fibre technology.

The stresses are enormous, even in light breeze. The thin foiling arms have to be able to sustain pressures above 25 tonnes for example. These AC75 would have been a slide-rule gamble without computerised calculations for stress and design. And the rules are still quite defined. Sir Ben's Pommy boat could have been disqualified had an added small (I guess about one inch diameter) hole in the bottom of the main sail not been approved by race inspectors on day one of the selection races, but this small hole became the subject of a protest which forced the hole to be patched and a new design solution approved to tension the sail near the mast. Rules are rules. No hole there.

The previous races held in Bermuda, 2017, with catamarans running at 30 knots in ten knots of breeze on foils, look like old steam engine racing compared to the souped-up AC75 of today, barely three years later. 

Sailing at 40 knots in 10 knots of breeze is not for the faint-hearted. There are many factors to manage and a lot of it is computerised by “avionics” so sophisticated you could land an A380 while being blindfolded with it.

Mind you, there is a crew of gym-ed-up beefy men — because everything has to be “man-powered" — pedalling generators the whole race time to recharge the batteries of the hydraulic pumps for the foiling arms which are hungry for power when switching position during tacking. Sometimes, you think “but why aren’t they tacking yet?”. Well, it could be there is not enough juice in the batteries to lift and lower the arms as needed. "The computer says no". Keep pedalling!… The hydraulics would need to push 250 tonnes up in order to lower the arm and lift the 7-tonne boat plus a possible downward sailing pressure of 10 tonnes. The electric pumps go like whining crazies… And the beefy men are sweating, with heart-rates being measured so they don’t go into heart-attack mode...

Talking of A380s, the Yankee boat is mainly sponsored by Airbus. Airbus has been the American AC competitor sponsor for a while now. The Italian boat, Prada-Pirelli Luna Rossa, is sponsored by Prada and Pirelli. The Pommy boat, named Britannia/Ineos, is sponsored by Ineos, a recently formed company that has bought many small chemical and vehicle manufacturing industries in the UK, with about $60 billion turnover in sales per annum, and by an older sports-gear making company, Belstaff, sawing since 1929. 

Of course, the former/current skippers of the America’s Cup are “stateless” because they are the best. For example, Jimmy Spithill, the Aussie, won the cup for the Americans a few times, lauded for steering Oracle Team USA to victory in the 2013 America's Cup over Team New Zealand. His “American" crew included Australia's Tom Slingsby, Kyle Langford and Joey Newton. Spithill is now racing for the Prada-Pirelli team. Dean Barker, the NeoZealander, who lost to Spitthill in San Francisco, is now skipper of the American Magic boat. The Neo-Zealander boat which is the defender of the cup is skippered by Peter Burling, a true-blue Kiwi who won the cup in Bermuda against Spithill-the-Aussie, who was working for the Yankees. 

So, Imagine, in San Francisco, Dean Barker, the Kiwi, was 8-1 on top of the Americans who had Jimmy Spithill at the helm. In the 13th race, Barker was in front by miles, and about to win the cup, but the 40-minute race time limit elapsed… No wind. This was very bad luck. Jimmy Spithill won ALL the next races with an overnight-tweaked, somehow faster boat… Two A-Cup for Jimmy.

What wins or loose a race series relies as much on the technological tweaks of the boats (remember the winged-keel painted to deceive onlookers underwater) as the skills of the skippers to pick the wind shifts. Yesterday’s races would have been tricky...

In the past, in the days of the J-Class boats, huge elegant beautiful monsters, the crews would be in white shirts, white socks (except for the New York Yacht Club in red socks) and white trousers, while the skipper donned a captain cap and a club jacket, at the wheel, drinking a cocktail.

In today’s racing, the sailors are equipped with helmets that would make cricketers envious. They also wear protective gear against hard-knocks, cold, water, wind and act as floating device should they fall into the drink. Their goggles are fully wind-proof and water-proof, because at 55 knots (the possible top speed of these AC75), like one of the Yankee commentators, a former sailing champion, would say, it’s “like having your head out of the window of a car on the road" doing 90 kms an hour while being drenched with salty water spray for 40 minutes. 

What will they come up with, next? Taking of Airbus, it’s likely that the next design could involve “flying” rather than “foiling”. Here I can see boats with a pair of sail/wings at 115 degrees angle of each others, flying a metre or so above the water with a 3 metre deep foil-less centreboard, while the rudder would have a foil to control the elevation. Stability would be controlled from the wings. Speed of 60 knots in 15 knots breeze could be expected according to my calculations. And this without an engine. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

What has this got to do with democracy, you may ask? What has sports got to do with democracy?

Good question and you know the answer...

My guess is like yours: competition and cooperation are essential parts of life. They are "text book" items. No cooperation and life becomes a deadly bum fight in which everyone looses, Life destroys itself. No protein duplication possible. No competition and there is little or no evolution. No improvement. The trick of human democracy is to manage both competition and cooperation while staying sustainable in a limited system or a conglomerate of limited systems, which is planet earth. Not a small task... We’ve been working at it for the last 10,000 years and we have not found the correct mix yet. We’re still in fiddle-fuddle-land. We improvise, we storm the Capitol, we let kings, emperors and presidents decide and we pay for the privilege through taxes. We are happy on average.

We have our sentient problems. But we invent others, more devious than the previous, in order to get ahead of competitors. At this stage of approaching environmental limits, we need more cooperation than competition. Competition should not be bashing each others like male leopard seals fight in order to mate, but finding more elegant solutions to what we are and wish to do. The world is our relative oyster. Sciences rather beliefs should (and will) give us our stylistic next wish, in which the natural processes of the wild should be respected. A tall order? We shall see as the baton of democracy is changing hands...

Gus Leonisky
Former sailor.

See also: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/29521
and:flying high with the scientific method...

 

 

Update: barely ten minutes ago (6:00 PM in New zealand, 15:00 + daylight saving EST in Australia), American Magic "flew off" and landed back on its side, loosing the 17/01/2021 race to Prada-Pirelli. It seems to have taken on water, but the crew is all safe apparently...

 

 

 

Update (20/01/2021)

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBUTJG3Hf_s


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3mpklj7_Yo
Note the speed when the topple happens: 45 knots (83.34 km/h)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKRmBaigV9Q


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SODQVrcR3KU