“Syd used to say to me when something was going good, ‘Be careful,’ ” Spithill said, “ ‘because you can be a rooster one day and a feather duster the next.’ ”
A sailor had to be careful indeed in the 34th America’s Cup, which generated historically fast speeds and risks in carbon-fiber foiling catamarans that bore a greater resemblance to flying machines than boats.
But while it once looked all but certain that Spithill, the Oracle Team USA skipper and helmsman, and his crew mates were going to end up as feather dusters in San Francisco, they were ultimately able to turn Fischer’s catchphrase on its head, pulling off the greatest comeback in America’s Cup history and one of the most dramatic in any sport.
Trailing by 8-1 to the challenger, Emirates Team New Zealand, and within one defeat of losing the Cup, Oracle continued to upgrade its boat and its confidence and — against overwhelming odds and a team of veteran sailors — proceeded to win an unprecedented eight straight races to defend the trophy.
The final blow was delivered Wednesday in the first winner-take-all race since 1983. It was a grand spectacle, with the biggest and loudest crowd of the regatta gathered onshore and the two predatorial catamarans crossing the start line in near unison at well over 30 knots.
Oracle was the first to crack, burying both bows in the water as it prepared to round Mark 1 And generating a huge splash and a collective gasp back on shore as it slowed dramatically. But there would be no breakdown and no Kiwi revival. Though New Zealand led at Mark 1 and Mark 2, the third leg was again critical. In the early stages of this best-of-17 regatta, Oracle was the slower boat upwind, but as the series stretched on, the team’s designers and shore crew used the off days to modify the boat to their advantage.
Wednesday only underscored the obvious. Oracle was the significantly faster boat upwind, hydrofoiling for extended periods while Team New Zealand remained closer to the water and increasingly farther from the defender.
“They just got better and better,” said Grant Dalton, the managing director of Team New Zealand, who was also part of the crew Wednesday. “They got about a minute and a half faster on the beat than they were nine days ago. We were sort of 50 seconds a beat quicker, and now they’re 50 seconds quicker than us. So they’ve done a really amazing job to turn that around.”
The full extent of what Oracle did to change that crucial speed equation is not yet clear. Modifications were made to multiple aspects of its AC72, from the hydrofoils to the wing sail that was its primary power source. And unlike Team New Zealand, Oracle sailed with a new measurement certificate — reflecting changes to its boat’s configuration — for every race as it searched relentlessly for incremental improvements.
Russell Coutts, the most successful skipper in the Cup’s modern history and Oracle’s chief executive, shared some details, looking as relieved as he did delighted.
“The major changes in my view were the balance of the boat, where obviously the load sharing between the foils is critical, so we adjusted that quite a lot,” said Coutts, an engineer by education.
“We changed that loading by manipulating the wing shapes and flaps. So we didn’t actually change anything in a physical sense. We just changed the setting, so we more bottom-loaded the wing and more off-loaded that, and that created a different loading for the foils. And that was probably the biggest change we made.
“And then there were a bunch of little changes that just reduced the drag a few kilos here and a few kilograms there, and all the sudden you have an edge.”
Coutts said the other major factor was his team’s growing confidence in its yacht.
“Everyone talks about the technology: ‘What changes did you make?’ ” Coutts said. “The guys on board changed a lot. For sure there was a use of the technology change where we manipulated the force or manipulated the balance of those forces, but the guys on board the boat changed their technique, so there’s this fantastic human element to this which really won the day in the end, which is great.”
It was hard to ignore the human element Wednesday when Oracle’s joy was matched in intensity by Team New Zealand’s disappointment. There are two ways to view such a reversal of fortune: as a comeback or a collapse. New Zealand, an island nation of 4.4 million, had already been making preliminary plans a week ago to bring the Cup back to Auckland. Instead, as The New Zealand Herald’s headline read, “America’s Cup stays America’s cup.”
It was a brutal blow to Dean Barker, the Kiwi helmsman and skipper who has had to deal with plenty of Cup-based disappointment after losing it in New Zealand in 2003 to Coutts and the Swiss syndicate Alinghi.
“I think again we saw today just how dominant they’ve become upwind,” Barker said of Oracle. “It’s very difficult to accept, a very tough pill to swallow.”
Oracle’s midregatta decision to replace the tactician John Kostecki, an American veteran who knew San Francisco Bay intimately, with Ben Ainslie, a four-time Olympic gold medalist from Britain, also contributed to the momentum shift, even though Oracle still lost its first two races with Ainslie in the lineup.
But the team’s fortunes and confidence began to soar when Team New Zealand, well in front and within one nautical mile of winning the Cup on Friday, was unable to finish before the 40-minute time limit. The race that would have been Race 13 was abandoned.
“Although we sort of probably did have our hand on the trophy, I don’t think we ever thought that way,” Dalton said.
“At 8-1, I said to the team, ‘We’ve got to close this out because I’ve got a feeling here.’ I probably slept better in the last two days than I slept a week ago because I knew, I sensed that it was coming.”
Dalton was talking about Oracle’s comeback, and though it made for painful viewing for New Zealanders, it was not a dark day for all New Zealanders. Coutts is a Kiwi, and Oracle actually had more Kiwis in its crew than Americans, with Joe Spooner and Jono Macbeth outnumbering the one American: Rome Kirby.
But Oracle Team USA’s owner is an American, the software billionaire
Larry Ellison, who has been juggling two major commitments this week. His company Oracle is staging its annual conference in San Francisco, attracting thousands of participants, but Ellison decided not to deliver his long-scheduled keynote address to the conference Tuesday so he could watch his team from the same chase boat where he was watching it lose earlier in September.
His priorities were questioned by some who had come to hear him speak and left frustrated, but Oracle will presumably have another conference in San Francisco next year. The America’s Cup was much less of a sure thing, and on Wednesday, Ellison was back on the water.
When his team crossed the finish line, he was soon on board with the crew to take part in the celebration, hugging Spithill and exchanging thoughts with Ainslie as they sat on the back of the catamaran.
This was Ellison’s and Oracle’s second victory in the America’s Cup, but it was the team’s first in a full-scale Cup.
Ellison did not announce concrete plans for the next Cup. He also did not reveal which yacht club would be the next challenger of record.
But after this Cup had been handed over to the crew, Spithill opened a bottle of sparkling wine and shouted: “Larry! Hey, Larry!”
When Ellison turned, Spithill removed his thumb from the top of the bottle and sent a steady spray in his boss’s direction.
“Absolutely no doubt,” Spithill said, “it’s better to be the rooster than the feather duster.”
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