The America’s Cup is yacht racing at its purest. You have only to spend a few minutes on one of the new boats, listening to the groans and creaks of ultra-lightweight, carbon-composite hulls and spars under intense stress, to know that these vessels would be useless for a leisurely weekend cruise or for anything other than the exact racing conditions for which they are designed.
America’s Cup racing has been as competitive as this since the era of the great wooden gaff-rigged sailing vessels of the 19th century – although the early stipulation that challengers had to cross the Atlantic by themselves required the boats to be properly seaworthy in a way that the modern ones are not. Still, this year’s contest, the 32nd America’s Cup which is being held in the Spanish city of Valencia promises to be no less compelling.
“What is nice about America’s Cup design is that the only mission is speed, manoeuvrability and reliability to best a single match race rival around a closed course,” writes Halsey Herreshoff, a descendant of Nathanael Herreshoff, the designer behind the late-19th century successes of the New York Yacht Club, the first winners of the Cup.
“Excepting the lavish excesses of big-time modern professional sport, more talent, effort and money have been devoted to the America’s Cup than for any other sport competition,” he writes in his history of the race. “America’s Cup intensity has inspired countless design breakthroughs, fallout from which benefits all yachts today to an extent generally unrealised by those who sail.”
Money and innovation have always been essential to the race. The history of the competition features magnates such as Sir Thomas Lipton, Sir Thomas Sopwith, Harold Vanderbilt, Ted Turner and, more recently, Larry Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli.
It was the combination of Australian entrepreneur Alan Bond’s money and the design and technology it bought that finally wrested the Cup from American control 24 years ago. One of the keys to Australia II’s victory over US yacht Liberty was a radical winged keel.
Once the Cup had finally changed hands, after an extraordinary 132 years at the New York Yacht Club, the number of clubs and countries competing started to grow, and technical innovation accelerated. This process culminated in the 5-0 win by Alinghi from landlocked Switzerland over Team Zealand in Auckland in 2003, a victory that has brought the competition back to European waters for the first time since the race that launched the contest back in 1851.
Alinghi’s victory has also led to a rethink about how the competition is run. In the past, a series of one-on-one contests were held with the eventual victor earning the right to compete against the holder. This year’s event has also been preceded by a series of fleet races involving all of the teams, with qualification points awarded in each race.
The competition for a trophy that became known as the “Auld Mug” has a colourful history. In 1851, when Britain was at the height of its naval power, Lord Wilton, commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes, invited the Americans to race in a summer regatta.
The New York Yacht Club took up the challenge and commissioned a 90-foot schooner, named America. The yacht promptly broke the transatlantic record in a crossing of less than 21 days and then beat all 14 British boats in a race around the Isle of Wight. As America rounded the Needles, Queen Victoria is said to have asked an attendant which yacht was in second place. “Your Majesty,” she was told, “there is no second.”
This comment may have reflected the fact that no other boat was in sight at the time, rather than a profound observation about the nature of victory. But the competition was born. The Cup, originally the Royal Yacht Squadron’s 100-sovereign cup, came to be renamed the America’s Cup in honour of the first winner.
Even during the decades when Britain – or to be more precise, a British yacht club, since the competition is between clubs – was the only challenger, the racing was rarely boring. Photographs taken by Beken, the famous yacht photographing family business of Cowes, show a series of magnificent wooden vessels racing through the flat waters of the Solent in their vain attempts to beat the Americans. But the truth is that most of the American boats were better designed and their crews better trained than those of the British challengers.
Sir Thomas Lipton commissioned no less than five yachts named Shamrock in his repeated attempts to mount a successful challenge. Shamrock III was beaten in 1903 by Reliance, an American yacht that was the largest ever built for the America’s Cup: she boasted 1,500 square metres of sail and needed a crew of 64. In 1920, Shamrock IV beat the American yacht Resolute off New York in the first two races, and designer Nat Herreshoff, by then 72 years old, was rushed down to New York from Rhode Island in a navy destroyer to save the day by tuning the rig – Resolute won the next three races.
The enduring attraction of the contest is a tribute to the ownership syndicate that donated the cup to the New York Yacht Club in 1887 with a “deed of gift”, preserving the trophy “as a perpetual Challenge Cup for friendly competition between foreign countries”. They even had the foresight to envisage the possibility of racing in the southern hemisphere, where some of the best racing has since been seen.
Since its first day, the America’s Cup has had its share of disputes, legal battles and disasters. An Australian entry folded up and sank off San Diego in less than two minutes in 1995. The 1988 competition was infamous for pitting an outsized New Zealand superyacht against a US catamaran, which inevitably won the races and – less inevitably – prevailed eventually in the courtroom.
But the intensely competitive spirit of the race has never died since that August day on the Solent 156 years ago. As Halsey Herreshoff wrote of his time crewing on the yachts in 20 races over four America’s Cup contests: “It was all about the greatest fun I’ve ever had.”
Victor Mallett is the FT’s sailing colmnist and editor of the FT’s Asia edition
