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SCUTTLEBUTT No. 577 - May 25, 2000WORLD MATCH RACING CHAMPIONSHIPSSPLIT, CROATIA - Dean Barker of Team New Zealand, and Frenchman Bertrand Pace both have five points on the scoreboard at the end of the first day of the ACI Cup, World Match Racing Championships, the third event on the Swedish Match Grand Prix Tour. The big difference is that Barker is undefeated, while Pace has suffered one loss, putting the young Kiwi sailing hero in a stronger position. Barker was in aggressive form all day, possibly trying to work out some of the aggression that must have accummulated over the past few days, as he struggled to come to terms with events in Auckland. "I don't feel as prepared for this event as I'd like to be," he admitted, "it's been a pretty tough couple of weeks at home mentally, just trying to come to grips with everything." Barker was of course refering to the defection of key Team New Zealand members, Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth, to a wealthy Swiss America's Cup challenge. Barker and Pace are also the top two skippers on the Swedish Match Tour scoreboard after events in Auckland and Perth, while Peter Gilmour, who is in third place on the Tour, is lying fourth in this event, after today. Conditions on the Adriatic Sea, off the ancient city of Split, turned out to be perfect, when sailing started after a three-hour delay as the crews waited for the wind to arrive. The north westerly breeze of 8 to 15 knots was steady for most of the afternoon, before it started to fade late in the day. Barker wasn't the only skipper pushing the limits, with the umpires having to work hard, and agreeing that there had been more penalties that usual. At the end of the day, two skippers had half a point deducted from their scores for causing damage to other boats in collisions. World number one Sten Mohr of Denmark would have shared the top score with Barker and Pace, but for a collision with Australia's Peter Gilmour, which cost half a point. - John Roberson RESULTS:
Event website: http://www.matchrace.net./press_centre.html KIWI MEDIA REPORT Round-the-world yachtsman Grant Dalton has not dismissed an administrative role with Team New Zealand for the 2003 defence of the America's Cup, but at this stage it's not a priority. Based in Brittany, France, Dalton is preparing his 33m super catamaran Club Med for The Race, a non-stop around-the-world event, starting on December 31. Told by a friend of the defections of skipper Russell Coutts and tactician Brad Butterworth, Dalton said yesterday that he had done no more than "muse over a what-if scenario. It wasn't really any more than that. I've had no approach and spoken to no one about it." Better known for his round-the-world campaigns, Dalton was involved in New Zealand's first America's Cup challenge in Perth in 1987. In Auckland, Team New Zealand syndicate head Tom Schnackenberg said he had not talked to Dalton. "It's something we would have to think about." However, Commonwealth weightlifting gold medallist Tony Ebert, who has worked with Dalton for years on many of his yachting projects, said Dalton was "the man for the job." He said he and Ross Armstrong, the new chairman of TVNZ - one of the family of five sponsors for the cup defence this year - were impressed with Dalton's ability to secure and manage sponsors. Ebert said if Dalton headed the 2003 defence it would free Schnackenberg and skipper Dean Barker to do what they knew best - designing and sailing the defence yachts. "I see Dalton as a champagne copy of Sir Peter Blake [the former Team New Zealand head] in his ability to deliver sponsorship dollars." - NZ Herald Full story: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/ac2000/ US MEDIA REPORT (Following is an excerpt from a story in Wednesday's Washington Post by Angus Phillips.) "The America's Cup is not about making money," veteran yacht designer Bruce Farr once said, "it's about spending money." Never has that been clearer than in the past week as top sailors from imminently successful Team New Zealand were lured from their homeland, shipmates and the hallmarks of their fame by a rich Swiss guy willing to spend, spend, spend. That would be Ernesto Bertarelli, No. 121 on Forbes Magazine's list of the world's richest people with a reported worth of $4 billion from his father's pharmaceutical company, Ares-Serono. Bertarelli, 34, likes squash, yachting and mountaineering, as befits a Harvard MBA. Oh, did we mention he's unmarried? Last week Bertarelli made two-time Cup winner Russell Coutts of Team New Zealand an offer he couldn't refuse - a reported $4 million to $5 million to skipper a Swiss challenge aimed at taking the Cup away from the country for which Coutts spent the last eight years winning and defending it. Who wants to be a millionaire? Coutts, 37, leaped at the chance and Bertarelli likely will lure away three or four of his lieutenants, including tactician Brad Butterworth. Profligate wealth is back in the Cup where it belongs. Bertarelli is but one of a half-dozen appallingly rich people said to be weighing Cup bids, including Seattle communications billionaire Craig McCaw, Oracle software guru Larry Ellison of California, Swiss watchmaker Pierre Essig, the Benetton fashion family in Italy and Prada owner Patrizio Bertelli, who tossed away an estimated $55 million to sail for the Cup unsuccessfully last time and is coming back for more.Welcome, tycoons. You've been missed. In the last decade, under the guidance of Dennis Conner, the Cup has turned in large part into a tawdry device to sell everything from computers to health plans to lottery tickets. Graceful boats that once plied the waves with nothing but pretty sheer lines and tall, glinting sails to commend them have turned into floating billboards slathered with so many corporate logos, they look like stock cars. It's a far cry from the glory days of Harold Vanderbilt, Sir Thomas Lipton, Baron Marcel Bich, Ted Turner and the like, who used the America's Cup to blow off steam, not generate it. Conner's all-American idea after winning the prize in Australia in 1987 was to use the boats to move goods. He pushed a rules change to allow onboard advertising, then sought out corporate sponsors to pay the bills for his campaigns and rewarded them with rides on the boat, big signs on the sails and hulls and motivational speeches to their top producers. But the problem with corporate financing of America's Cup campaigns, he and others found out, is it's hard work getting the money, particularly for a marginal sport such as sailing, and every hour spent fund-raising and entertaining sponsors is an hour not spent sailing and boat-designing. That's apparently the dilemma TNZ skipper Coutts found himself in after winning in March. - Angus Phillips, Washington Post Full story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1111-2000May24.html LETTERS TO THE CURMUDGEON (leweck@earthlink.net) Letters selected to be printed are routinely edited for clarity, space (250 words max) and to exclude unfounded speculation or personal attacks. This is not a chat room. You only get one letter per subject, so give it your best shot and don't whine if people disagree. -- From Bill Koch - Jim Brady recently noted the accomplishments of Buddy Melges, a good friend of mine and wonderful sailor. In his enthusiasm to praise Buddy, Brady got one of his facts wrong. Buddy served as helmsman aboard our 1992 America's Cup boat. I was skipper. Not to be persnickety, but I just wanted to set the record straight. -- From Dave White, Past President of the New England Yacht Racing Council, (Area A) and the Northeast Sailing Association (Maine, New Hampshire, & Vermont) - A huge thank you to Art Engel for his work on the income, expenses, and allocation of funds of US Sailing. Most informative - As a devotee of Junior Sailing, I would like to add one factor - the Junior Championships (including the Jr. Olympics) are a tremendous income stream for US Sailing. Each junior who participates in the ladder championships pays dues to US Sailing, and frankly if it were not for those championships, that income would disappear. It would be nice to see if the amount of income derived by those juniors offsets the "subsidy" given to the championships. I suspect that it would make a huge dent in that "subsidy". --From Tim Landt, Laser class representative - Mr. Engel's comment are a total distortion of the real issue. The fact of the matter is that a large percentage of the revenues are consumed by G&A (salaries & benefits) and anyone with a business back ground knows you can allocate these as seen fit. The real issue is how much gets back to the member, once we know this we can fully understand how well USSA functions as a organization and for its members. -- From Ken Guyer - The elimination of the America's Cup being a competition between nations is becoming complete, and it is really now a competition among yacht clubs, period. The defection of Coutts and Butterworth highlights this fact and brings the question to the front. Do we toss out all of the "nationality" related rules and protocols? If not, how far do we go? Obviously there is no nationality issue for any of the crewmembers. Should there be nationality issues for design? Should it be held that designers must be from the country of challenge/defense? That would at least leave a shred of what the originators of the deed of trust envisioned. If so, it should be a tightened up rule, one which does not allow establishment of residency to qualify. The designer must truly be from the country putting up the challenge/defense. -- From Andrew VanDerslice - With some of the worlds wealthiest individual again taking aim at the Americas Cup - it may well be on it way to a truly professional level with the cloak of nationality finally coming down. With all the talk of corporate involvement, let's remember that most, if not all pro teams in the US are owned by individuals not corporations. Corporations and their sponsorship money tend to follow these individuals not lead. Maybe there could even be a draft? It's time that the best sailors in the world get paid for being the best. Amateurs they are not, they are professionals that have demonstrated their skills time and time again. -- From Marc Herrmann-- In his interview with Gary Jobson, Mark Reynolds pointed out that he used his dad as coach at the Olympic Trails to check the currents in between races. Now obviously other teams used similar tactics and since these were the Trails, not a major championship, it begs the question of what happened to letting the sailors figure out the current on the race course when actually racing? Does this not go against the fundamental rules of competition? Don't get me wrong. I wholeheartedly believe and most certainly support the concept of coaching. It's outside assistance such as the above that concerns me. If everyone employs this type of approach at major events (World's, NA's, etc.) the necessary support and cost for each team just escalated to extreme proportions. What happened with the concept of keeping OD racing at a affordable level? This applies to all OD classes. MAGNUS LILJEDAHL (Yesterday 'Butt ran an interview with the new Star World Champion, Mark Reynolds. The following is an excerpt from a profile of Reynolds' crew Magnus Liljedahl written by Tim Jeffery for Quokka Sports.) Liljedahl is a former Finn sailor who placed second in the Swedish Nationals and sixth in the Europeans in 1979. A year later, he elected to move to the States. "We'd been practicing here, and I really liked it," he explains. "Like many people at 25, I decided that I had trained for the Finn but wasn't really succeeding. So it was time to get on another train, to try something different." He had intended to move directly into keelboats, but he didn't appreciate the full impact of switching domiciles. "Coming to the U.S. isn't an easy thing. I'm a construction engineer by education, but when I came over to Florida I started a little furniture-making business with a cabinet shop. It took a lot more time to make money than I had ever envisioned. It took 10 years before I felt I could relax a little." The big, former Swede found plenty of part-time sailing on Biscayne Bay with the active and competitive Star fleet, but the path that led to a professional teaming up with skipper Mark Reynolds goes back to '79. That year, he met Reynolds when the latter was sailing with Augie Diaz in the Flying Dutchman. Liljedahl renewed his friendship with his Star skipper during the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. He'd visited the Olympic Regatta to support his friend Kevin Burnham (who was sailing with Morgan Reeser in the 470), and Reynolds was sailing at his imperious best, winning the gold medal. Liljedahl elected to get back into full-time sailing after that, and persuaded Swedish friend Rustan Carlstrom to buy Ross MacDonald's bronze medal-winning boat. Carlstrom bailed out, leading to the pairing with Wallen. But Liljedahl's American citizenship led to another change, this time to the front of Vince Brun's boat. "I didn't really know that I couldn't sail for Sweden any more, so it was a good thing that we blew that thing off early." Brun is a hot property in the Star class, with an exceptional Bacardi Cup record. As it was an Olympic year, the lineup for the 1996 Bacardi Cup was exceptional, including the likes of Paul Cayard and John Kostecki - but Brun and Liljedahl won. Liljedahl had already sailed with Reynolds the year before at the Europeans in Cascais, Portugal, followed by the North Americans, when it became apparent that Reynolds's long-standing crew, Hal Haenel, was considering stepping down. "I was determined to give myself the best chance if that happened," remembers Liljedahl. It did, and by early 1997 Reynolds' boat started to carry two small flags on her transom: the Stars and Stripes and Sweden's yellow cross on a royal blue field. If others thought that Haenel's hiking harness was a big one to fill, Liljedahl did not. "I've said many times, I don't see sailing as being too complicated," said Liljedahl. "Certainly Mark and Hal had developed an aura and proven themselves a winning team. I just wanted to make sure Mark could win with me as well. I knew things would determine themselves on the racecourse. Sitting around in the yacht club saying you're good enough is not really going to do it." - Tim Jeffery, Quokka Sports Full story: http://sailing.quokka.com/stories/05/QCMa4sail_s_star0522_WFC.html BOAT U.S. SANTA MARIA CUP As the Star Class folds up its World Championship in Annapolis, the Eastport Yacht Club is finalizing the details for the 10th Annual Boat U.S. Santa Maria Cup in Annapolis. Racing begins Wednesday afternoon, May 31st and continues through Sunday, June 4. Racing in J/22s, the teams will contest a double round robin to determine the 4 semi-finalists. The semi-finals are a best 2-out-of-3, to set up the finals and petit-finals, which are again best 2-out-of-3. The BoatU.S. Santa Maria Cup is a grade 1 women's match race event, which has drawn a truly worldwide contingent of sailors. Participating this year are:
Dawn Riley, last year's winner, and the only two time winner, has added Sharon Ferris (NZL) who is ranked 20th, to her team as tactician. Last year's tactician, Melissa Purdy will be sailing with Hannah Swett this year. Again this year, the Boat U.S. Santa Maria Cup will be featured on Gary Jobson's Ultimate Sailing show on ESPN2. The program will air July 8, at 2PM EST. - Jeff Borland Results will be posted from the water during racing each day on the event website at http://www.santamariacup.org CALENDAR * June 23-25, United States Sailing Association s USA Junior Olympic Sailing Festival--Upper Midwest, Milwaukee Yacht Club. Young sailors 7-19 in Laser, Laser Radial, Club 420, and Optimist dinghy sailboats. http://www.ussailing.org/youth/racing/jo/2000/index.htm or http://www.milwaukeeyc.com/jolympic/ THE CURMUDGEON'S OBSERVATIONS The greatest risk is not taking one. |
