Betrayed by the America’s Cup

Larry Ellison wins again

It was when Ed Lee appeared on stage that the penny dropped: I’d been duped.

But it took Gavin Newsom to really bring it home:

“You don’t wanna be the best of the best,
you wanna be the only one that does what you do.”

I’m pretty good at getting into something new when I want to. I think it’s how I came to be a decent radio journalist: whatever the story of the day, I had to know everything there was to know about it.

Today, that skill seems mostly to be applied to learning about new sports and rash (failed) attempts to write code in the hope of impressing my engineering colleagues.

I first learned to sail when I was twelve or thirteen. A sailing school on the south coast (of England) was offering a discount on a week-long sailing course. The only attendees that week were my parents, my sister, and me. That was because the course was during the Easter holidays, and the weather was miserable.

To start with, we hid in the classroom. But after two days, it became clear that to get any kind of certification in sailing, we’d have to brave the elements and get in a boat to, you know, sail.

My mum and sister did their capsize drill a day early. Accidentally.

They opted out of the final day.

Fifteen years later, I was wrestling with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services and unsure if I’d be able to stay in San Francisco much longer. I decided I should learn to sail properly. It’s something I’d always wanted to do, and where better than San Francisco? I’d kick myself forever if I didn’t get another chance.

My first course lasted four full weekends. Each day began in the same way: I would buy the coffees, and a friend drove us over the Golden Gate Bridge to a sailing school in Sausalito. By 6pm, when Sarah dropped me back at my apartment, I was exhausted. But so happy.

Sailing in the bay is a thrilling and challenging experience. I was utterly distracted from everything else happening in my life; each day, I was transported to a 32 foot-long piece of fiberglass that was at the mercy of variable winds, Alcatraz, and container ships a million times bigger than us.

Sailing is hard. And there aren’t many land-locked sailing environments that are harder than San Francisco bay.

When I first heard that the America’s Cup was coming to San Francisco, I didn’t pay it much attention. When my last company, Automattic, was kicked out of Pier 38 amidst rumors that the city wanted to co-opt it for the America’s Cup, I still didn’t pay it a ton of attention.

I saw the boats practice from my ferry commute home. Huge, fast, and unwieldy-looking. Just awesome.

In October, I played hooky and went out with friends on a sailboat to watch the AC45s race (that’s when I took some of the pictures in this post). They were fast — that much was clear. I had no idea how the race course worked, so we had to get close to another boat with radio commentary to figure that out.

I still didn’t pay any much attention. I saw the America’s Cup park and grandstands taking shape around the Embarcadero. I knew that boats were racing, but I didn’t fully understand what was at stake.

I heard that a boat had capsized and a sailor had died. I don’t remember seeing the pictures. I didn’t know that Andrew Simpson was a British Olympian.

When the America’s Cup (actually) began, I still didn’t notice. I heard that the Oracle team had had a bad start and that someone had fallen in the water. They had a two point penalty — I didn’t really understand why.

Brad’s parents were in town, and they were excited. Oracle was their team: “I hope we do better today,” his mom said when they visited the office.

I got hooked over the second weekend of the regatta. It was early afternoon, and my son was taking a nap. I turned on the TV, expecting to see an EPL game on NBC’s sports channel. Instead, there were boats racing. A virtual course overlaid the images of the bay, showing exactly what was going on.

Perhaps most notable of all, the US team (“Team Oracle USA”) was losing — badly. Their boat may have been a little slower, but mostly it seemed they were being out-sailed.

It was time to learn what this was all about.

Like the good student I can be, I tried to figure out as much as I was able. Of course, the internet made this easy. The important facts seemed to be these:

• New Zealand (“Team Emirates New Zealand” if there’s a sponsor within earshot) had won the (Louis Vuitton) Challenger Series. The prize was going head-to-head against Oracle in the America’s Cup.
• Oracle hadn’t really raced their boats against opposition — only against each other.
• Britain’s most decorated Olympic sailor, (Sir) Ben Ainslie, was skipper of Oracle’s second boat, the only job of which was to give the first boat some competition experience.
• Sailors on all the teams are basically hired guns. They’re free agents, unbound by nationality or former team allegiance.
• Oracle had one American sailor on its boat (and he wasn’t the skipper).
• The New Zealand team is mostly funded by New Zealand. The USA team is mostly funded by Larry Ellison.
• Larry Ellison made up the rules because his team won last time.
• If there’s too much wind, or too little wind, or the wind isn’t going in the right direction, they postpone the race.
• The reason the Oracle team had a two point penalty was that they had blatantly cheated in an earlier series. In that event, every team had to sail the same boat. But the Oracle team altered their boats to make them faster by adding bags of lead.

Which reminds me:

“You don’t wanna be the best of the best,
you wanna be the only one that does what you do.”

Right on, Gavin.

History will do a better job of telling this part of this story. But the simple summary is that Oracle was down 8-1 and then came back to win it.

I’d wanted to watch one of these races live and I had still never done it. Yesterday was my last chance. A couple of colleagues came for the ride, and moments after Race 19's starting gun was fired, we were climbing onto a shipping container on Marina Green to get a view of the race. For reasons that were unclear, “America’s Cup Village” was being packed up around us, even as people still arrived to watch the winner-takes-all final.

We were ordered off the shipping container minutes later. Tip-toes would have to suffice for glimpses of these great boats flying over the bay. Cheers from the crowd behind indicated that New Zealand’s early and narrow lead was diminishing, and then gone.

As soon as the race finished, we walked away. We needed to get back to work.

I didn’t watch the day’s coverage and trophy presentation until I was home last night. The first two legs were spectacular, far closer and more exciting than was clear from my there-in-the-flesh vantage point. Leg 3, which had been the Oracle team’s undoing for much of the first half of the series, changed everything. The Oracle boat was just so much faster. “Boat speed is a tactician’s friend,” the TV commentator couldn’t resist repeating often.

I felt really bad for the Kiwis. Imagine sitting on match point for a week (a week in which you nearly won a race that was then cancelled because it exceeded the time limit). Imagine the moment when they realized that the opposition had figured out a way to make their boat faster, and they would never keep up on the critical upwind leg three.

At 8-1, you had to figure that chance would get to play its hand and give the New Zealand team the final win it needed.

It didn’t happen.

The Oracle boat was now a lot faster. If I wanted Oracle to win, it was because I thought it would be cool that the Americans had to be saved by a Brit. I also have a soft spot for underdogs. And perhaps after eight years here, I’m trying to be a little sympathetic to the local team. For the most part, the USA doesn’t actually bother to compete in sports internationally (World Series, haha), so this was a rare opportunity to show a little loyalty to the country that allows me here as a Permanent Resident Alien.

But it wasn’t the Brit that made the difference. It was speed, the tactician’s friend.

“We did it,” screeched Ed Lee.

“The greatest comeback in the history of sports,” said Gavin Newsom.

The San Francisco Chronicle called the win “All American,” celebrating its “home team.”

I’ve been lucky enough to go to New Zealand once. It’s a beautiful country where not very much seems to happen. Idyllic, really.

They care about their sports, though. My friend Lindsey is there at the moment. She told me that nobody has done any work for two weeks because they get up early every morning to watch the races in bars and cheer on their team.

It’s really their team. The sailors on the boat are all Kiwis with two exceptions, and they’re Australians with strong ties to New Zealand.

Oracle won because they made their boat faster.

When the TV cameras and virtual reality software were switched off, a shore team spent nights analyzing data from the boat and figuring out how it could be improved. In the words of their Chief Executive:

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.

You probably don’t find your way to becoming one of the richest men in the world by giving up.

Ellison got to make up the rules, but he somehow missed the fact that his team and boats wouldn’t be well enough prepared if they only cheated, or raced against themselves, before they entered the final competition. They came down to the wire, and they figured it out just in time.

The sailors are the best in the world, competing in a sport that requires strength, tenacity, and excellent judgment.

Oh, and money.

Money that allows you to hire a team of engineers and technicians that will work through the night to improve the hardware so that it performs better than the competition.

“You don’t wanna be the best of the best,
you wanna be the only one that does what you do.”

I feel betrayed. These races were a fraud. The 34th America’s Cup contravened the first principle of sport: the race simply wasn’t fair.

Ellison made up the rules and created a competition in which nobody could really compete with him. As Oracle’s boat 17 approached the finish line, the TV graphics laid a virtual American flag over the San Francisco bay. On the boat, ten Non-Resident Aliens and an American celebrated.

Ed Lee put his America’s Cup cap on, and Gavin Newsom pulled on his Oracle jacket. Dean Barker held back sobs as he steered the New Zealand boat back to its mooring.

We did it.

This competition was about money, sponsors, and politicians taking the customary advantage of any small thing they can call a success.

Maybe that’s all sports are these days. If so, I don’t want to be a fan.

I’m not going to get duped again.