From the Sunday July 14, 2013 business section of the Washington Post, a reprinted article by Aaron Kuriloff of Bloomberg Markets had this statement from the second kahuna of the Oracle team;
Coutts, 51 said before the accident that his team's decision in 2010 to use 72-footers for the Cup was a mistake. He believed then that the 72s would look better on TV than smaller cats which are less costly to build and slower.
Coutts later discovered during the televised America's Cup World Series beginning in 2011 that 45-foot cats played well on the screen.
"We were paranoid this needed to look good on TV," Coutts says. "I thought the 45 would look too small. It doesn't. It looks fine."
Oh-oh! Not good when you admit you are probably sailing the wrong boats before the series even starts.
For more unbiased America's Cup reporting, I suggest you follow either Tillerman, or Joe over at Horse's Mouth.
If some of you young'uns are contemplating a career as a sail-race professional, I suggest you start concentrating on getting some trampoline combined with Rubik's Cube workouts, as the link to this following America's Cup training video shows.
4 comments:
Thanks for the tip. I'm definitely going to take my Rubik's cube with me next time I go Laser sailing in 25 knots. Solving the cube while sailing downwind in big waves will be excellent training.
Whenever I now see the words "America's Cup" or the abbreviation "AC" (assuming we're not talking about Atlantic City)I tend to yawn and scroll on without reading. To me the America's Cup has no meaning or impact and provokes little interest. It could disappear this afternoon and I'd not notice--and I'm a sailor who started racing at age 11. To the non-sailing public I suspect the attitude, and correctly so, is that the AC is merely about a few cranky old rich white men and their respective lawyers, and therefore is a questionable "sport".
Tillerman,
I think if you come up with a system where the Laser can sail itself downwind in the big stuff while you use two hands to solve the Rubik's Cube (say a gyroscope, apparent wind, forward looking video, proprietary software to integrate it all in a laptop/GPS kit plopped just forward of the DB trunk) then the Oracle design team will come knocking on your door (forget about winch grinding).
This is cool!
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