Gary Jobson (eBook)

1 Troubling Forecasts I counted the days. The first race of the 31st America's Cup Finals was soon, scheduled for February 15. Still home in Maryland-8,000 miles from the racecourse-the deadline loomed. As a reporter for ESPN, I needed to get out to New Zealand-to walk the docks and talk to sailors and get behind the headlines. I would normally be itching to get out to the Cup racecourse and capture the story, but something strange was happening to me. For the first time in my career, I couldn't imagine getting on that plane to the Cup races. It wasn't for lack of interest in the America's Cup, an event that has long been such a big part of my career that it's impossible to separate the story of the event from the story of my life. By now, the two are permanently braided together. I saw my first 12 Meter at age 12, on a family trip to Newport, Rhode Island. Weatherly slipped through the water under tow. Her hull was enormous and her rig towered into the clouds-an overwhelming sight to a kid sailing dinghy-sized boats. I dreamed of someday becoming a Cup sailor on a Twelve. By the time I was in my late twenties, I had my chance when Ted Turner invited me to be his tactician aboard Courageous for the 1977 Cup. Over a summer of racing against two other U.S. boats for the right to defend the Cup, our crew developed into a solid team. We had chemistry like no team I had known before and no team I've known since-and we won the Cup against Australia. Since then, I've been involved with every America's Cup as a sailor or a television journalist. But now, that flight to New Zealand seemed as long as a moon shot. I was not ready to go. It wasn't for lack of finding a good story, either. After several rounds of racing in the Louis Vuitton Cup-an elimination series when challenging syndicates vie for the right to match-race the Defender of the Cup-the Challenger I predicted to win was named. But the outcome seemed too mythic. If a fiction writer crafted the story, it would seem contrived. Truth, however, was stranger than fiction. The Swiss team Alinghi-with New Zealanders Russell Coutts at the helm and Brad Butterworth calling tactics-would be on the starting line of the America's Cup Finals. These Kiwi sailors were racing against the syndicate of their homeland, but the irony was, Coutts and Butterworth were once part of the team that won the Cup for New Zealand in the first place. Their win was history making in this small Pacific nation, a classic David-and-Goliath story. But now, these Kiwi sailors were coming like thieves in the night to wrest the coveted prize from their countrymen. In 1995, Coutts and Butterworth were part of the New Zealand team that came to the Cup racecourse in San Diego as a unified front. They sailed two boats, Black Magic 1 and Black Magic 2, and this syndicate sailed like their boats, like magic. With a limited budget and strong leadership from the late Sir Peter Blake, they spent where it counted. And what this syndicate lacked in funding they made up for in raw talent and heart: they won the challenger selection and swept the America's Cup 5-0 against the U.S. Defender Young America, becoming the second nation since 1851 to take the Cup away from the Americans.