AC 34 Details Revealed

With bated breath, the sailing world has been waiting for months for a definitive announcement regarding the 34th America’s Cup. Today it got a little satisfaction with the announcement that the next Cup match will be contested on hard-wing 72-ft catamarans in 2013. The new-look America’s Cup and its protocol were unveiled in a joint press conference hosted by the Golden Gate YC and the Challenger of Record Club Nautico di Roma in Valencia.

"We need to have the best sailors in the world sailing the fastest boats in the world," BMW Oracle Racing CEO Russell Coutts said in a conference call this morning following the announcement.

While there’s been plenty of what has turned out to be true speculation with regard to the AC 72 catamaran, the 2013 date was a bit of a surprise as was the announcement that the new, annual series of traveling events leading up to the Cup — dubbed the "America’s Cup World Series" — would start in 2011 in a one design 45-ft hard wing cat. The AC 45 will allow new teams a chance to come to grips with the new technology before building their custom AC 72s with 130-ft tall wings for 2012. Another very pleasant surprise is that once the AC 72s come online, the AC 45s will be sailed for a "Youth America’s Cup."

The new boats sound fantastic, the racing should be very high-intensity, and the youth protion will have a dramatic impact as a kind of "minor leagues" element that should bring a whole new demographic into the sport and hopefully broaden sailing’s audience. As far as their suitability for match racing, the multis should be awesome.

Although a 2014 date for the next match would have better played into the chances that the Bay will host the next match, we still think there’s a chance. We don’t have the space here to go into all the reasons why we think so, but we can tell you that a high-powered organizing committee that includes people like Peter Stoneberg, Tom Perkins, Malin Burnham, and John Sangmeister are proceeding at full speed.

"The City has said unequivocally that they can be ready for a Cup match in 2013," Stonberg said. "The City has known that it would be a possibility and have been planning for it all along — it won’t change the attitude of the City.

Stoneberg also said that the proposal Mayor Newsom’s office pitched to Larry Ellison and BMW Oracle Racing two weeks ago was "received very positively," and that it significantly elevated San Francisco’s stock as a potential host site.

During the time period surrounding that meeting and in the ensuing weeks, BMW Oracle Racing spent a lot of time meeting interested parties around the Bay. A recurrent theme was that they wanted to see visible support for a Cup match on the Bay. The best place to start is with us sailors, and there are a number of things that we can do to show the team, the City, and the world at large how much we want the next match here.

First of all, if you haven’t already done so, fan the Bring America’s Cup 34 to San Francisco Bay Facebook page, and implore all of your Facebook friends to do the same — let’s try multiply the page’s 4,700 fans many times over. Second, send an email of support to Mayor Gavin Newsom. Third, there’s a chance, although its not yet finalized, that there will be a petition circulated at this week’s Rolex Big Boat Series. Finally, possibly one of the most visible and effective ways to get right to BMW Oracle Racing’s top brass, would be to sail this year’s Leukemia Cup, where Coutts will be the keynote speaker at Saturday night’s dinner. Imagine what it would do for our chances if a fleet of 300 or more boats — not unlike the one that’s shown up for the last couple Three Bridge Fiascos — were to be on hand when the CEO of BMW Oracle Racing was in town.

We need to show the powers that be that the Bay is "The Place for the Race."