Kiwis on Match Point in 37th America’s Cup

We are now on Match Point at 6-2 with Emirates Team New Zealand ready to pull off a historic hat trick of winning the America’s Cup three times in a row. Actually, they will have won the Auld Mug once and are now defending it twice, but that is a point of minutia for the historians to debate as the New York Yacht Club won the Royal Yacht Squadron Cup once and defended the Cup 23 times, but never “won” the America’s Cup.

What was a “bad day in the office” in Races 5 and 6 to an almost certain dressing down and “sharpen-up” debrief from ETNZ coach Ray Davies and CEO Grant Dalton that night turned to a beatdown in Race 7 as the Kiwis picked up a massive shift at the start and sailed away over the horizon. They won by a margin of 1 m 13s to temporarily take a 5-2 lead going into the second race of the day.

It was a complicated race course, with a lot of puffs and shifts and a much flatter sea state that seemed to favor the Kiwis. But in Race 8, after their second solid start of the day, ETNZ put the pedal down on a monumental shift as they worked their way up the “conveyor belt,” in commentator Peter Lester’s words, to double the lead as they sailed away to Match Point picking the shifts and choosing the right sails.

With the Emirates Team New Zealand Kiwi Nation and their Māori spiritual inspiration, along with a massive infusion of New Zealanders, the team must feel right at home!

For Ben Ainslie and the INEOS Team, it is now one race at a time as they attempt to chip away at the Kiwis’ formidable lead. There was an issue with INEOS’s rudder, as coach Tony Wilson said they “had three moments with the rudder and may have hit something damaging the leading edge.”

In scoring two wins on Wednesday, the British signaled their intent with a massive wave of momentum. scoring one relatively easy win after ETNZ uncharacteristically fell off the foils in the pre-start of Race 5. This was followed up by a 7-second win, as the Kiwis were not giving in at all, leading to a good day for the INEOS Britannia team all around.

For the British, it’s the first time in over 90 years, since 1934, that they have won two races in an America’s Cup Match. They were shut out in 1958 and 1964. Sir T.O.M. Sopwith’s Endeavour scored the first two wins before Harold Vanderbilt’s Rainbow came back strongly to defend the Cup 4-2. History is certainly being made in Barcelona.

The opening race got underway on time with the wind above the 6.5-knot lower racing limit and a lumpy, bumpy sea state that the Brits’ “Flying Barge” loves as they dropped the Kiwis off their foils in an uncharacteristic mistake.

Still on their foils, Ainslie and company wing-washed ETNZ to really rub it in. It took the Kiwis a few minutes to point in the right direction to pop up on their foils and fly again. From that point on, for the Brits the race was all about staying on the foils, which became a moot point as the wind gradually increased as the race moved on.

“Big day, massive day for the team. We really needed that, and I can’t say enough about how everyone across the board responded to being four down,” said Ainslie. “It’s just little things, it really is. These boats are so fickle in terms of how you set them up and the techniques of how you sail them. Going up against the Kiwis and seeing some areas where we were perhaps a little bit behind, so full credit to the coaching team and the engineers trawling through the data trying to figure out how we can make some of those adjustments.”

“That first one was a real shocker by our standards; to get low speed on the port entry and then get into a situation where we couldn’t cross, or maybe could have, that was just one we would like to forget,” said Blair Tuke, ETNZ wing trimmer. “We had to kill time not to be early and then by the time we pulled the trigger we just got caught on the back of two real nasty set waves. Then there was probably a bit of mis-execution from us. You never want to put the boat into a low-speed jibe.”

I am having the time of my life and I am trying to relish every moment here as reality is setting in that the Kiwis have a tight grip on the Cup again.