Pleasure cruise aboard the ultimate rich man's toy
Matt Scott gets a taste of $120m of America's Cup action on Larry Ellison's BMW Oracle challenger
Matt ScottTuesday May 15, 2007
Guardian
If Roman Abramovich thinks he is getting a slice of the action with his £500m investment in Chelsea, perhaps he should take a look at Larry Ellison's toys. That is because Ellison, who with £10.6bn is 11th on the Forbes list of the world's richest people, compared with Abramovich's 16th, actually gets to be part of his America's Cup yacht-racing team. Every day Ellison clambers down from his super-yacht, Rising Sun, which at 450ft long is bigger than any in Abramovich's three-yacht fleet, to go racing aboard USA-98.He is no Jonah. The computer magnate's boat has qualified as BMW Oracle for the semi-finals of the challenger series for the America's Cup after coming second in the 10-team round-robin phase of the Louis Vuitton Trophy and last week I was a guest aboard while they raced against the fourth-placed Desafio Español.
It seemed to me that Ellison did not do much beyond taking readings of the distance between his yacht and the Spanish to give updates on progress. With the race already won after two hours in the Mediterranean off Valencia, he did snaffle some of the glory by taking the helm from his skipper, Chris Dickson, as the boat ran across the line with its spinnaker flying. Where Ellison did come into his own, though, was in founding and funding this highly successful team.
In this America's Cup, BMW Oracle is the so-called "challenger of record", which means it organises the preliminary regatta (alongside the holders) on behalf of all the other challengers in what is sport's oldest international tournament. More pertinently, it has been brought to Valencia with an investment estimated at $120m (£60m).
Drawing an analogy suited to an Oracle-sponsored boat, the New Zealander Dickson refers to the equipment as "the hardware" and the 17-man crew as "the software", but soft they are not. The budget has assembled a team of elite yachtsmen from around the world: Dickson is a five-times America's Cup campaigner, as is the American navigator, Peter Isler.
Dickson's 33-year-old compatriot, Gavin Brady, is already in his fourth cup and holds world titles in four different classes. With such talent aboard, Dickson is able to turn his boat like a formula one car. In the pre-start, where two boats vie for the better end of the start line, their activity is furious as ropes and rigging groan under the pressure and water spills over the gunwales. But such is the practised precision of the sailors that there is a silent calmness to their activities.
Energy is saved instead for output. Two men occupy each of three energy-sapping grinders, large winch barrels for hauling in the halyards that raise the sails and the sheets that trim them. It is estimated that the grinders can burn 5,000 calories in a day's sailing; it is small wonder they have backs and shoulders like rugby props.
But sailing is not only a contest against human opposition but also the elements, and here is where the former Olympian Brady's faculties are priceless. Spotting wind shifts and gusts is one of his focal roles and his accuracy is breathtaking: several times he said fresh gusts were 40 seconds away and you could set your watch by his predictions. "Growing up on little boats and getting it wrong, you capsize and get wet, so you learn very quickly," said Brady. But, as in everything to do with these yachts, natural aptitude is enhanced by technology.
"You have to guess the way the wind will hit the boat and you can see that because of the type of glasses we wear. They are polarised to show different colours according to the wind direction. If there is a darker patch on the water, that is a puff of wind. Whether it is a lift or a header is about the angle that it hits the boat. Because we have a 120ft mast, it hits aloft 10 seconds earlier than it hits the hull because of the friction of the water."
Everything to do with these boats is expertly engineered, and even the Henri Lloyd clothing is designed to optimise the power and concentration of the sailors around the course. The Australian Rod Daniel, who is a boat builder by trade but is competing in his third campaign with BMW Oracle, explains why America's Cup racing is known as sailing's formula one.
"A lot of the people in the racing team are from a technical background who've wanted to get off the tools and put in place what they know," he said. "There are other guys with a sails background, and I had a few ideas about the hull design. The boat-building team have got the tolerances down to nothing. There is a lot of load - these are big brutes."
I'd say Ellison has his money's worth.
1 comment:
didnt work though....
BMW Oracle Racing's dejected elimination from the challenger semi-finals at the hands of Italy's Luna Rossa ranks as the biggest corporate collapse since the 1987 America's Cup in Fremantle when a previous American team similarly dumbfounded expectations.
With skipper and chief executive Chris Dickson having all but surrendered on the start line in five races to Luna Rossa's James Spithill, and then sailed without any evident spark around the course, the was an inevitability about his elimination.
This took place yesterday morning after BMW Oracle fell 4-1 behind Luna Rossa in Saturday's race in which Dickson fouled the Italian boat twice in the pre-start. An already acute situation in the first-to-five-wins Luis Vuitton Cup semi-final turned critical.
Larry Ellison, one of the corporate giants of the burgeoning software billionaires, was not in Saturday's crew but he made his presence felt yesterday. Just after 10am, Dickson was seen leaving the BMW Oracle base. The team then con-firmed that Danish tune-up driver Sten Mohr was to steer and tactician Gavin Brady given the nominal skipper's role too.
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As a fix, few outside the team believed this would work. The 180 team members had to believe it would arrest their four-year campaign's gathering descent into oblivion. U2's singularly inappropriately titled Vertigo as a dock-out song was dropped, and if the cheers and wishes of the hundreds of family members and supporters could have buoyed USA 98 as it left the dock, it would have.
Mohr got an even start, but Spithill and tactician Torben Grael, who have gelled into devastating partnership, worked ITA 94 into an early lead. Some 80 minutes later, it was all over. Ellison shook his crew by the hand. Dickson, while admitting his future is uncertain, says he will be back.
The Italians, in their third campaign from Prada boss Patrizio Bertelli, had muscled aside a team considered for the past three years the strongest of all 11 challengers. Not since the America II syndicate from the New York YC have such a team blessed with time, money and opportunity, been subjugated and subdued by a rival.
It was only 12 days ago that Brady declared at the end of the rounds robin that USA 98 was "formidable", a view shared by rivals and observers alike, and that Dickson "was sailing better than I have ever seen".
"This is not the exit we hoped for," Dickson said last night. In saying "we didn't have any glaring weaknesses" many would disagree, including his own team members who had conceded he had sailed badly. Com-pounding the matter was that the tactics from Brady and Eric Doyle were no match for the virtuosity exhibited by Grael.
"We got outclassed," added Dickson, confirming precisely what had occurred not just in six races, but at every turning mark in those races. Only once did USA 98 have its bow in front and this was the last 500 metres of the second race.
"If there was something glaringly obvious we would have done something about it," Dickson said.
Spithill and Grael have won the plaudits for Luna Rossa's triumph but enormous credit is due to their leader Franceso de Angelis. After the last America's Cup, Bertelli said he was done. But de Angelis coolly analysed why the Prada challenge of 2003 had been less successful than in 2000, and in his words, "made a new recipe" which went far beyond taking himself off the helm and putting Spithill on it.
Luna Rossa have an 11-day break while the other semi-finalists, Emirates Team New Zealand and Desafio Espanol, continue to race. The Spanish pulled another race back yesterday, converting a fractional lead at the first mark into something defendable by holding off the Kiwis on the crucial first downwind leg. With the score at 4-2 to the Kiwis, today is a lay-day.
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