Swiss better hope they can get their boat out of Persian Gulf
By ERIC SHARP
FREE PRESS SPORTS WRITER
How’s this as a nightmare scenario for Team Alinghi, Switzerland’s entry in the 2010 America’s Cup, which is supposed to start Feb. 8?
Sheikh Saqr bin Mohammad al-Qassimi, the ruler of Ras Al Khaimah, selling tourists rides on his private yacht, a 115-foot catamaran formerly called Alinghi that he seized from the Swiss team as compensation for the $120 million he blew building a marina for an America’s Cup that was promised to his country but moved to Valencia, Spain?
That possibility came to mind after Cory Friedman, a lawyer-sailor from New York City, wrote a fascinating analysis on the Scuttlebutt Web site about the continuing fight by Alinghi’s sponsor, the Societe Nautique de Geneve, to hold the cup in Ras al Khaimah despite telling a court that it would race a 113-foot American trimaran off Valencia, Spain.
The New York State Supreme Court ruled recently that Alinghi could stage the event at Valencia, site of the last cup in 2007, or at any suitable venue in the southern hemisphere, which Ras al Khaimah is not.
The Swiss said OK, Valencia it is. But the echoes of that utterance hadn’t faded away when Alinghi announced it would continue its appeal to get Ras al Khaimah reinstated.
Why the backpedaling? As Friedman wrote, “What SNG did not seem to expect was that hell hath no fury like an Emirate scorned. It seemed that there was the little matter ... of the $120 million that RAK invested, based upon SNG’s representations that the match would be held there. Apparently, the Sheik of RAK cannot take a joke, as one of the (Persian) Gulf media published a report that RAK was ‘considering its options.’ That is U.S. lawyer speak for ‘we are not taking this lying down.’
“Being an absolute monarchy with no rule of law at all other than the Sheik’s whim tends to broaden the ‘options’ when the guy who done RAK wrong and plans on moving on to a new Spanish lover happens to have a very expensive racing catamaran and lots of other goodies parked in RAK’s garage -- and the Sheik has the only key to the garage,” Friedman wrote.
Meanwhile, Oracle-BMW continues to refine its big tri off San Diego with its new hard-wing sail, which is bigger than the wing of the largest Airbus jetliner and reportedly has driven the boat more than three times faster than the wind speed.
It’s my heartfelt desire that, despite court battles and potential international intrigue, we’ll eventually see a match between the two wildest, fastest and cutting-edge racing yachts the world has ever seen, a race that finally will validate the foresight of Nathaniel Herreshoff.
In 1876, Herreshoff entered a 33-foot catamaran called Amaryllis in a New York Yacht Club Centennial Regatta and scared the crap out of the yachting establishment by winning going away.
The radical boat, the first of its kind in the United States, was amazingly advanced with touches like ball-and-socket joints at the end of the crossbeams that let the twin hulls ride the waves independently.
After Herreshoff won the race for yachts under 36 feet, the anonymous writer who covered the event for the New York World wrote presciently, “It behooves the owners of the large schooners” that competed for the America’s Cup “to take counsel together, lest somebody should build an Amaryllis a hundred feet long and convert their crafts into useless lumber.”
The writer was suggesting that the owners of the big yachts should embrace new ideas and technology like Herreshoff’s boat. But that’s not the way establishments normally react when their noses are tweaked. Instead, the New York Yacht Club and other major clubs banned multihull boats from their events.
Something similar happened in cycling a half-century later when a second-class rider, Francois Faure, showed up for races in Europe with a recumbent bicycle on which the rider sat in a reclining position.
Faure soon was hammering first-class pros in major races and set world speed records for the kilometer, mile and one hour. Predictably, the International Cycling Union followed the line of the sailing establishment and wrote new rules that banned recumbents from its events.
Because of that kind of thinking, Herreshoff, America’s most renowned yacht designer, and other brilliant, inventive people who designed sailboats and bicycles could no longer work on technological breakthroughs like multihulls and recumbents because the people they depended for their livings would no longer buy them.
It took nearly another 100 years before catamarans earned grudging acceptance from the sailing establishment, when Hobie Alter, a California surfboard shaper, designed a 14-footer that could be launched from a beach.
Hobie’s cat was relatively cheap, tough as nails, very fast and a lot of fun. The Hobie 14 and its bigger Hobie siblings were bought by the tens of thousands by young sailors who didn’t give a darn about yacht clubs and held their regattas right off public beaches.
You have to wonder what sailboats and bicycles would be like today if we had enjoyed the benefit of 75-100 years of development by the top designers and racers, instead of a century of refining orthodoxy.
We’re fortunate that automobile and aircraft designers didn’t need to kowtow to the kind of international mandarins who control yachting and cycling but were rewarded for building faster and more efficient models (although the Royal Air Force rejected the first jet engine, invented by an Englishman.)
Otherwise, we’d still be clinging to the exposed wings of biplanes and driving on solid tires.
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