Alinghi goes 1-0 up as Team New Zealand comes apart

by Magnus Wheatley 15 Feb 2003 11:26 GMT

Photo © Th. Martinez / Alinghi Team The two teams close upwind before Team New Zealand broke their boom Photo © Ivor Wilkins Team New Zealand ships water upwind

It took all of twenty minutes for Team New Zealand to implode in race one of America’s Cup XXXI. Everything that could go wrong did from the design side and serious weaknesses have been exposed that may be too late to sort out and defend the Cup. As the wind Gods served up a constant breeze of 26 knots with gusts that at times hit 30 knots, the race committee took the decision to start the race in the hope that the stronger breeze would favour the Kiwis. It was a decision that within 20 minutes came back to haunt them.

Alinghi looked more than comfortable in the pre-pre start, sailing around pinging their deltas and checking their laylines with consummate ease. Meanwhile Team New Zealand seemed to have difficulty with sail selection, making a late call for a change and looked at sixes and sevens as the five-minute gun fired. The official answer was that they damaged a jib halyard in some straight-line testing with NZL-81 (who incidentally also suffered gear damage) and this was the start of a catalogue of problems as the men in black looked anything but comfortable on the bumpy Hauraki Gulf.

As both boats entered the starting box, Alinghi looked nimble and quickly angled down towards Team New Zealand as the breeze rose to 28 knots. In those conditions a dial-up can cause all sorts of problems so as Russell Coutts lured Dean Barker into going head to wind, he declined and took their transom. Barker bore away and headed off to the committee boat end of the line whilst Coutts executed a poor downspeed turn and failed to get hard on to their tail. With the clock counting down within the final two minutes Coutts gybed away to take the leeward position whilst Barker tacked around to get the windward side.

Barker suddenly felt uneasy being to windward of the ‘master’ and tried desperately to get the hook on Alinghi by dialing down on their transom in a daring move. Coutts had it covered and bore sharply away before winding up for the final approach. If anything the gauge between the two boats was too great meaning that Team New Zealand had a slight edge but Coutts aced his time on distance to hit the line at full speed and held an initial one-second advantage.

Now it was arm-wrestling match-racing at its very best as both boats tried to out-muscle one another on a drag race out on starboard. Team New Zealand looked to have a very stiff set up and was certainly handling the 2 metre swells better, sailing higher and a fraction faster. Coutts kept Alinghi beautifully on track to leeward and started to get into the groove with the waves as TNZ’s problems started to take their toll. With an umpire and 17th man perched on the very aft of the transom, TNZ started to ship on water just aft of the runner winch. This wasn't just a little, try about five to six tons and with the buckets out, two crew-members were desperately trying to bail. The concentration had gone in the afterguard and the balance of the boat was fatally flawed as ‘killer Coutts’ mercilessly closed the gauge hand over fist eventually forcing Barker to tack away on to port.

With the loading dramatically increasing on the hull and rig due to the water, TNZ were a stroke away from a real disaster occurring and had very few answers to their problems. Alinghi was striding into the lead and as they tacked back on to port, Team New Zealand came back on starboard and that long awaited first cross was about to happen. The Virtual Spectator had Alinghi ahead by 45-50 metres but on the water we could see that TNZ were having major problems as their boom outhaul fitting had failed, tearing the lens foot of the mainsail and leaving it nearly three feet out from maximum. The failure was a pure carbon explosion on the strut end of Team New Zealand’s radical new truss boom. The team had been having concerns about the gooseneck fitting but ultimately it was the outboard end that failed and effectively their race was over in any competitive sense.

Things, however, were about to get much much worse. As Alinghi crossed clear ahead, storming into the lead, the tack ring on the genoa exploded on NZL-82, ripping the luff of the genoa clean out of its track all the way to the head and sending the sail flapping dangerously aft. The crew managed to get the sail down as Barker bore away to get the jib behind the mainsail but the jib luff track was irreversibly damaged. The foredeck team did a good job in clearing the old jib and getting a new sail up on deck and launched within three minutes. However as the new sail reached half height it too pulled out of the track and the team were in serious danger of losing the rig altogether. That was game over for Team New Zealand who had no other option other than to retire and their chase boat was quickly on the scene and the tow rope attached before any more carnage snowballed.

Alinghi then sailed conservatively for the rest of the race although at the first mark they kept the pressure on by executing a perfect hoist and set. After it became clear that Team New Zealand were no longer in the race, the Alinghi team backed off and dropped their kite before gybing and never again bringing it above decks. They crossed the finish line five legs later having been on cruise control, bare headed and nailed the first nail in the coffin of the Cup holders.

At the press conference afterwards it was all excuses for Team New Zealand saying that they hadn’t raced in such extreme conditions and that they had taken on water before "to some extent" but not as much as they did today. From the outside it looks like they’ve got fundamental design problems that may be ironed out by the expected lighter breezes tomorrow. However they're 1-0 down in the best of nine and Dean Barker’s body language and demeanour reflects a man on the receiving end of a major psychological blow. Russell Coutts on the other hand was annoyed that there wasn’t enough competition and that’s the mark of a real winner. Team New Zealand have their backs to the wall…

More Information:

• YachtsandYachting.com America's Cup Section