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AMERICAS CUP - Hamish Hooper blogs on America’s Cup drama, dominos and another AC72 launch in Auckland….
The organisers wanted drama in their new America’s Cup – well they have it. Arguably in greater quantity than they wanted.
The past week has illustrated just how much this edition of the America’s Cup is on a knife-edge. One day you look good and the very next day you look disastrous … literally.
As a result people are suggesting that right now Emirates Team New Zealand is significantly ahead of the competitors.
You can believe this or read into it as much as you want, but the reality from within the team is that each day the AC72 goes out on the Hauraki Gulf to test there is not a person in the team not on tenterhooks just hoping nothing big goes wrong.
These boats seem to be continuously like a domino on a knife-edge. If it falls, it has major consequences all the way down the line. And the bottom line is, if the domino falls off the knife within seconds we will be back to, if not behind, where some other teams are right now.
The stressful thing is that this situation, the worry and concern will never stop. Not until one boat – hopefully our boat – crosses the finish line first in the final race of the America’s cup match. It’ not until that moment will everyone in this team be able to take a massive sigh of relief.
That’s a long time to hold your breath, but whatever it takes.
Tomorrow the fourth domino will take its place on its knife-edge.
It’s Luna Rossa’s time to launch an AC72. No America’s Cup campaign would be complete without the Italians and this made me realise that remarkably half of the entire 34thAmerica’s cup fleet is going to be training and fine tuning for the next six months in an Auckland summer, while the other half are in San Francisco looking down the barrel of a cold six months of winter.
I know where I would rather be. But that’s beside the point, nothing else matters as long as we stay on that knife-edge until the end of racing next year
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