Update – Finally! Wind in Valencia

Two races on both race courses today. 7-10 knots from 100 degrees.

The big story of the day was Mascalzone Latino beating Team New Zealand in the first match of the day. It was a great race by the Italians who won the start, took the favored right side and led around every mark to win by 15 seconds. The beautiful thing about this win is that it wasn’t a fluke. No lucky shifts just a solid game plan and good execution. Mascalzone’s weather team picked the correct side, the helmsman got the side they wanted, the right side, the boat is fast and the crew executed perfectly. That is solid and they can count on that for the next few months.

In the second flight Mascalzone beat Areva of France to finish the day on two wins along with Luna Rosa and BMW Oracle. BMW Oracle has two rather easy races beating the Chinese and the Germans while Luna Rossa beat China and the Swedes.

Team New Zealand only raced in the first flight and had a bye in the second. The Spanish did not race in the first flight and won their only race of the day against +39, the third Italian team. Each team has a bye in each round robin as there are 11 teams therefore 5 matches in each flight.

The top of the leader board is Luna Rosa and BMW Oracle each with 7 points, Mascalzone is third with 6, Desafio is forth with 5, and Team New Zealand tied for 5th with Victory Challenge with 4 points.

Of course our job on Italian TV was made easier with the good results of the Italian Teams. The news of Mascalzone’s win of TNZ was huge in Italy. All the TV channels covered the story on their nightly news programs. La7, who I am working for, is the only one who has the rights to show the racing live.

For me, it was a great day. Lot’s of action, plenty of tactical situations to comment on, and I am feeling very comfortable in Italian. So far I have to say I am enjoying this new challenge.

Tomorrow’s forecast is not stellar. In fact, there isn’t much wind on the horizon for the next week. So it looks like we will be in some margin race conditions for a while.

Tomorrow morning there is a meeting of the challengers to decide how to proceed with the missed races and the one day of rest scheduled between Round Robin 1 and 2.

At least we have got this thing started.

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Paul Cayard and a challenge with Desafio

Paul Cayard is a sailing legend. The winner of the Louis Vuitton Cup with Il Moro di Venezia in 1992, he won the Whitbread Round the World race 1997/1998 and has been involved with several successful sailing teams in a number of regattas. Prior to the start of the Louis Vuitton Cup he spent two months as a technical and sporting advisor for Desafío Español 2007.

What was you main role in Desafío Español 2007?

I mostly gave them ideas on what the priorities should be at this late stage in the competition. In the America’s Cup you make a plan two years before, and you also start a lot of projects. Research into special masts, special keels, rudders… Many projects are put in motion. And you get to the end and obviously these plans aren’t all finished. One mistake is to continue spending money, time and energy chasing something that isn’t going to give any fruit. With experience you know which ones to cut to save energy, time and money, and use it somewhere else, where you will see the results. That is really the important game in the end.

Besides the budget, what are the main differences between a winning team and a losing team?

The difference is when to make a decision. If a team has been chasing after something for a year and a half and still nothing has come from it then it must be forgotten. Whether it is a decision about the boat, the crew or whatever, there is often a tendency to keep discussing and worrying about something, wasting energy when you just have to make a decision. One of my philosophies is that if two things are so similar that it makes it hard to decide then you should just pick one, because it doesn’t matter. It is important not to waste any more time on it because there is probably something else that will make much more difference, where you really need the time. If you get it wrong in that case you can lose a lot, but if two things are going to have a similar outcome, it’s not worth wasting any more time on it, since in the end it will be the same anyway.

The Cup has got to a stage where all the teams are multicultural, what are the challenges they are facing?

One big challenge for the Desafío is not only the language but the culture, and I know it well because I worked with Il Moro di Venezia as an American. When you have multicultural teams I think everybody has to come to a common denominator that is not the language. So what is it? The professionalism, respect and solidarity: the fact that everyday at 8.00 we are all in the gym fighting together. When we lose the race, we lose together, and when we win the race we win together. It goes beyond the language and the culture. You have to go beyond that to find what it is that is keeping us together. And I hope that by just talking about it we made everybody think about it. But for sure that is going to be a challenge for Desafio. Every team will lose a race here with somebody that they thought they should beat. But the question is, when they lose that race, are they going to lose their solidarity as well? Or are they going to stay tight and come out for the next race again with 110% on the table?

What was a typical day like with Desafío?

8.00 Gym, 9.00 shower, 9.15 breakfast, 9.45 interviews, 10.15 head of departments meeting, crew meeting, then performance meeting. 12.30 out on the water. 5 or 6 dock, take sails off the boat, fold genoas in the loft. Short meeting for department heads to make a plan, performance analysis of the day. 8.00pm home.

Paco Tormo/AB

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Update from Valencia

These days are getting very redundant. Valencia: 0 for 4. What are the odds of this? I asked the great meteorologist Roger “Clouds” Badham this morning, “less than 1 in a million” was his reply.

For sure this is a record that will stand for a very long time. I have been sailing for 40 years this year. The only time I can think of that I was at a regatta and did not race for four days in a row may be at the 1978 Star North Americans in Toronto. We took up lawn bowling on that occasion!

There may be one good reason that there hasn’t been any wind for four days. You may remember that +39 broke its only new mast during the fleet racing two weeks ago. They were hit by the Germans and it was the Germans’ fault. The Germans offered to give +39 one of their spare version 5 masts…the latest. The jury was willing to make the necessary changes to make it happen but the challenger group voted it down. So +39 put in an old Alinghi mast and has been “ready to race” with that mast since the beginning of Round Robin 1. Meanwhile their shore team has been working night and day to repair the broken mast. The mast will be put in the boat tonight and +39 will sail at 0800 tomorrow to tune the repaired rig. Being an Italian team, maybe someone above is taking care of the justice!

The agitation amongst the teams and sponsors is growing. The television teams are going crazy trying to figure out how to handle their audiences.

For me at La7, today was my busiest day. At 0830 I met with Roger Badham and we filmed and 5 minute piece on why there has been no wind here for four days. Roger explained that there has been virtually no gradient (system driven winds) wind around Valencia in this period. In this case, we need to rely on a thermal wind, also known as a sea breeze. A sea breeze is a circulation of air; cooler air onto warmer land, which heats up and rises to a few thousand feet and then heads out over the cooler water, where it cools and descends back down to the surface and then is sucked back over the warm land. The problem hasn’t been the heat and temperature differential. The problem has been that the little bit of gradient aloft is in the opposite direction to that of the recirculation warm air aloft, going out over the water to be cooled. This has blocked the circulation and the “pump has not been able to get primed”.

Next I went to +39 to see their mast repair and do a piece on the role of the Pit Man onboard one of these boats. With all the halyards and foreguy, topping lift, etc. in that area one realizes pretty quickly that an octopus would be the best animal for that job.

Then we went live at 1400 for 10 minutes and maintained a vigil in the studio waiting for the start of the race. It looked more promising than other days as the boats were sailing, heeled upwind, gennakers downwind. Yet the committee did not feel the wind was stable enough to give start.

So at 1730, La7, my TV station, ran a 30 minute special. First, we showed the piece with clouds filmed earlier this morning. Then we did a piece on Luna Rossa who played soccer this morning. Then I did a “stand up” live, on the importance of righting moment to a sail boat. The subject of righting moment has come into focus since the unveiling on April 1.

There is speculation over here that Alinghi has found a away to increase their righting moment by moving the keel while racing. Photos of the Alinghi keel show a “buldge” in the top 30cm of the fin section nearest the hull. Some are speculating that the “buldge” is the housing of some sort of trick mechanism to control the keel laterally. As the rules strictly prohibit this, I think it is more likely that if anything at all, they may have found a way to reduce the amount of deflection of the keel fin while under load, upwind. It may even be that the attachment of the keel is done in a trick way so as to make use of the loads on the keel or mast. Any reduction of leeward deflection of the keel would translate into greater righting moment. Some teams seem very distracted by this and others less. It is also possible that the keel fin is simply thicker there which would reduce deflection. Of course there is a cost to having a thicker fin, that being drag. But the designers make calculations on the tradeoff of the gain of having the bulb held closer to centerline versus the added drag of the thicker section. It is even possible that there is nothing to it and that Alinghi is just enjoying the disruption that this is causing some of the challengers. It would not surprise me if that was the case.

So as is typical of the America’s Cup, the pot is being stirred. Never a dull moment even while we are setting records for numbers of days without sailing a single race!

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Update from Valencia

In baseball, it’s 3 strikes and you’re out!

It is official….this is a record for the number of days at the beginning of the Louis Vuitton Cup without a race.

The bad news is that tomorrow is still the same synoptic situation. Friday things start to change a bit and there is a bit of movement.

The story is this – synoptically, there is very little gradient wind here this week. No fronts, no lows, no isobars, no nothing. There is a very slight Northeast flow over the top of a mild low pressure that is over Algeria, south of Valencia.

So, we are dependent on thermal heating to create a sea breeze. On a clear day, the sun heats the land, it also heats the air above the land. This air rises and circulates back out over the cooler water. This cooler air then sinks where it then flows back over the shore creating wind. The bigger the temperature differential between the cooler water and the warmer land, the stronger the sea breeze.

The problem here is 1) it is spring time and the temperature differential is not that great, as the land is only getting to 22C these days and 2) the little bit of gradient there is, is coming from the Northeast and the upper air circulation of the sea breeze here in Valencia, needs to flow to the East. So we have the two breezes fighting at 5,000 feet and therefore, no circulation.

Maybe it is time to put a call into the Vatican Yacht Club.

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Update from Valencia

O for 2. No wind again. Very frustrating for the TV rights holders…those who invested a great deal to broadcast the races live in their home countries. Of course it is frustrating for the spectators too. Imagine the people who have planned trips to Valencia, paid money for the hotel and rides on boats to go out and watch. It is tough on everyone, but there is nothing to do but be patient.

It will come good, but what a shame to start off this way. I can’t remember a Louis Vuitton Cup that started with no sailing on the first two days. I think it is a record and it will be hard to beat in the future. Let’s hope we don’t extend the record.

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Round Robin 1-Day One

Unfortunate start to the 32nd America’s Cup season…no racing today. This is a very unfortunate reality of our sport. If there is no wind, there is no race. With anticipation built up over four years for the first AC from Europe, the fact that there was no race today was a let down for the sailors and spectators alike.

I have taken on a new challenge for this America’s Cup; that of commentating the races for TV. It is a challenge to bring such a technical sport to the public, trying to keep it simple yet exciting. Just to make things a little extra challenging, I am doing it in Italian.

I am working with a great team of people; 80 in total, for La7 which is the Italian rights holder for this Cup. Paolo Cecinelli is the pro and Luca Bontempelli, a journalist, and I are the “color”. I think that is the term for it. We have a nice young girl named Chiara, who runs the Virtual Eye (AC Managements version of Virtual Spectator) for us on the set. Of course we have our colleagues on each race course and around the harbor who bring us stories and round out the picture of what is going on with the whole event. So it is a big operation and all new to me.

Hopefully we will get under way tomorrow. The forecast isn’t great though and we are already stressing out over what we will do if there is no wind tomorrow. There is only so much you can rehash from the past or stories to tell. We need the goods! Hopefully Tuesday Valencia will deliver!

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Italy’s Corriere della Sera launched its new magazine ‘Style – Yachting

To mark the start of the 32nd America’s Cup, Italy’s Corriere della Sera launched its new magazine ‘Style – Yachting’. The ‘official Italian guide’ to the America’s Cup profiles all of the teams and features Paul Cayard ‘L’arma in piu’ – the secret weapon of Desafio Espanol.

View the entire article (Adobe Acrobat format – Acrobate Required)

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Update from Valencia # 3

I have just returned to San Francisco after finishing my second and last session with Desafio Espanol 2007. People ask me if it will be hard to watch the Cup rather than participate. Not really. I know that it takes three years of total dedication to prepare a team to compete in the America’s Cup. For me, it has been important, during the past three years, to have at least some time at home with my family, especially my kids who are finishing up high school and entering university. There is a time for everything and some things can’t be rescheduled.

It was interesting for me to be on the inside of the AC game after a few years away. Some areas of the campaign have really been taken to new heights. Others are just the same. The main thing that is the same is that it is all about people. It is about the individuals you start with and the team you build with them. It is about making a strategy and managing the path you take in consideration of the constantly changing environment. And now, in the end, it is about taking what you have, whether it is what you had hoped for or not, making a “game day” strategy and winning the important races.

Desafio have a good team. Like many teams, they will need to continue to improve as the racing goes on. Probably no team is as good today as the winner will be in the final race of the Cup. So everyone has to evolve. To do that well, you have to be astute observers and then flexible to allow for some change. How much you attempt to change is another $200 million question. This is where experience comes in.

I found the performance analysis aspect of the campaign to be quite improved. The amount of data collected, the format developed for reviewing that data and the key people in the analysis department who lead the debriefs with the sailors; all were quite impressive.

The first week of April is a big show and tell week. On April 1st, the teams were required to unveil the underbodies of their boats. Anyone could walk into a base, within 3 meters of a boat, and inspect it. It is quite interesting to see what tradeoffs teams have made in terms of drag and righting moment and size of appendages for control. In addition, the last training regatta, ACT 13, got underway yesterday. It is a fleet racing event that lasts until Friday. This is a chance for all teams to gauge their performance against their rivals just before the all-important Round Robins start on April 16th.

Once the Round Robins start, it will be all over for 7 of the 11 challengers very quickly. Unlike previous America’s Cup’s, this Cup reduces the challenger group to four boats in three weeks. No time to make changes to your boat after learning something from a bit of racing. This favors the big teams that have had both time and good boats to do their own development in house.

As for me, I will be providing commentary for the Italian TV rights holder, La7. I will be working with Paolo Cecinelli who brought Il Moro di Venezia into Italian households in 1992. La7 has a good team in Valencia of over 80 people all up, so this is a very professional broadcast. This is a new challenge for me, to try to bring my passion and enthusiasm for sailing to the public. There is the added challenge of doing this in Italian, rather than English. So I will be in Valencia for 12 days a month, then back home in San Francisco for the rest of the month, throughout the spring.

If you are planning on following the Cup this spring, don’t wait too long, if you blink you will miss half of it.

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Cayard to Commentate on the America’s Cup for Italy’s La 7

During the 32nd America’s Cup, Paul Cayard will join the Italian broadcaster La 7 as a special guest commentator, providing expertise and insight into the racing in Valencia. Cayard will feature regularly on “Forza Sette”, the broadcast moderated by Paolo Cecinelli, aired daily at 2.00 pm, Cayard will report on the exciting and compelling sailing from the studios, as well as on the water in Valencia.

Cayard will combine his true passions for sailing and Italy, core elements of the “Paul Cayard legend”. Seven-time world champion and double Olympian, Cayard is also an America’s Cup veteran, having taken part in five editions of the event. Cayard is well known in Italy for his exceptional feat as Skipper of Il Moro di Venezia in the 1992 Louis Vuitton Cup which was won by the Italian team and for the 2000 Louis Vuitton Cup Final when Cayard raced as Skipper of America One against Luna Rossa.

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Update from Valencia

My first stint with Desafio came to an end earlier this month. I was just getting comfortable with the boats and the team when it was time to return to California. My family is taking high priority right now, so although it was not ideal in terms of timing, it is important for me to be back at home for now.

I will return to Valencia next week, for two more weeks, to do what I can to help Desafio in their final preparations for the Louis Vuitton Cup. They are a good team and will certainly be in the thick of the battle.

Of course I can’t say much about exactly what we are working on except the obvious things that all teams are doing at this stage: refining the performance of the race boat, figuring out what makes the boat go better up range and down range, getting ready to be able to shift gears to match up to the performance of primary competitors once they are known, race testing all support teams, and just doing a lot of close racing in house to sharpen the instinctive reactions of all onboard.

There are some procedural things that have to be done in anticipation of the event. Measurement of the boats and sails is one and that has been done while I have been away.

One thing I think could throw a curve ball at some teams is the weather in April. April is still definitely spring and the previous racing in Valencia has never started this early. February was 15-20 knots 75% of the time. Most teams have designed their boats for 9-14 knots which is expected in June. But to get to June, you have to survive April and May. The competition is going to be tough. I think there will be a number of “upsets”. All this will mix up the results a bit more than expected and create some anxiety for the teams that are “supposed” to be there in May.

It will be fast and furious for six teams; the regatta will be a three week event for them. You only have to look at that reality to become extremely motivated.

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