Ripple effects hit after Navy ship’s sinking, clean-up efforts get under way in Dunedin and how one Wellingtonian is boycotting the city’s rates increase.
THREE KEY FACTS
Ineos Britannia (UK) won the Louis Vuitton Cup final 7-4.
Great Britain has not yet won the Auld Mug in the 173-year history of the America’s Cup.
The America’s Cup match is scheduled to begin on October 13 (NZ time).
Sir Ben Ainslie is the Ineos Britannia (Team UK) team principal and skipper. He’s the most successful Olympic sailor in history, with four golds and one silver medal.
OPINION
We enjoyed the aftermath of Friday’s Louis Vuitton Cup win. You have to celebrate the wins in this game and after a week like that it was only right, as a team, that we should take a moment to feel proud of how far we have come, and how we performed in that final series.
I’m sure you could tell what it meant to everyone (step forward Freddie Carr!) and how much pressure we were feeling. So yes, we sprayed some champagne and sang happy birthday to Ben Cornish, one of our cyclors, and generally enjoyed the moment with our friends and families.
But no one was getting carried away. There were no all-night benders on Friday. The sailing team will take the rest of the weekend off to decompress, as they should after such an intense battle. I want them back on Monday sharp and ready to go. But most of the team were back in the office on Saturday morning, working out how to make the boat faster.
Ineos Britannia and Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli battle it out during day six of the Louis Vuitton Cup final. The British team would go on to win the series. Photo / Ricardo Pinto, America's Cup
The truth is we have the opportunity of a lifetime here and we are going to give it absolutely everything.
New Zealand really are the ultimate challenge in modern-day America’s Cup racing. I was fortunate enough to be part of the Kiwi team in 2007 and it was an education. They are a well-drilled unit, with brilliant sailors, brilliant designers, led by a brilliant leader in Grant Dalton. And they have been doing this for a very long time.
This is only our third Cup after Bermuda in 2017 and Auckland in 2021. But do I believe we can do this and bring the Cup back to Britain for the first time? Absolutely I do.
I said from the outset, when people began writing us off after August’s preliminary regatta, that this was a development game. I felt confident there was more potential and headroom in our boat and I’m so proud of the way everyone stuck to their guns. I think we have developed really well in this competition – and by God we’re going to need to keep doing so because we know how quick New Zealand are.
The encouraging thing is we know there is more performance in there. Despite how closely matched we were with Luna Rossa, the design of our AC75 was not the same as theirs, and it is not the same as New Zealand’s either.
We took a risk going the way we did, designing and building a prototype test boat with our partners Mercedes F1. It used up precious time, and it was not all plain sailing. But it was a calculated risk. We feel there is still more performance in there and our job now is to unlock it.
We will look at what tweaks we can make over the weekend, study the long-range weather forecast, and come up with a plan for when we get Rita back on the water in the next few days.
What we cannot know, of course, is what New Zealand have been holding back. No one really knows until we get off the start line next Saturday. That is the beauty of sport, I guess. I’m sure they will have new sails, and newly modified foils and so on. They were already seriously quick in the round robins and they will not have been standing still.
What we do know, though, is that we are so much stronger for having gone through what we have just gone through. Not simply in terms of being battle-hardened, but in terms of our performance, which has gone through the roof. The benefits of match racing day after day against a seriously tough competitor are not to be underestimated.
‘Jimmy Spithill is the ultimate sportsman and a bloody good bloke’
I have to take my hat off to our coaching team of Rob Wilson, Xabi Fernandez and Ian Williams for analysing the competition and figuring out the plays. It is such a big part of this game and they have been solid throughout.
But it feels pointless singling anyone out. It really is a team effort. From our choice of sailplan in Friday’s race when the forecasts were all over the shop – we went with a slightly smaller jib in the end, which paid off – to the way the boys executed the start, to the shore team, it made me incredibly proud.
I want to say a couple of thank-yous. To Jimmy Spithill first of all. In your sporting life, you go up against one or two of the greats and Jimmy is right up there. It has been a privilege to race with him and against him. Jimmy is the ultimate sportsman and a bloody good bloke.
I think in these moments you also have to talk about the support of British sailing in general. From Jim Ratcliffe and the team at Ineos to all the people who have supported British America’s Cup teams over the last decades, going back 173 years. All of those backers, designers, engineers, shore crews, sailmakers, sailors, anyone who has ever been a fan of British sailing and British America’s Cup sailing. Winning the Louis Vuitton Cup was for them.
We hope we can deliver the big one now. Reaching a first Cup match in 60 years is great. But I think within 30 seconds of the finish line, a lot of us were already thinking about next weekend. Rest assured, we are up for the fight.
