There were 15 boats in the very first race for the Royal Yacht Squadron’s £100 Cup back in 1851, 14 British, and one not. The odd one out was a 101ft schooner named America, which had been built in New York, and brought across especially to show off the prowess of US shipbuilders. It arrived, in the words of one writer, like a sparrow hawk among a flock of wood pigeons. As every young English sailor learns at his grandfather’s knee, the story goes that when America came into sight at the end of the 53-mile (98km) race around the Isle of Wight, Queen Victoria, watching from the Royal Yacht, turned to a signalman and asked who was in second place behind it. “Your Majesty,” he is supposed to have said back to her, “there is no second.”
America won that first race by 24 minutes, and, the best part of 200 years later the British still have not come close to winning the trophy, which was soon renamed in the winner’s honour. They have not even had a chance since 1964, when Sovereign, skipped by Peter Scott, only child of Antarctic explorer Robert Scott, lost 4-0 to the US yacht Constellation.
Until now. At two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Sir Ben Ainslie will finally lead another British challenge for the Cup. His team, Ineos Britannia, won the right to race against the defending America’s Cup champions, Emirates Team New Zealand, by defeating four other competing teams, from Switzerland, Italy, the US, and France, in the Challenger Selection Series which finished last week. It has cost Ainslie and his team tens of thousands of hours, and hundreds of millions of pounds, just to make it this far. Now they have, at most, 13 races to find out whether it was all worth it. The first to seven wins.
“It’s a really proud moment for us,” Ainslie said on Friday. “We’ve been going for 10 years to get ourselves into this final, so what an opportunity this is. We’re going to give it everything we’ve got.” Ainslie, 47, has already won pretty much everything there is in his sport. He is the most successful sailor in Olympic history, and has won 11 world championship titles, and the America’s Cup too, as the tactician for Oracle Team USA in 2013. But this, the chance to become the first captain to win the Cup for Britain, has become his white whale. He has spent a decade chasing after it. His backer, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has put in well over £100m so far.
“Why?” Ainslie said, he turned to look at the trophy, affectionately known as the “auld mug”. “It speaks for itself doesn’t it? Britain is a very proud sporting nation, and has a very proud maritime history, and this Cup is the one thing that’s missing. That’s why. The fact that Britain has never won the America’s Cup is what drives us.”
Ainslie describes it as the hardest task in sport. New Zealand, under their captain, Peter Burling, have won the past two editions of the competition, and as defending champions they had the right to dictate the terms and conditions of the latest contest. On top of that, while Ainslie and his crew have spent the past three weeks competing in a series of gruelling races against the other challengers, the New Zealanders have been watching and working on their boat. They have had plenty of opportunity to study Ainslie’s strategy, and Ineos Britannia’s strengths and weaknesses on the water, but Ineos Britannia have no real idea what shape Emirates New Zealand will be in.
“In terms of who’s got the advantage I’d say for sure it is team New Zealand,” Ainslie said. “They’ve been able to have two or three weeks to work on the configuration of their boat, to get the data on the competing boats. If there’s one team here that really knows the competition, it’s Team NZ, not us. So that’s what we’re up against. But we’ve come through one incredible final, and we’re up for another. That’s the game.”
Ainslie’s co-helm, Dylan Fletcher, described Ineos Britannia as “pretty broken and knackered” after their last qualifying race against the Italian team Luna Rossa. Although on Friday, Fletcher said it was “exactly what we needed to prepare ourselves for the Kiwis”.
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The British team do have two aces to play. One is in their backroom. All the data from their boat is fed back to the analysis team at the Mercedes Formula One factory in Brackley, where analysts will work on it in real time. The tweaks they make to the boat’s configuration mean it will only get faster from one race to the next.
The New Zealanders will be doing the same thing, but do not have all that F1 expertise to draw on. Ineos Britannia’s other card is Ainslie himself, who has more experience in match racing than Burling. Not that Burling, who is a laconic sort, seems especially worried about the comparison. They said similar things about his contests against another great match racer, Jimmy Spithill, in 2017 and 2021, and Burling won both.
Still, the expectation is that these two boats will be more evenly matched, despite their radically different hulls. Which means that the Cup will probably come down to which of the two skippers is able to outmanoeuvre the other at the pre-start. The America’s Cup is a very long way from the sort of dinghy boats Ainslie started out in. He says himself that these AC75 yachts, which work almost on push button technology, have taken the sport to the point where they are almost over reliant on automation and that the human element “isn’t as relevant as it should be”. But it still tells, especially at that pre-start, when the two boats jostle for optimal position heading into the race. “Ultimately, the start is what’s going to define a race,” says Burling’s co-helm, Nathan Outteridge.
And the end is what it will be remembered for.