Letter from America's Cup #7: An Optimistic Brit by Mark Covell
Published 01:00 on 10 Oct 2024
Photo credit Ian Roman / America's Cup. Previously in my letters from the America's Cup, you may have picked up on my optimistic tone when it comes to going all the way and the idea of winning the 37th Edition here in Barcelona. I've asked you to dare to dream. I've asked you to picture defending the Auld Mug in the Solent and I've hopefully transported you to the sunny Catalonian waterfront to vicariously witness Ineos Britannia winning the Louis Vuitton Challenger's series. There is a little less rosé wine left in the cold store in the AC37 Club hospitality, and my nails are bitten short from suspense, but so far the journey has been a lot of fun.
I'm still optimistic, but being four - nil down in this first to seven regatta is not ideal.
I'm not going to get into the play-by-play reasons why Ineos Britannia is not quite ruling the waves yet. I'm sure the mighty armchair admirals of HMS Members Bar have all the answers and are mounting the next AC campaign as I type. What I can say is this is not easy, and Sir Ben Ainslie and his team are giving their utmost effort to turn this around. The margins are a duck or a tack small and the momentum has been with the Kiwi's. Now that we have some performance data in from Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) the boffins of Brackley will be crunching numbers and analysing data faster than a Mercedes at Monza.
Recent history will tell you that Ben played a big part in the US comeback for the incredible final Oracle victory in 2013 in San Francisco. So just do that again please... As ESC's Rica Kent will tell you, if it were only that easy, so many other things came together just at the right time for them.
We are on a no-race day here and the skies are dark with the threat of rain matching the mood of some of the naysayers. I've just been out in the city and the streets are awash with ETNZ black shirts. It's like the All Blacks have been playing around with a cloning experiment that's gone wrong and off loaded the whole Kiwi army to Barcelona. It's quite impressive when you mix an Emirates Airlines package deal with the sporting passions of the people of a tiny island who love to win things.
For the last three months we have been hosting friends and family here in our modest apartment in Poble Sec, Barcelona. Each guest has witnessed a different side of this summer's many city regattas. Each one would tell a different story. We bathed in cool Cava when we won the Louis Vuitton Cup. But now I'm washing the sheets in the tears of the last lot who stayed and the Cava is on ice just for the moment.
It's time now to host the last wave of optimistic Brit's heading out for tomorrow's crucial races five and six. Their job will be to bring new flag waving energy as Ineos Britannia go back into battle. Will the weekend be a foiling flamenco comeback for Ineos or a waltzing win for a Kiwi team that has learned to fly high and win an unprecedented three in a row? I have do believe that we can still to it now where are my castanets.