ONELIFE #33 – American English

The Americans famously drafted in Sir Ben Ainslie to
call tactics. But Ainslie wasn’t sticking around for the
next defense. He hot-footed it back to the UK and to
the Royal Yacht Squadron, where it all began back in
1851, to announce the most serious British challenge
yet for the America’s Cup. A year later he signed a deal
with Land Rover to collaborate on the design of the
challenger boat.
There’s still plenty of work to do yet. The America’s
Cup is not entirely a knockout competition like the
World Cup for soccer (which it pre-dates by nearly
80 years). Instead, the winning team from the previous
Cup gets a free ticket to the next final, while the
knockout takes place among those challenging for the
other place in the final (so if it was soccer, all the clubs
competing would be fighting to take on Germany).
Unlike fleet racing in the World Series, the America’s
Cup itself is all match racing, with only two boats
on the course at any one time. So if Ainslie is to
challenge the American boat next year, he first needs to
beat the other four challengers. Should he achieve that,
we’ll be treated to two of the sport’s undisputed giants
slugging it out in one of the greatest, though leastknown,
rivalries in sport. Put in boxing terms, you might
paraphrase it as the ‘rumble on the water.’
The current Team USA having spent hundreds of
millions before finally winning the America’s Cup in
2010 (and therefore winning the right to dictate the
location and format of the next event), wanted to start a
process that would make the America’s Cup more
famous, more accessible and more sustainable. They
did this in a number of ways: they stuck with a
catamaran design that could be developed into the
world’s fastest match-racing yachts; they decided to
bring the event inshore in 2013, to San Francisco
harbor, so spectators would get to see it from the
PHOTOGRAPHY: MARK LLOYD AND RICARDO PINTO
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