Sailing / Rich Roberts : Smyth Happy He Picked Cup Over Olympics

The man acknowledged as America’s best catamaran sailor sailed in the America’s Cup races instead of the Olympics last month.

Randy Smyth was unable to do both, has no regrets about choosing the Cup races, but allows that both events might have seen the last of the 34-year-old sail maker from Huntington Beach.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in the sense of the technology and to learn and be a part of it and contribute to a catamaran effort,” he said of the Cup experience.

“The Olympics come every 4 years, and the America’s Cup in a multihull might come only once. To put lead on the bottom (of a monohull) is a big step backward when you’re looking for performance.”

All the exercise between Dennis Conner’s double-hulled Stars & Stripes and New Zealand’s sloop achieved, Smyth said, dryly, was that “after $30 million, you realized a multihull was faster than a monohull.”

Later in the month at Pusan, South Korea, U.S. sailors collected a gold, two silver and two bronze medals. Smyth, who had won a silver with crewman Jay Glaser at Long Beach in ‘84, said he didn’t miss it.

Smyth skipped the U.S. trials at Newport, R.I., where Pete Melvin and Pat Muglia won. They finished a disappointing 14th at Pusan.

“They had a hard-luck series,” Smyth said. “Won one race but got disqualified. Another race their mast step (which holds the mast in place) broke.”

Overall, U.S. sailors fared better than any other country in the wet and wild conditions, although not as well as some had hoped. Matching their ’84 sweep of three golds and four silvers in the home waters of Long Beach in ’84 was asking too much, but Smyth thinks they could have done a little better.

“The big problem was, when you look back on it, the Olympic (Yachting) Committee made some major mistakes, starting with the weather input they had from Korea, which (predicted) light air.

“They set up all the Olympic trials in light-wind places. Everyone was sailing to win the trials. The whole last year was spent training in light air. Those people were poorly trained.”

Smyth is not second-guessing. Most of the sailors expressed the same opinion long before the trials. They had to train against boxers to get the chance to meet a slugger in Suyong Bay.

Smyth also said that the U.S. team missed Sam Merrick’s leadership in getting the U.S. sailors to work together, as he had in the years before ’84.

“Our class in particular, there was no exchange of information (among rivals),” Smyth said. “Everybody just went off on their own ego wars. If we don’t converse, neither of us will get up to where we need to be. It’s a very bad, self-centered attitude.”

Then there was the boat, the Tornado cat used in the Olympics.

“That style of racing is not state of the art,” Smyth said. “It’s a 1968 design. They don’t allow a spinnaker or a trapeze. I’m not saying they should change all those things, but I’d rather go with the latest, most exciting type of venue and equipment.”

These days Smyth is into something more advanced, the professional Salem ProSail series featuring P40 catamarans, twice as long as the 20-foot Tornadoes and similar to the Formula 40s used in the European series.

Smyth won the first two events, at Newport, R.I., in August and at San Francisco last weekend. Each victory is worth $20,000, with one more event at Miami Dec. 8-11 and a $25,000 bonus to the overall champion--all of which Smyth will share with his 5-person crew.

America’s Cup campaigner Tom Blackaller, just getting introduced in cat racing, was an impressive second at San Francisco and has been surprised to find out how much fun he’s having.

Smyth said that even sailing aboard Stars & Stripes’ 60-foot cat in the second Cup race had its moments when the wind piped up.

“The boat is not only designed for light wind (but) for fairly smooth seas,” Smyth said. “That was the windiest day we’d had.”

Observers accused Conner of sandbagging because he increased his lead by only 2 minutes on the first reach.

“Even though we didn’t fly a hull, we were still right on the edge,” Smyth said. “We were sticking the bow underwater. We stuffed it as hard as we ever had. And that wing being 108 feet tall on a 6,000-pound platform, there was so much momentum the boat could just flip right over.”

Then, at the finish, the cat was tossing around so violently in the wash from spectator boats that the mainsheet broke.

Later, Smyth said, he was stunned by the bitterness of the news conferences, when the New Zealanders called Conner a poor sport and he called their boat a dog and its designer a loser.

“That was not a very tasteful finale to the America’s Cup,” Smyth said. “I guess it summarized the whole summer.’