Dickson Exacts His Revenge : America’s Cup: Nippon skipper strikes back at countrymen, beating Kiwis. Conner wins to clinch second place going into fourth round.
This “friendly competition between foreign countries” is still searching in vain for George L. Schuyler’s ideal, stated when he deeded the America’s Cup to the New York Yacht Club in 1887.
Will the competition always be so acrimonious?
“I hope so,” Nippon skipper Chris Dickson said Saturday after beating New Zealand. “It worked wonders today.”
New Zealanders have been bashing Americans, Japanese and their own expatriates; Americans have bashed Italians, Swedes have bashed Spaniards, Australians have bashed each other, and everyone has bashed the international juries hired to maintain order amid chaos.
On Saturday, Japan bashed back.
Dickson restrained himself when New Zealand team manager Peter Blake called him “a mercenary working for the Japanese because they can’t do it themselves,” but he responded by outsailing the Kiwis by 1 minute 2 seconds to clinch first place in the round-robin phase of the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger trials and lead the way into the semifinals.
There was no less satisfaction for Dennis Conner, who sailed Stars & Stripes to a 38-second victory over America 3’s Defiant in northwest winds building from 5 to 14 knots.
It was the first time Stars & Stripes had won consecutive races in this competition, and the victory completed an adventurous two-month run during which its mast fell down, it collided with a rival boat, rear-ended a spectator boat and threw away three races while trying to use a goalpost for a keel.
But the beautiful, midnight-blue boat is very much alive, with further modifications--including a new keel--planned before the next round.
The result was worth four third-round points and assured Stars & Stripes (8-12) of second place with 19 points, behind Bill Koch’s America 3 (17-2) with 40 but ahead of Koch’s Defiant (10-9) with 12.
After the arrival of Koch’s fourth boat Friday, Defiant is due to be retired after today’s intramural match with America 3 to conclude the round.
Then the question remains as to how Koch will slot his boats for the fourth round starting March 28. In the fourth round, a quadruple round robin, victories count only as victories, not points. He can leave America 3 with the two bonus victories it earned as the high-point scorer in the first three rounds, or move America 3 to Defiant’s third slot and give his new boat the bonus.
Stars & Stripes gets one bonus victory for second place.
Koch’s goal is to get two boats into the defender finals. In the next two weeks he must consider which boat is fast enough to earn its own way, starting with a handicap against Stars & Stripes.
America 3’s first loss to Stars & Stripes on Friday complicates the equation, but Conner’s crew had to follow that with a triumph over Defiant to make it meaningful.
“We decided we’d sail as hard as we could to get that one (bonus win),” port trimmer Bill Trenkle said.
Their start was the strangest of the trials. Officially, they crossed the line 56 seconds later than Defiant but were sailing hard into a wind shift, as starting helmsman Dave Dellenbaugh--until Saturday, virtually invincible--decided at the last moment to tack across Stars & Stripes’ bow and take Defiant the other way.
“We felt (the wind) would go back to the right,” Dellenbaugh said. “It didn’t, and that’s where the race was decided.”
Not quite. There were still some tough tacking duels to come, and Defiant dogged Stars & Stripes by no more than 55 seconds throughout the race, waiting for the race-breaking mistake that never came.
In the challenger trials, there are no bonuses for how they finished in the three round-robins leading to the semifinals March 29, when they’ll race each other three times.
The Final Four, with final tabulations to be completed in today’s meaningless matches, are Nippon, 17-3, 74 points; New Zealand, 17-3, 66; Il Moro di Venezia, 14-6, 61, and Ville de Paris, 13-7, 53.
The longshot hopes of Espana ’92 (7-13) were finally extinguished Saturday by Il Moro, using a carbon-fiber mainsail, by 2:14. Ville de Paris defeated Spirit of Australia (7-13) by 3:13 and, in the “unrace” of the day, Challenge Australia (1-18) blew out its gennaker on the sixth leg, allowing Sweden’s Tre Kronor (3-17) to go in front and win by 1:13 and move out of last place.
By chance of the draw, each of today’s final four matches pits a winner against a loser. Four will be sailing for the last time, and there is unlikely to be any shuffling in positions--but hey, guys, go for it. A boat from the bottom four hasn’t beaten a boat from the top four yet.
However, skipper Peter Gilmour had Spirit of Australia in front of Marc Pajot’s Ville de Paris by 23 seconds after two legs Saturday when his mainsheet traveler--the block and tackle that holds the boom down--pulled up the deck.
“Iain (Murray) was standing on it and raised up about a foot,” Gilmour said.
New Zealand was the only rival Nippon hadn’t beaten, but there was more incentive than that.
Dickson said, “Our whole team has been very disappointed in what has been said, as you’d expect . . . from the Kiwis on our team, the Japanese on our team. But it’s gone, and I’ve received an apology . . . a written letter from Peter (Blake).”
The race was a contrast in design technology in the new International America’s Cup Class--New Zealand with the lightest boat with the smallest sail area and Nippon with one of the larger, heavier boats, which seems to benefit when the wind freshens above 12 knots.
Starting when the wind was its lightest, they went in opposite directions, then converged to find Nippon holding a slight but critical edge.
“The boat that gets her bow in front is probably gonna hang onto it,” Dickson said.
New Zealand skipper Rod Davis, who has had nothing controversial to say about any other challenger, said his crew also erred in believing the wind wouldn’t get above 11 or 12 knots on the day.
“We put on our light-air main,” Davis said, “and that was compounded by putting the wrong jib on.”
On the second windward leg, with the wind up, New Zealand had trouble trimming its sails for the first few minutes and lost 1:01 to fall 1:23 behind.
“That leg did a lot of damage to us,” Davis said. “But we have said from the beginning that we wouldn’t win every race. The New Zealand camp has never seen itself as the favorite.”
Now, some of the heat may shift to the Japanese, who until Saturday found respect for their efforts not as high as it was for, say, New Zealand and Il Moro.
“It obviously wasn’t,” Dickson said. “We can look at all sorts of press clippings dating back two, three or four months. Today was our saying, hey, we’re in the boat race.”