‘New’ Bow Is No Help

You know how tricky these America’s Cup syndicates can be.

They’ll try any gimmick to get another fraction of a knot in boat speed.

Put these guys in baseball, and they would be throwing spitballs or using corked bats. Put them in golf, and they would be using square-grooved clubs. I wouldn’t even sit in on a poker game with any of them unless they were wearing short-sleeved shirts.

The Aussies and Kiwis created stirs in years past with winged keels and plastic hulls. They weren’t exactly stirs. They were more like cries of anguish.

We now have bizarre rudders and liquid crystal sails and scooped transoms. They would polish the hulls with snake oil if they thought they could get a little more speed.

On a day when Il Moro de Venezia earned a closely-raced and hotly-debated victory from New Zealand and America 3’s Kanza slipped a kelp peel under Dennis Conner’s momentum, France tried something unique.

It sailed without a bow. That’s bow, as in the front of the boat.

Don’t look for it to catch on.

Ville de Paris, you see, did not go to sea Thursday with the idea that it had come up with the latest technological innovation. It did not arrive at the race course with its new look front end. It had its bow when it got into the pre-start maneuvering with Nippon.

What happened was that it got a nose job, if you will.

During one of those dances they do in the final minutes before the start, Ville de Paris and Nippon got close enough to waltz. That’s much too close. They needed a chaperone for this prom. France banged into the back of Nippon and suffered a nasty gash to its bow.

America’s Cup was suddenly turning into an aquatic destruction derby. You halfway expect the next gimmick will be torpedoes. I’d expect the Kiwis to get rid of that bowsprit and replace it with a bumper, except the bowsprit gave it what seemed for a while to be a one second victory Thursday over the Italians. Besides, it looks like the French are more in need of bumpers.

It was hard to tell, looking at Ville de Paris, whether it had been bitten by a shark or if it was a shark. It’s front end certainly had that jagged, almost toothy look. Its sail made for a splendid fin. You didn’t know whether to shoot it or sail it. Roy Scheider would have known what to do.

Believe it or not, the skipper’s name is Marc Pajot. If I’m not mistaken, that’s pronounced Pa-Jaw. He would make an excellent taxi driver in Tijuana.

The question was whether Pajot would be driving a submarine before the day was over. This was a gaping hole. It was so large you wondered how he managed to find an iceberg off the shores of Point Loma. This would be the first crew in America’s Cup history racing with life jackets, presumably by Pierre Cardin.

As might be expected, the French were appalled that their vessel would be so defaced. These boats are run through computers and wind tunnels and tank testing and maybe even lie detector tests to make sure everything is just right, and suddenly Ville de Paris looked like something Jose Canseco had been driving.

Both France and Japan waved protest flags. To put this in language understandable by those who have spent hours studying for driving tests, the French were arguing that Japan recklessly changed lanes and did not properly signal and the Japanese were arguing that a vehicle striking another from the back is always at fault.

France was easily the most badly bruised by the incident, but the on-the-water umpires ruled that Ville de Paris was the villain of the piece. Any policeman would have ruled the same way. The citation goes to the guy who doesn’t keep his distance.

The penalty for this malfeasance is a 270-degree turn after crossing the starting line and maybe eight hours in traffic school. This was no way to start a day, with a penalty turn and a hole in the bow. It’s like waking up in a burning house.

Understand that France entered this day tied for first place in this semifinal series. It needed a victory to stay tied with the Italy-New Zealand winner. This was a very big race.

Alas, Ville de Paris would not get a victory, not with its front end reconfigured more to gulp water than cut through it. It might have been better off sailing backward.

Remarkably, Ville de Paris acquitted itself reasonably well under the circumstances. It lost, of course, but by a relatively respectable two minutes. It actually cut into Nippon’s lead on the three reaching legs, though hardly enough to poke what was left of its bow into contention.

It was probably just as well that France did not find a way to win this race. If it had, the five other syndicates would have been up all night bashing their bows.

America’s Cup racing would have a new look.