Stars & Stripes Back Sailing in Troubled Waters
Haven’t we heard this one before?
Dennis Conner is backed into a corner, skippering an outclassed boat and facing elimination from the America’s Cup defender finals.
It’s the same old song that has been sung in virtually every round since he began defending his America’s Cup title in January. He’s been written off as dead more often than Wile E. Coyote.
And every time, Conner has managed to walk the tightrope and keep advancing.
Things have never looked bleaker in Camp Conner than they did Wednesday, when Stars & Stripes not only lost for the third consecutive time to America 3 but virtually disappeared in light winds, losing by a whopping 4 minutes, 20 seconds and falling as far behind as 5:20 late in the race.
And that after winning the start.
If Saturday’s race hadn’t been discontinued for lack of wind, Conner might now be 0-4 in the best-of-13 defender finals; Stars and Stripes was losing that one substantially, too.
So far it’s proven premature to write off Conner, but the arithmetic is there in red, white and blue:
In the overall series Stars & Stripes is 3-11 against America 3.
Though Conner beat America 3 twice at the end of the defender semifinals, Bill Koch’s syndicate has improved its boat for different wind and sea conditions and Conner, the man who wrote “No Excuse to Lose” and “The Art of Winning,” has yet to pen a happy ending this round.
America 3 won Monday in stiffer winds, prompting Conner to comment, “They used to be (our) optimum conditions. Now we are looking for some new optimum conditions. . . . I think there is some chance that we are more competitive now when it’s windy. I need those conditions now to find out.”
Conner repeated some of that after Wednesday’s race, but for the moment he has lost the home advantage. “It looked like one of those days Bill was going to dread,” Conner said. “I thought, ‘This is gonna be great.’ Unfortunately, after about five minutes (the wind) started collapsing. There was as much as a 50-degree shift. . . . It looked like we were gonna need binoculars to see him at the first set. It was a no-brainer tactically. It was the roughest day we’ve seen yet. Really, there was no chance for us to be Houdini.”
Although Stars & Stripes did a fine disappearing act.
However, Koch said the America 3 camp isn’t ready to gloat yet. “Needless to say we’re quite happy but . . . Dennis Conner has been the comeback king,” he said. “We’d love to (sweep) but that’s a dream. I don’t think that’s reality. We’re stronger now because we didn’t achieve our objective of getting Dennis out (in the semifinals). I thought we had Dennis clearly shut out, and we didn’t. You can’t take anything for granted. He’s superb.”
Koch said he might prefer a long series, reasoning, “I think we have a little boat speed edge against Dennis, and in a longer series the probability starts to weigh out against (Conner’s) local knowledge.”
But Conner’s knowledge of the unpredictable San Diego waters went awry Wednesday, and Conner suggested Koch’s boat might have outsailed his no matter what in Wednesday’s choppy conditions.
“From the times one could come to the conclusion Bill has a 20-second edge in moderate conditions. (Koch’s early lead) was more like a minute. Certainly some of it came from (the way) America 3 knifed through, while we look like we’re in a gulf race, bucking a lot and putting out a lot of spray,” Conner said.
What does he do at this point? “I want seven more wins,” he said with a characteristic tight smile. “We don’t know what we don’t know. I’d like to see a bit more breeze, like I said (Monday) but we’ll take it day by day and hope we can win some races.
“It was just one of those difficult days.”
The degree of difficulty may be reaching the critical stage.
