Plenty of people are wondering what kind of Cup this will be. There's so much that's new, and it's hard to form a real opinion on any of it. On one side there's the weight of a great tradition whose watchful eye demands a vision tied not so much to the past as to the enduring values of an event built on legend, the legend of Queen Victoria, of the Vanderbilt family, of Thomas Lipton, and of so many other modern icons who pointed the way: the Auld Mug is made of technology, but it's also made of characters. And it's this second reservoir of storytelling that has been running dry for a few editions now, lost in the buttoned-up silence of the team bases, in the canned questions of press conferences that have become almost pointless to attend. Speed and foiling haven't managed to replace Dennis Conner's insults to his defeated rivals. We miss Conner, just as we miss Alan Bond discovering the keel of Australia II, or Raul Gardini, in one of the hottest press conferences in the Cup's history, accusing the New Zealanders of having used their bowsprit. The list could go on. In short, what's missing are the men, or rather, the men are still there, but in a naive vision of how to communicate the event, someone seems to think they can be hidden away in favor of a manufactured spectacle, turning the great circus of the Cup into a sort of cold circuit modeled on other sports. Communicating a sport isn't the same as marketing a product. You can treat sport as a "product" if you like, but the grammar for connecting with an audience is fundamentally different from what's taught in schools that train people to sell detergent and cars. Sport is a contest between athletes who use a tool to compete. The Cup uses foiling boats, track and field uses spiked shoes and javelins. So far, foiling hasn't changed how widely our sport is followed, because it's been treated as the point rather than the means. The real story is that of the men and women and their struggles. Now the Cup is turning its gaze toward influencers, hoping to tap into a new, young, curious market. That's absolutely the right thing to do, but let's give this new audience something real, something human. Let's not let the story be the shallow one, the kind that stops at the color of the sails. Let's feed the public the whole, powerful legend of the Cup. Then we'll secure a following that lasts longer than a few seconds of scrolling.
So what's actually happening on the practical side? For starters, the usual skirmishes among the baronets: there's bad blood between Ben (Ainslie) and Jim (Ratcliffe), with decisions still to be made that could paralyze the British syndicate's participation. The issue is boat ownership: do the boats belong to whoever paid for them through sponsorship, or to whoever has been managing them? It's an interesting question, if the judges decide the boats belong to Jim, Ben ends up unable to take part in the Cup, despite the mountain of money from the team's new benefactor, Peter Dubens, who is deeply involved in the sailing world. It could even come down to the Royal Family stepping in to broker an agreement. The Royal Yacht Squadron team, the club where it all began, has to be there. The teams have started sailing their AC75s modified to accommodate crews without human-generated power, the grinders and cyclors have disappeared on board, making room for batteries instead. The first to get out on the water were the Luna Rossa boys and the Kiwis, which says something about the fact that the longtime rivals are also the best prepared.
The first act of America's Cup number 38 was the preliminary regatta in Cagliari, a city that's decidedly easier to manage than Naples, perhaps with less atmosphere, but with a lot more certainty. While Naples gets ready, in Cagliari the Defender and the Challengers finally found themselves back on the water for fleet races aboard the AC40s, which, right up to the final day, were dominated by Luna Rossa's young crew, with Marco Gradoni and Margherita Porro on the helms and Maria Giubilei and Giovanni Santi trimming. For the history and legend of the America's Cup, a win by this crew would have been the perfect result: two young women and two young men beating the seniors, the millennials beating the elder statesmen. It would have proven the strength of youth and shown that women can compete on equal terms with men, demonstrating that sailing may be the one sport where the gap in physical power can be set aside. The truth? On the final day, the young crew made serious mistakes, risking two borderline starts when all they needed to do was calmly manage the comfortable lead they held over everyone else to reach the final. There was an early start in the first of the two fleet races, followed by a disqualification for failing to take the penalty. The same thing happened in the last race, and so Luna Rossa's young crew ended up out of the running, while the seniors gave a lesson in composure and experience. The result? The final match race of the Louis Vuitton Preliminary Regatta in Cagliari came down to Luna Rossa's senior crew — Peter Burling, Ruggero Tita, Umberto Molineris, and Vittorio Bissaro — against Emirates Team New Zealand, with Nathan Outteridge, Seb Menzies, Iain Jensen, and Andy Maloney. It turned out to be a fairly straightforward race for the Italian boat, which controlled the Kiwis off the start and stayed in front the whole way. Then came the triumph, sirens blaring, for Luna Rossa, winning on home waters. Home advantage, certainly. But skill too. So the win went to the millennials, another story to tell, another legend, another kind of experience, another kind of composure. And also the law of the strongest, because whoever won is, by definition, the strongest, and we were starting to forget that. Because Peter Burling, at the helm of Luna Rossa, beat his own ghost, his shadow still sitting there aboard Emirates Team New Zealand.
For the first time, the Kiwis are having to reckon with the "loss" of a helmsman-engineer who had asked for a bit more money and the freedom to manage his own life between the Olympics, where he won two medals in the 49er, and other commitments. Then there's Ruggero "Ruggi" Tita, with his two Olympic gold medals. So aboard this senior Luna Rossa crew there are four Olympic medals, three America's Cup wins, and seven Luna Rossa campaigns between them. Could it have gone any other way? Maybe not, experience still counts in a Cup that wants to be different, young, social, but that in the end still needs the old vocabulary. As for the other challengers? All well back, only occasionally interesting.
Says Max Sirena, CEO of Luna Rossa: "These races were an important test to see whether the work we're doing is on the right track, because it's the only chance we get to compete against the others, to see our sailors under pressure, and to put our rivals under pressure too. They also mattered from an image standpoint, since obviously we're playing at home." Now the future points to Naples, in September at Nisida with the AC40s, and then, in May, with the AC75s.
