America’s Cup: Winging It

The hybrid America’s Cup races beginning off San Diego this coming week might seem aboutas well matched as a bathtub sailing against the Queen Mary, or the Wright Brothers’ plane flying against the space shuttle.

The contest beginning Wednesday consists of the best two out of three races around a 40-mile course between the 133-foot-long challenger, New Zealand, sponsored by Kiwi industrialist Michael Fay, and the 60-foot defender, the San Diego-based catamaran skippered by Dennis Conner, winner of the more traditional 12-meter America’s Cup races in Australia in 1987.

In design the New Zealand boat is somewhat similar to the towering J boats that raced for the America’s Cup half a century ago. It requires a crew of 40, many of them clinging to flaring deck wings to provide balance against the pull of the huge sail. As The Times’ Scott Ostler put it, the craft is only slightly smaller in acreage than all of New Zealand. It will carry as much as 18,000 square feet of sail, about enough to launch the Los Angeles Coliseum.

The American boat really is two skinny canoes held together by a trampoline and propelled by an airplane wing standing on end where there should be a sail. Fay claimed that it was unfair to meet his challenge with a twin-hulled catamaran, since catamarans are inherently faster than traditional monohull boats. Conner responded that the America’s Cup ancient challenge rules say nothing about fairness. The court battle over the nature of the race will continue afterward, probably with Fay asking the judge to nullify Conner’s victory.

This will not be the sort of race that the old salts who started the America’s Cup had in mind, and it might not be close. But it should be a dandy show, with the best of modern aerospace and computer technology and two of the yachting world’s most dogged competitors and egos.