'Chippy' journos and an AC vision
Fascinating interview with Sir Ben Ainslie...
Dinners with Mourinho. Swearing intentionally at Stephen McIvor to inspire team spirit. Strategy. Building blocks. Success and a partnership, of sorts, with Emirates Team New Zealand. This was an interview that revealed much about Ben and how he has grown and continues to grow into a powerful voice at sailing’s highest table. Regrets? Yes there were a few and his wife Georgie teased and charmed them out of Britain’s greatest sailor in their Performance People Vodcast but it’s at the end where perhaps arguably the real nuggets came and gave a glimpse to what’s brewing in these dog dark months after Barcelona.
“How can we develop a more consistent future for the Cup so that the teams, the sponsors, the media know what they’re up for and they can really build and develop that…if we can create a more economically viable future for the Cup then everyone is going to win and that’s certainly something that we would love to help Grant Dalton and Team New Zealand to do so it (the Cup) has a much more exciting future commercially.”
He’s bang on. The Cup inflates like a balloon to an unimaginable tension and then bursts dramatically the moment the winner crosses the line. It doesn’t deflate. It bursts. And the saddest place on planet earth, I contend, is a team base, especially a losing team base, in the immediate aftermath of an America’s Cup cycle. Contracts end. Contacts scatter to the four corners and the AC family divorces spectacularly. Team-side the IP is secured but beach holidays and parenting suddenly take centre-stage after three years of 24/7. The insecurity of not knowing the next venue, venues or format, creates a vacuum before suddenly it’s all back on again and noses return to the Cup grind.
Into that void steps SailGP and for the sailors the jamboree continues but even for them it’s a second-fiddle global traipse whilst the Cup holders ponder their next move and meet the dreamers and business-models of venues desperate for the stardust and opportunity that only the Cup can bring. Building what Sir Ben describes as a ‘consistent future’ is a dream that’s been precisely 153 years in the making where we go back to James Lloyd Ashbury’s final challenge in 1871.
Back then, Ashbury was Commodore of the Royal London Yacht Club (amongst others) and had spectacularly fallen out of love with the New York Yacht Club, accusing them of being ‘cute’ with the rules that surrounded that event. So incensed were both Ashbury and the club, that gifted Cups were returned and no amicable solution could be found. Ashbury never sailed in an America’s Cup race again and it was 14 years before Britain went back for more with Sir Richard Sutton’s ‘Genesta.’
In between were two poor Canadian challenges but the momentum that Ashbury was trying to build having challenged in both 1870 and again in the following year of 1871 for what was looking like becoming possibly an annual event, petered out with a subtle but seismic change of the Deed of Gift.
In Barcelona this summer there were rumblings of ‘going again’ quickly in order to keep up momentum and provide some certainty for sponsors but this seems to have come to naught with only AC40 racing, and perhaps only for Youth & Women, on the cards. Great for learning and progression but not the America’s Cup. Quite what Ben and the British team can negotiate or at least have in the back of their minds to commercialise the event further is something rather exciting to wait for but the folding stuff will play more than a massive part in the juggernaut restarting quickly.
Ben was clear that Jim Ratcliffe will be back in a capacity but perhaps not all-in as he has so marvellously done in the past two campaigns. New partners will be secured and the focussed dynamic of having just the one person to satisfy will be disrupted. Ben has consistently seemed very cool about that and so he should be. In Barcelona they were operationally excellent and sailed the boat like they stole it. Development was linear and planned. Those software upgrades night after night, race after race gave the Brits an edge and they didn’t disappoint. Luna Rossa, let’s face it, were carved to pieces in that thrilling Louis Vuitton Cup Final as Jimmy & Cecco mis-fired, losing confidence in the boat and themselves but it still required execution and Ainslie, Fletcher-Scott and a team at the top of the game put the boot in masterfully right when it mattered.
What this interview also revealed was what many of us saw in Barcelona - namely Ben back to his best. That raw competitiveness masked in a convivial persona and a sense that just beneath the surface lies a heavily suppressed aggression. When slighted expect an eruption and Ben holds no candle to the media, holding them by the tail like a live and dangerous snake, wary of a bite that is perceived as fatal but barely exceeds a graze. In truth, my sense is that the media very much like Ben. I do. He’s nothing but great. I’m not however entirely convinced that it’s reciprocated and the eruption towards Stephen McIvor, a seriously nice man and a first-class commentator, said more about Ben than his inquisitor. The fact that it elucidated strong arms and ‘hell yeah’s’ from the rest of the team was a flex for Ben and his position as CEO. The sailors love that kind of thing and the Guv’nor is never better than with his back against the wall, firmly into that seige mentality that he craves and uniquely thrives off so much.
What I saw in the Preliminary Regatta in Barcelona was what I reported - no panic from the INEOS camp whatsoever. No signs of stress. No despair. Just a simple trust in the process and a trust in the team. As the results came, in no small part due to the wonderful boat-on-boat simulation tools that the team had developed, they became an unstoppable force. Poppies growing tall in the field - very John Bertrand in the essence of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a novella that Bertrand referenced and was inspired by. An account of that fictional book recalls that, “Jonathan is an independent thinker frustrated with the daily squabbles over meagre food and sheer survival within his flock of seagulls who have no deeper sense of purpose. Unlike his peers, he is seized with a passion for flight of all kinds, and his soul soars as he aerially experiments and learns more about the nature of his own body and the environment in achieving faster and faster flights.”
That’s very Ben Ainslie. Independent thinker, frustration, soaring higher, experimenting, seized with a passion and achieving faster and faster flight. Write him off or lazily argue that he’s too old and you are way off the mark. Ben was outstanding in Barcelona and will remain so wherever the Cup goes next. As he itches in his settling skin, there’s no doubt that he is in a class of one at the very top of British sailing and his performances in the Louis Vuitton 37th America’s Cup bode well for the 38th. He’s too good on the water to be left in an office drumming up support and strategising and there’s not a sailor in the Cup world who would disagree right now.
As the Challenger of Record again, a seat at the decision-table is guaranteed. Those discussions for sure will be detailed and it’s this stage of the campaign that Ben earmarks so well as being ‘crucial’ to the final outcome. He’s making all the right noises, battle-hardened, wizened and unlike Ashbury, up for the fight and determined to finish the job.
Brilliant podcast by Ben and Georgie. Well worth a good listen: