Oracle Team Usas Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cup Pdf

FREE WINGING IT: ORACLE TEAM USAS INCREDIBLE COMEBACK TO DEFEND THE AMERICAS CUP PDF

The winds on San Francisco Bay started kicking up in the late morning. Before long, they were blowing more than 20 miles an hour. Jimmy Spithill and his 10 teammates put on their crash helmets and flotation vests and climbed aboard the AC72, a menacing, story black catamaran capable of near-highway speeds. As a powerboat pulled them into the bay for Race 5 of the America's Cup, Mr. Spithill shot a glance at the Golden Gate Bridge. It was shrouded in fog. An unfamiliar, Winging it: Oracle Team USAs Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cup feeling was tugging at him. Spithill, skipper of Oracle Team USA, the richest and possibly most prohibitively favored team in the history of the world's most famous yacht competition, had lost three of the first four races. Something was wrong with the way the Oracle boat was performing. Now he was facing the unthinkable: His team might lose. The America's Cup, first held Winging it: Oracle Team USAs Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cupis believed to award the world's oldest international sporting trophy. The contest also is one of the least professionalized. There is no permanent organization, commission or governing body. The winner gets to pick where and when the next race is held—typically every three to five Winging it: Oracle Team USAs Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cup what type of boat is used. All that tends to make the racing rather lopsided. In most cases, the faster of the two boats in the finals wins every match—and the faster boat is usually the defending champion. Fast boats, then and now. All race footage courtesy America's Cup Event Authority. The Cup wasn't supposed to be any different. But a competition that was expected to be humdrum turned into one of the most remarkable ever. This account of how that happened was pieced together through extensive interviews with the sailors, engineers and other team leaders. Largely because of team owner Larry Ellison, the founder of software giant Oracle Corp. The 11 sailors were a collection of international superstars. The engineers who designed the yacht and the programmers who built the software used to plot strategy had no peer. Spithill wasn't sure why Emirates Team New Zealand, Oracle's opponent in the final, had been faster so far. The prevailing theory among Oracle's sailors was that they were just rusty. As the defending Cup champions, they hadn't had to race in the preliminaries. Spithill on Oracle's tactics at the start of Race 5. As the AC72 dropped its towline on Sept. Spithill hoped that in Race 5, the Oracle crew would get its act together. The start of an America's Cup race is an exercise in pinpoint execution. The two boats can't cross the starting line until a countdown timer hits zero. On this day, both boats hit the line Winging it: Oracle Team USAs Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cup. The five legs of the racecourse sent the boats from near the Golden Gate Bridge to the downtown San Francisco waterfront and took anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to complete, depending on wind. Through the first two legs, Oracle was in total control, building up an eight-second lead. The upwind third leg was the one that had been keeping Mr. Spithill awake at night. Sailors have known since ancient times that sailing against the wind requires plotting a zigzag course—called tacking— steering the boat back and forth at a roughly degree angle to the wind. Oracle's aura of invincibility had crumbled on this upwind leg. If New Zealand was behind at the upwind turn, it would take the lead. If the Kiwis already had the lead, they would turn the race into a rout. How sailors use a technique called tacking to sail upwind. Tacking involves an elaborately choreographed routine. To initiate the turn, eight sailors crank winches resembling hand-operated bicycle pedals, powering the system that moves the sail. Two sailors pull ropes to adjust the angles of the enormous mainsail and the smaller jib. At precisely the right moment, the skipper—Mr. Spithill—spins the helm. Then all 11 sailors scurry from one hull, across a patch of trampoline-like netting, to the other side. If everything goes right, the boat loses little speed. A small misstep or two, however, can cause the boat to bog down—or in extreme cases, to capsize. But the Kiwis edged closer with every turn. Within three minutes, New Zealand's red yacht crossed in front of Oracle. Spithill had blown another lead. Spithill on how Oracle blew the lead in the upwind leg of Race 5. By the time the boats reached the fourth leg, the gap was too large for Oracle to recover. New Zealand won by more than a minute. In racing terms, that might as well have been a week. New Zealand was now nearly halfway to the nine wins it needed to secure the Cup—and the time gap between the boats was only getting larger. Even the Kiwis were surprised. After the race, Team New Zealand's managing director, Grant Dalton, passed one of his sailors in the hallway and said: "I can't believe we just won. As the AC72 skulked back to its berth, Mr. Spithill heard the voice of Russell Coutts, the New Zealand-born chief executive of the Oracle team, on his walkie-talkie: "Have you thought about using the postponement card? A postponement card is the America's Cup equivalent of a timeout, envisioned as a way for teams to fix problems like broken equipment. By using it, Oracle would be able to delay the afternoon's second race Winging it: Oracle Team USAs Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cup the next race day, 48 hours later. At the postrace news conference, the grim-faced skipper said: "We feel like we need to regroup, really take a good look at the boat. The following day, his team practiced in the bay and considered modifications to the boat, while the programmers ran simulations. In addition, the team's tactician, who advises Mr. Spithill on wind, current and strategy, was replaced. Spithill thought the break, and the small modifications they had made, might have done the trick. The answer came quickly in Race 6. After getting blown out again on the upwind leg, Oracle lost by a margin of 47 seconds, and later that day, lost Race 7 by 66 seconds, its worst finish yet. New Zealand now needed just three more wins—and it had 12 chances to get them. Already, the fans who gathered on the waterfront to watch the races had started cheering for the Kiwis. Unless Mr. Spithill figured out how to sail faster upwind, the affable sailor would forever be remembered as the engineer of his sport's greatest flop. He learned to sail in a leaky wooden dinghy that a neighbor had planned to throw away. Being a sailor of modest means isn't easy. Even as Mr. Spithill showed prodigious talent as a teenager, his parents—his father was an engineer, his mother a medical receptionist—struggled to send him to international competitions. Spithill exhibited an aggressive streak and a blue-collar mentality. Once, a week before the national high-school sailing championship, he broke his wrist playing rugby. He won the sailing contest in a cast. The America's Cup, the world's most prestigious yachting competition, dates back to American yacht clubs held the Cup for straight years, relinquishing it for the first time in Dennis Conner was the first American skipper to lose the Cup, only to reclaim it in Teams from only four nations have won the trophy: the U. Inwhen he was 20, the Young Australia team made him the youngest skipper in America's Cup history. The team lost, but he proved talented enough to get recruited to the U. He lost again in preliminaries, to Mr. Ellison's Oracle team, which went on to lose in the finals. He returned in as helmsman for the Italian team Luna Rossa. During the semifinals of the challengers' heats, he got his first glimpse of Mr. Ellison's lavishly funded new Oracle team, with a budget that ran into the tens of millions. He routinely outwitted Oracle at the starting line and won the series,before losing in the next round. Coutts, the Oracle team's CEO, was suitably impressed. When the Cup was over, he made Mr. Spithill one of his newest hires. Joseph Ozanne, the designer of the wing, describes Winging it: Oracle Team USAs Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cup tension with sailors. For the next Cup, team Oracle tricked out its three-hulled trimaran with a revolutionary carbon-fiber sail that looked like an upright airplane wing. America's Cup How Oracle Team USA Launched the Greatest Comeback in Sailing History - WSJ

Open main navigation Live TV. Full Schedule. Live Radio. Live TV. English voanews. Learning English learningenglish. Shqip zeriamerikes. Bosanski ba. Srpski glasamerike. Azerbaijani amerikaninsesi. Central Asia. South Asia. Bahasa Indonesia voaindonesia. Khmer voacambodia. Afaan Oromoo voaafaanoromoo. Bambara voabambara. Hausa voahausa. Ndebele voandebele. Shona voashona. Soomaaliga voasomali. Kiswahili voaswahili. Zimbabwe voazimbabwe. Kurdi Winging it: Oracle Team USAs Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cup. Latin America. Creole voanouvel. Share on Facebook. Share on Twitter. Share via Email. Print this page. Oracle completed one of the greatest comebacks in sports history Wednesday to win sailing's most prestigious trophy and defend its title from three years ago. In this best-of series, Oracle at one point trailed before charging back in the races on San Francisco Bay to beat Emirates Team New Zealand by a final tally of Oracle dominated the last race Wednesday, showcasing the dramatic improvement in boat speed on the upwind leg of the race that began to emerge a week ago. Oracle seemed to find an extra gear after losing most of the early races, and even overcame a pre-match penalty. The America's Cup was sailed in a new class of meter, wing-sailed catamarans. Related Stories. By VOA News. More Coverage. Race in America. More U. Switch to Dark mode. Oracle Team USA Wins America's Cup With Stunning Comeback | Voice of America - English

Spithill steered Winging it: Oracle Team USAs Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cup space-age, foot catamaran to its eighth straight victory, speeding past Dean Barker and Emirates Team New Zealand in the winner-take-all Race 19 on San Francisco Bay to keep the oldest trophy in international sports in the United States. All but defeated a week ago, the year-old Australian and his international crew twice rallied from seven-point deficits to win Owned by software billionaire Larry Ellison, Oracle Team USA was docked two points for illegally modifying boats in warmup regattas and had to win 11 races to keep the Auld Mug. After almost dunking its chances when it buried its bows in a wave shortly after the start, Oracle's hulking black catamaran - with a big No. We've never seen anything like this in any kind of sailing boat, much less the America's cup. The New Zealanders were game despite being stranded on Winging it: Oracle Team USAs Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cup point for a week. Spithill and crew still had to sail their best to end Winging it: Oracle Team USAs Incredible Comeback to Defend the Americas Cup longest, fastest and by far wildest America's Cup on a course between the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz Island. Team New Zealand had the lead the first time the boats crossed on opposite tacks. By the time they crossed again, the American boat - with only one American on its man crew - had the lead. As Oracle worked to stay ahead, tactician Ben Ainslie, a four-time Olympic gold medalist from Britain, implored his mates by saying, "This is it. This is it. Working your rears off. It had to have been a gut-wrenching moment in New Zealand, which has been on edge for a week as the Kiwis failed to close out the victory on a warm, sunny afternoon. The Kiwis had been faster upwind in running away with races early, but Oracle constantly made changes to make its cat a speed freak. As Spithill rounded the third mark onto the downwind fourth leg, his catamaran sprang onto its hydrofoils at 35 mph, its hulls completely out of the water, and headed for history. There were hugs and handshakes after he steered the cat across the finish line, 44 seconds ahead of Team New Zealand. It wasn't always so jubilant, of course, but Spithill refused to let his team fold after the penalties were announced four days before racing started. As stirring of a comeback as it was for Spithill and his mates, it was a staggering loss for Team New Zealand. Barker, 41, was looking for redemption after losing the America's Cup to Alinghi of Switzerland in and then steering the losing boat inalso against Alinghi. This was the first time the America's Cup was raced inshore and San Francisco Bay provided a breathtaking racecourse. Powered by a foot wing sail, the cats have hit 50 mph, faster than the speed limit on the Golden Gate Bridge. After Artemis Racing's Andrew "Bart" Simpson was killed in a capsize on May 9, sailors began wearing body armor, knives, an air tank and breathing tube, self-lowering equipment and underwater locator devices. The new, cutting-edge boats are not without criticism and Ellison defended what some call risky engineering and sailing tactics in an interview with CBS News' Charlie Rose last month. A bunch of people don't like the Olympics now because we've added skateboarding. We're modernizing the sport. Ellison added: "We're competing with other sports to get kids attention. We've got to make our sport exciting and we've got to modernize it. 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