Word: cups
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...stern, Australia II has the most radical keel ever to hang from the bottom of a 12-meter-yacht*. Though the Aussies ostentatiously drape a shroud over the keel when the boat is hauled out after each day's sail-psych is everything in the America's Cup competition-just about all of Newport knows what Australia H's secret weapon looks like: it is bulging in the front, separates into delta wings at the rear, and could pass for a cross between a whale and the space shuttle...
...York Yacht Club, custodian of the Cup and grand panjandrum of its defense, has howled that the radical keel is an infraction of the 12-meter rule, even though it passed muster earlier this year before keen-eyed measurers, including the club's own tape man. With its lowered ballast and jetlike wings, the innovative yacht can slice through the water with less turbulence, turn virtually on a dime, and stand much more erect than its rivals when they beat into the wind, thereby drawing more power from its sails. Remarkably, all this seems perfectly within the rules. Even...
Conner's cranberry-red Liberty, the favorite, is currently at the top of the heap in the skirmishing among three U.S. boats for the honor of defending the Cup. The other two: Tom Blackaller's Defender followed by John Kolius' nine-year-old Courageous, which nonetheless upset Liberty and Defender six times last week and was still in the running. Though the challenger is picked strictly on results, the choice of the American boat is entirely up to the blue-blazered gentlemen of the New York Yacht Club's race committee. If they believe a yacht...
That snappy performance reflected the damn-the-expense attitude of Alan Bond, 45, the swashbuckling tycoon from Perth (real estate, mining, oil), who heads the Australia II syndicate. Bond, a onetime sign painter, is making his fourth try for the Cup, a record surpassed only by Britain's indomitable Sir Thomas Lipton earlier in the century. In his latest bid, Bond could spend as much as $3.5 million for a prize initially valued at only 100 guineas (about $70 by current reckoning...
...performance so far, along with the New York Yacht Club's anguished reaction to that success, has created extraordinary confidence in the Aussie camp. Australia II's skipper, John Bertrand, 36, is already contemplating how Australia will change the rules after it captures the Cup. "If we win," he says, "we're going to make sure all sailcloth must be made of kangaroo hide. Then we are going to fill up a salt lake in the outback and defend the Cup there." After this wild America's Cup summer, stranger things could happen...