Word: lexcen
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...local patriots God-blessing America and brandishing the Stars and Stripes. Despite a few ugly incidents, there was remarkably little ill will among the crowd of 10,000 on the Newport waterfront. As Australia II was guided back into her slip, Skipper Bertrand, Backer Bond and Designer Ben Lexcen led a round of hip-hip-hoorays for Conner and his men. "There will never be another like it," mused Halsey Herreshoff, Liberty's navigator. "It was the essence of sport in that one race...
...highlight of the rites was the unveiling at last of the radical keel that the Australians had kept carefully shrouded from view since their arrival in Newport last spring. Lexcen's design did not, as many pundits had said, sport a bulbous nose or a double trim tab. Its magic lay in the two one-ton deltoid wings drooping from the bottom of what, in effect, is a normal keel turned upside down; its trim tab is very narrow, however, with a strip of plastic fairing to make it even more effective. As Australia II had amply demonstrated...
...There's no reason for America to think we're in any position but No. 1." Some American critics claimed that Conner had paid insufficient heed to his navigator and tactician and had thereby missed some crucial wind shifts. A kindlier assessment came from Australia's Lexcen: "Dennis saved the Cup the last time [in 1980], and he deserves the credit for almost saving the Cup this time...
...campaign has had an unlikely Nelson: Allan Bond, 45, a chunky, feisty Perth entrepreneur and onetime sign painter, who has spent $16 million in ten years pursuing what many of his countrymen dismissed as a manic obsession. This is his fourth bid, Australia II his third boat. In Ben Lexcen, 47, Bond found a naval architect who could radically change the design of a 12-meter boat, a field that has seen little technological innovation in years. In secret tank tests in The Netherlands, Lexcen developed a keel like nothing ever used before: with two delta-type wings weighing more...
...matter the outcome, the world is in Australia's debt for transforming what had become a boring parody of competition into a tingling cliffhanger of sport. The brilliant designer Ben Lexcen was wrong in one respect. Before the first race of the finals, he declared, "If we can't win this time, no one can win the bloody thing." His boat has proved, once and for all, that the bloody thing is bloody winnable. - By Michael Demarest. Reported by Richard Hornik and John F. Stacks/Newport