Word: yachtsmen
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...feel sorry for the five British yachtsmen who set sail from the tiny Middle East state of Bahrain last week. First, a dodgy propeller apparently stalled their vessel's progress toward the nearby emirate of Dubai. Worse still, seemingly adrift in the Persian Gulf, their 60-ft. boat appears to have inadvertently coasted into the territorial waters of Iran. Duly halted by Iranian naval vessels on Nov. 25, the men - seasoned sailors who had planned to take part in a yacht race from Dubai the following day - were swiftly whisked into the uncertain fate of Iranian custody at a moment...
...complicated by the diminished goodwill between London and Tehran, which has been stretched thin in recent months amid conflict over Iran's nuclear ambitions and disputed presidential election. With Britain often the preferred whipping boy of the Tehran regime's denunciation of alleged Western conspiracies against it, the yachtsmen's capture, made public on Nov. 30, could hardly have come at a worse time. Desperate to play down the incident and avoid a diplomatic row, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he was looking forward to the matter "being promptly sorted out." Tehran took a different tone. "Naturally our measures...
...because the yachtsmen have no military or government ties, mounting a case against them will be tricky. "The Iranians could be magnanimous, try to get rid of the 'bad boy' reputation they have by releasing them," says Daniel Korski, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in London. "On the other hand, there is going to be great pressure to not do that, to keep them and either parade them - which Iranians will say they're only doing to show they're being treated well - but at any rate send out tidbits of information which will keep...
...With a population of just over 4 million, New Zealand has long punched above its sporting weight. Over the years, it has spawned the world's best miler (John Walker), one of cricket's greatest fast bowlers (Richard Hadlee) and yachtsmen skilled enough to win the America's Cup twice. While all of these men knew how it felt to compete under a nation's expectation, the All Blacks are a case apart. Failure has never been an option for them. Their hardheaded coach Graham Henry sounds positively Nietzschean when he declares: "The success of our rugby team is important...
...since Businessman Alan Bond and his Australia II broke the 132-year U.S. hold on the America's Cup and put it in a bulletproof glass case in the Royal Perth Yacht Club. Barely a month after that defeat, the first Americans showed up in Perth, followed since by yachtsmen from five other nations, all of them plotting how to wrest the Cup from the Aussies. Last week the joust began...