What happens at this point? Who nose dives under? The guys on this end have to hang on the the boat and suddenly they’re 60 feet up in the air hanging on and dangling. They’re moving so fast and jockeying for position at the same time.
Sailing is a whole new world. I saw the Oracle AC72 for America’s Cup, almost overnight they just left behind the traditional yacht club approach. The boats are so different, they’re twice as fast in three years. WHAT? It was the fastest boat in the history of the event! There are people that are saying “pay attention because these boats can’t last.” They cost too much to make and there are fatalities and crashes. Spectacular crashes… Their wingsail is 223 ft tall– the tallest one ever built.
The America’s Cup has always been about showcasing cutting-edge design. The AC72s don’t even sail on a hull. It sits on the thing Laird Hamilton surfs, a hydrofoil. The hull doesn’t touch the water when it’s moving along. Once it gets going, the horizontal surfaces on the sailboat begin to loft and all that’s in the water are these hydrofoils. They’re like skegs on a surfboard.
There’s no drag in the water that’s why they sail faster than the wind making the sport exceedingly unstable and dangerous. You have to see these boats racing. Suddenly you go from 11 mph to 50+ mph and the whole sailboat is up out of the water. These boats change everything, it’s an unbelievable controversy. For the first time in sailing, someone was killed. Andrew “Bart” Simpson was pinned underneath the 72 foot boat for 10 minutes.
Everything changed in the last 3 years. Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, reshaped the entire sport of sailing. If you wanna compete, you have to compete like this now…