Set and match ball. We are not talking about tennis, but about sailing. But that’s what the scoreboard says. Emirates New Zealand has gone 6 to 2. On Saturday, if there is a regatta, the New Zealanders can win the America’s Cup. He is one point away from sporting glory. It would be historic if the same team won the Hundred Guineas Jug for the third time in a row.
The Emirates knew how to read a very crazy wind on the coast of Barcelona
The double victory on Friday was overwhelming: in both matches the distance when crossing the finish line exceeded one kilometer and in time the delay was close to a minute. “It seems to me that we are going to have New Zealand winning for a long time in the coming years,” commented Antonio Vettese, who has written a book on the history of the America’s Cup.
The difference on Friday was having a good meteorologist in their ranks. Because the wind on the regatta course was one of the most irregular in memory of this edition. There were areas where it was barely around nine knots and others where it rose to 17 or more. Double. In other words, being in one place or another on the regatta course meant having an extra engine in the sails.
In both races on Friday, the distance to the finish line was more than a kilometer
The British could do little, no matter how much Ben Ainslie entrusted himself to Santa Rita (all his ships are named after a gift his mother gave him. of the Church of Santa Rita de Tenerife when in the Canary Islands I haggled as a child). As if that were not enough, in the second race some object collided with the rudder and caused it to lose some performance.
“With such a gusty onshore wind, the strategy was relatively clear. What happens is that when you don’t have control and others do, they throw you on the bad side or you’re always late to where you need to go. We had the plan to defend the right also in the second race, but with this style of dribbling, it is very difficult to have options. And also the New Zealanders have not made a single mistake,” explains Xabi Fernández, Ineos coach.
In both matches of the day, the New Zealanders intelligently marked their opponent, placing themselves between Ineos and the buoys without letting him breathe (not even Claudio Gentile was so suffocating with Diego Armando Maradona in the 82 World Cup in Spain). But not only: they always knew where to go. Where the wind blew the most. And this thanks to the knowledge of a mythical man: Roger Badham.
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This 75-year-old Australian has been predicting the weather for just over half a century. He has done it in the last ten editions of the America’s Cup, in nine Olympic Games and has worked for Grant Dalton for two decades. His nickname is Clouds. He has received the Medal of the Order of Australia. As he told this newspaper to Sara Sans last August, he wanted to retire before this edition, but Dalton told him that: “If you are not here, we will still call you every morning so you can make us the prediction.”
Badham has specialized in microprediction, giving little information, but precise and on a small scale, because the ships go fast and move in a small space. Intuition, but also calculation (he studied mathematics and physics). His services are appreciated in several sporting disciplines, also in Formula One, where he has worked for Ferrari to suggest which tires to put on (in case it starts raining on the circuit during the race).
Emirates flight controller Andy Maloney recognizes the work of Badham’s team. “It is always difficult to know if the sea breeze will continue here in Barcelona. We had to see it before we fully believed it. But once we got out and the wind started to pick up, we were pretty sure the second race would continue to pick up. The conditions made it extremely fun trying to look for the gusts and shifts. “I’m sure the British were doing the same thing, but we just got ahead of ourselves and had all the options and chose well from there.”
On the British side, they trust the miracle to a possible change in weather. Very little wind is expected this weekend, which in principle does not benefit Ineos. “It is obvious that medium wind and more waves are what we would like to have the most, since they are the conditions for which we believe the boat is most optimized. We will see how the weekend goes and if we are still alive on Monday, since there may be an easterly wind with more waves,” says Xabi Fernández.
The oracles say that the outcome is near.
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