• Spithill Wants Another Crack at America’s Cup in 2021

    Beaten Aussie skipper Jimmy Spithill, who spectacularly surrendered the America’s Cup to New Zealand Team Emirates when the Cup was contested over the past summer in Bermuda, seems to be of the opinion that Oracle Chief Larry Ellison wants to remain in the contest and try to wrest the Cup back from the Kiwis in Auckland in 2021.

    Good luck with that, mate. Or, should we say, matey.

    The Oracle team was so badly outclassed in the Bahamas that the stench could be felt as far away as the Isle of Wight, site of the first racing series in 1851.

    Billionaires such as Ellison hate losing at anything, and even though the millions he spent of the failed 2017 effort might seem to him as pocket change seems to the majority of us, he obviously was not pleased with the results Spithill produced, from a perspective of both boat performance and the tactics of Team Oracle, who were nearly shut out of the Cup Finals series.

    It should be an interesting affair in 2021, as Team New Zealand has made the radical decision to return to a monohull design, which has led to wild speculation about what such a move would entail, as the multihull design has proved superior in the last three editions of the America’s Cup.

    There have been some suggestions that Ellison will start a rival racing series in order to keep the 50-foot foiling catamaran boats in action.

    The team that wins the Cup has the right to establish the rules for the next series.

    New Zealand not only took the radical move of switching back to more traditional hull technology, they announced that they would revert to using grinders to power their boat’s hydraulic systems, abandoning the cyclors that seemed to represent an order of magnitude leap in sailing technology.

    Exactly how Spithill intends to make his case to return at the helm is even harder to conceptualise, as his result in 2017 is more worthy of a walk on the plank than a captaincy.