December 2003
I’ve flown in with Ellison from San Jose for the semifinals of the Louis Vuitton Cup, the winner of which will go on to challenge Team New Zealand for the America’s Cup in February. When we arrive, we find that Katana, which has been Ellison’s base in New Zealand for the past year, has been moved out of Auckland’s pretty, but crowded, inner harbor to a pier just outside that both affords more privacy and allows the big boat to make a quicker getaway each morning before the day’s racing begins. At the landward end of the pier is sailing’s equivalent of gasoline alley, known as Syndicate Row, along which are lined the high-tech boat garages of the nine teams that arrived here many months ago in their quest for the “auld mug.” There’s a constant sound of banging, grinding, and drilling, signaling the unremitting effort to hone and fettle the boats.
After a patchy start during the first round-robin races in October (when every team races every other team), Ellison is buoyantly confident. Since he brought his favorite sailor, Chris Dickson, back from exile on his farm near Auckland to skipper the team, Oracle BMW has been literally unbeatable, scoring eleven victories in succession—a run of wins that has now taken it through to the semifinals. Most satisfyingly, in the quarter final, Dickson trounced OneWorld, the team from Seattle that’s owned by the cell phone pioneer, Craig McCaw, and backed by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Quite apart from the Microsoft connection, there’s not much love lost between them and Oracle. OneWorld has been dogged by accusations that it had stolen design secrets from Team New Zealand, and Ellison refers to them in private as the “cheaters from Seattle.” A little too cheerfully, on the morning of arrival, he tells reporters in the regatta press center how distressed he is “as an American” that this team, financed by billionaires, might have stolen from the impecunious Kiwis, who have had to raise money by public subscription. “If it can be proved that OneWorld is guilty,” he intones solemnly, “they should be thrown out of the regatta.” He might almost be talking about Microsoft during the antitrust case.1
Ellison is also openly scornful of McCaw and Allen’s sentimental environmentalism: “OneWorld issued this press release saying that they were racing in the America’s Cup for a ‘higher purpose’; they said they were racing ‘in the name of the health of the oceans.’ Can you believe those guys? I mean, how does spending tens of millions of dollars on a sailboat race improve the health of the oceans? They travel to New Zealand in private jets and drive around the gulf in a boat that’s twice as big mine [Allen’s 302-foot Tatoosh, purchased from McCaw, is moored on the opposite shore]. You can’t be a world-record consumer of fossil fuels and still claim to be a conservationist. Their crew was planting trees for the benefit of the TV cameras, not the environment.” The stunt that Ellison is referring to was indeed pretty nauseating. Somebody from OneWorld calculated the amount of emissions caused by the team’s armada of chase boats and further worked out that the precise remedy would be to plant ten thousand trees on the slopes of a nearby island volcano. Just how many trees you’d need to stick in the ground to clean up the atmosphere every time Allen fires up the twin 4,500-horsepower engines of his megayacht, nobody’s saying.
One half of the draw will be contested between the two most successful boats so far, Oracle’s USA-76 and Alinghi’s (the Swiss challenger) SUI-64, while the bottom half is between the winners of the “repechage” quarterfinals, Prada from Italy (the winner of the Louis Vuitton three years ago) and OneWorld—if it’s not chucked out. Under the complicated rules, the winner between Oracle and Alinghi, owned by billionaire biotech tycoon Ernesto Bertarelli, will progress directly to the finals, while the loser will have a second chance to qualify by racing against the winner of the best-of-seven series between Prada and OneWorld.
With racing due to start on Monday if the unpredictable Hauraki Gulf winds are not too strong—Alinghi has just had a narrow escape, losing the top of its mast during its Sunday-morning practice session—everyone’s expecting a close and hard-fought battle between the two favorites. After the press conference, at which Ellison unassumingly sits in the audience, Dickson comes over to Katana to brief his boss on how things have gone in Ellison’s absence during the fortnight’s lull in the racing. Although Dickson never loses his intensity, by his standards he seems pretty relaxed and brimming with confidence. He says that the team has been working well together and has extracted some useful extra speed from the boat. Although he has a huge amount of respect for Alinghi (the Swiss boat is actually dominated by the Kiwis, who won the last America’s Cup, in particular through the partnership of skipper Russell Coutts and tactician Brad Butterworth, controversially lured by Bertarelli with a check for $5 million), his body language suggests that he expects to win.
In terms of sheer boat speed, all the evidence suggests that unless one or the other side has hit on an especially effective “tweak,” Alinghi and Oracle BMW should be pretty evenly matched. Bruce Farr has delivered a more than competitive design, but USA-76 is not quite, as Ellison earlier bragged, a “take-your-blazer-to-the-cleaners” boat, meaning one that is so far out ahead that all you have to worry about is looking your best when receiving the cup. Both are optimized for sailing upwind to try to grab crucial advantage between the start and rounding the first mark, where races are frequently won and lost. But after Oracle lost four out of five races between the end of the first round-robin and the beginning of the second, its sails have gotten bigger and the massive bulb on its keel lighter in a bid to improve its light-air and downwind performance.2
But the real worries are more to do with the crew than the boat. Ellison summed it up: “Alinghi runs like a fine Swiss watch; we’re more like an American daytime TV soap opera.” The problems had been there since the very beginning. The decision to buy the two boats from the AmericaOne syndicate, which had lost in 2000, had turned out to be a double-edged sword. It meant that Ellison’s team had gotten onto the water early, giving them a head start in training and development, but the boats had brought with them their skipper, Paul Cayard, and most of his losing crew. Right from the get-go, Cayard’s Americans and the New Zealanders who had come from Sayonara didn’t get along. But the biggest point of friction was between Dickson and Cayard, whose different styles and rivalries proved an impossible combination. Even Ellison’s removal of Cayard, a man he’d never much liked, by locking him in “golden handcuffs” and pushing him off the team, had failed to bring harmony.3
Ellison told me, “There was a lot of infighting between the AmericaOne guys and the Sayonara guys. In hindsight, it should have been a very easy problem to solve; all we had to do was pick the right people and get on with it. But that’s not what we did, because we couldn’t agree on who the right people were. I wanted Chris. Others wanted Paul. So I made the worst decision possible: no decision. I just didn’t have the time to gather the facts and figure out what was really going on down in New Zealand. Silicon Valley was in the middle of a severe recession, and I was 110 percent consumed by my job at Oracle. But I couldn’t delay forever, so I made the second worst decision possible: I delegated the decision to somebody else. A few days later, I was informed that as a result of Chris’s being too hard on the crew, he had been ‘voted off the team.’ I was told that Chris had a ‘dark side.’ Well, I’d never seen this ‘dark side’ of Chris’s personality that people were telling me about. All I saw was a guy who pushes himself and others because he wants to win. I’d been sailing with Chris for years. I couldn’t imagine being on the boat without him. He’s incredibly smart, organized, disciplined, hardworking, and intense. From what I can tell, he’s the best sailor in the world. How can we fire the best sailor in the world?4
“It was a monumentally stupid mistake! When I finally got to New Zealand and started practicing with the sailing team, I discovered that the guys were pretty evenly divided between the pro- and anti-Chris factions. Several of the people I had sailed with on Sayonara told me that they were absolutely furious about how badly Chris had been treate
d. I felt terrible. How could I have let this happen? Chris is my friend. He trusted me. How could I let him down like that? Some of the key guys on the race boat didn’t like Chris and didn’t think we needed him; they were wrong. I was on the boat for all the races of the first round-robin of the Louis Vuitton Cup. It was painfully obvious that we were lacking leadership on the water.
“We had started our America’s Cup campaign with three top-rated America’s Cup drivers: Chris Dickson, Paul Cayard, and Gavin Brady. But somehow we managed to lose all three of them. We lost Gavin Brady early on, because he thought Chris and Paul would be driving our two boats and he wouldn’t get a chance to drive at all. As it turns out, if he had stayed, he would have driven our race boat, but instead he went to Prada to drive their warm-up boat. That meant that Peter Holmberg, who started as our number four driver, was now our number one driver and skipper. Peter was ranked number one in the world in small-boat match racing, but he had done very little big-boat racing and he had virtually no America’s Cup experience. As the Cup racing began and the pressure built, the team started making mistakes. We hit a stretch where we lost four out of five races.”
What made it possible to bring Dickson back was that losing streak. Although Oracle BMW’s skipper, Peter Holmberg, had proved a fiercely competitive starter, according to Ellison, he was prone to errors while driving the rest of the race, which, in turn, was putting pressure on lead tactician John Cutler that he couldn’t handle.5 The result was that twice USA-76 lost the lead and the race against clearly weaker opposition. After losing one race against the unimpressive GBR from Britain, Ellison told me that, riding back to base in the tender, he had been closer to losing his temper than he could remember for a very long time.
Demoting Holmberg and restoring Dickson provoked a near mutiny, with four crew members threatening to quit (although only one, Stuart Argo, a headsail trimmer, actually did). It also put Bill Erkelens, Ellison’s inexperienced team manager, in an awkward position, having had his earlier judgment so comprehensively overruled. Ellison is unimpressed: “This time I didn’t have to rely on someone telling me what was going on. I was on the boat for every race. I saw firsthand how people performed under pressure. I had all the facts I needed. During the GBR race the British boat jibed and our tactician, John Cutler, said, ‘GBR jibes, do we go with him?’ You can’t do that. It’s too slow to take a vote after the other boat jibes; you have to decide in advance what you’ll do if they jibe. The tactical situation needs to be evaluated in advance, the decision has to be made in advance, and then the decision has to be clearly communicated to everyone in the crew so we all know what we are going to do well in advance of actually doing it. It takes several seconds to get set up for a jibe on an America’s Cup boat; those seconds can be the difference between winning and losing the race. The command should have been ‘If GBR jibes, we go with them’ or ‘If GBR jibes we let them go.’ We were in desperate need of an experienced, decisive leader, so I asked Chris to come back.
“I held a team meeting to announce and explain my decision. It got ugly. Some of the crew complained bitterly, saying they didn’t like Chris and they didn’t want him to come back. I said they didn’t have to like him—I wasn’t asking them to date him, I was asking them to sail for him. Some threatened to quit. They said they voted him off the team twice. Interesting. I’m voting him back on the team. They said Chris being on the boat put too much pressure on the crew to perform. What? If the crew can’t take the pressure of Chris being on our boat, how are they going to handle the pressure of racing against Russell and Brad on the Swiss boat? One of the guys said, ‘I thought we were here to have fun.’ Do you think losing is fun? I don’t. This is professional sports, not high school. We’re here for one and only one reason—we’re here to win. You’re paid to win. But we’re not winning, so you’ve got a new boss. I said it as clearly as I could: ‘Chris Dickson is skipper of Oracle BMW Racing until we win the cup, or we’re beaten on the water.’ By the end of the meeting I had achieved two things: the best sailor in the world was back on board, and he was no longer the most hated guy on our sailing team—I was.”
Dickson’s resurrection had another consequence. After driving and winning his first race out, the intensely self-critical New Zealander had concluded that he couldn’t make up for the months of practice lost while kicking his heels on land; he also knew he had to do something to try to bind the feuding team together. He therefore made it a priority to persuade Holmberg to continue to start the boat and do most of the driving, while he made the tactical calls. But that meant there was no longer room for Ellison on board—no team could afford to race with three drivers. It was a tough call for Ellison, as he had been pleased with his performance against the world’s best professionals. “Every time I drove, we increased our lead over the other boat. I’m proud of that. But, at the same time, I know I wasn’t making the difference between winning and losing because I was only driving when we were already in front. And I wasn’t enjoying myself. I hadn’t had much time to practice with the team, and I hardly knew most of them. The only enjoyable race for me during the entire Louis Vuitton Cup was Chris’s first day back on the race boat. Several members of our sailing team went on strike to protest Chris’s return, so we had to replace them with a bunch of our old Sayonara guys. It was great to be with the guys I had sailed with for years. It was just like the old days, except we were in USA-76 racing our way toward the America’s Cup. Chris easily won the start, drove for a while, and then I took over. It was a clear sunny day on the gulf with the wind out of the northeast at fourteen knots. We led from start to finish. That was my last turn at the wheel. Once it became clear to everyone that Chris was here to stay and we’d race with or without the striking crew members, the strike was broken. All but one of the sailing team members returned and agreed to sail under Chris’s leadership. Their return meant there was no room for me on the race boat. Being on the boat hadn’t been great for me, but still, I really hated getting off.” He also knew that if he had insisted on staying, Dickson’s job would have been even harder than it was already: “The same people who didn’t want Chris on the boat didn’t want me there either.”
The transformation of the team’s performance since Dickson’s return had triumphantly vindicated Ellison’s decision. But winning races had suppressed rather than ended the grumbling and the personal animosities in the camp. The chances were that any reversal of fortune would quickly bring them bubbling to the surface again.
• • •
The first scheduled semifinal race day is canceled because the wind is averaging about twenty-four knots—according to the rules, too much for the highly tuned boats to sail in safely. The following day, however, is set fair, although the wind is expected to get up later. This should suit Oracle BMW, which is thought to have an advantage in strong breezes. Soon after 9 A.M. the teams begin the exodus from the harbor. They leave in pairs, towed by the powerful launches that carry spare parts, additional sails, and nonsailing team members. It takes about an hour and a half to reach the course, which is well out in the gulf. When they get there, the first- and second-string boats from each of the four teams still in the regatta will sail against each other for a couple of hours of warmup and shakedown. Soon after the racing boats set off, the rest of the flotilla, bearing officials and spectators, starts streaming out of Auckland. Among them are Bertarelli’s 150-foot Vava and Katana.
To get closer to the action than I can on Katana, I decide to watch the race from one of the Oracle BMW chase boats—forty-foot RIBs (rigid inflatable boats) with powerful diesel engines. The previous day, I’d been on board a boat crewed by a couple of New Zealanders. They had been friendly and open, but it hadn’t been long before they had started telling me about how fed up they were with the feuding in the camp. Supporters of Dickson, they said that too many of the crew on the race boat were there for political rather than sailing reasons. The atmospherics aboard the boat I’m on today are very different. There
’s almost no banter among the seven or eight team members on board, and while that may be due to tension, I get the distinct impression that because I’m associated with Ellison, I’m not a welcome presence.
The race itself goes badly. Although the weather conditions are poor—it’s overcast and squally with quite heavy seas—they should suit USA-76. Holmberg is driving, while Dickson is calling the tactical shots. But despite what looks like a slight advantage at the start line, it quickly becomes clear that Alinghi has found more breeze by going out to the right-hand side of the course. By the time the boats reach the first mark, SUI-64 has opened out a lead of nearly fifteen seconds. Thereafter, Coutts and Butterworth continue to stay in phase with the wind shifts, finally crossing the line more than a minute ahead of a well-beaten USA-76. On the chase boat, there’s no display of emotion. The truth is that the race was over within the first ten minutes and that Alinghi has given Oracle BMW a lesson in match sailing. After those eleven wins on the bounce, it’s desperately disappointing, but Ellison doesn’t seem too down when I find him back on Katana. “They won the right side, got the first shift, and it was over,” he says.6
But the next day, things don’t go any better. Although Holmberg manages to get to the far right of the course where the wind is once again, Coutts somehow manages not only to stay in contention but to get to the first weather mark a little ahead. It’s enough to lock Oracle BMW out for the rest of the race. This time, Ellison is not inclined to make excuses for the team. He says, “We had a pretty even start with Alinghi, so it became a drag race to the lay line. When both boats are side-by-side racing in a straight line like that, you have to drive very smoothly inside a narrow performance envelope of wind angles and boat speed. It’s a combination of driving by feel and driving by the instruments. Most of Peter’s experience is in small boats, so he relies more on what he feels than what the instruments are telling him. I don’t think you can beat Russell Coutts in a drag race if you drive that way.” Consequently, Ellison decides to make another throw of the dice, taking Holmberg off the boat and persuading Dickson—“the best straight-line driver I’ve ever seen”—to replace him at the helm.
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