by Mary Pilon
Foils, or hydrofoils, as some preferred to call them, weren’t new to sailing, but they had never been used at this level, this speed, before. Smaller boats, such as Moths, had long foils. In a first, a hydrofoil Moth had won the Moth World Championship in 2001, and later, foiling became ubiquitous in the Moth class. Sailors debated whether adding foils to boats placed them a different class altogether, and whether foiling and nonfoiling boats should be competing against each other.
The vertical lift of the foils on the AC72s, developed by more than thirty engineers, designers and programmers, added speed, as they reduced the friction of the boats against the ocean surface. “But,” Nick Holroyd, Team New Zealand’s technical director, told Sailing World, “it does lead to serious control issues69 when you get it wrong.”
Adding foils to the boats instantly magnified the tension between speed and safety, pushing the boats and sailors to the technical edge of risk.70 The design team had taken many of its cues from the science of flight. It was easy to “fall off the foils with a severe crash,” he added. “You might survive that crash, but the average speed won’t be good. It’s all about finding and maintaining a high average speed.”
Moth diagram (David Schmidt. “Learning to fly,” Sail magazine [2007]. https://www.sailmagazine.com/racing/learning-to-fly-2)
With echoes of how the NFL used to promote the most spectacular collisions between players (which are now known to lead to devastating brain damage)—America’s Cup marketing and public relations experts began to upload and promote videos on YouTube71 of the large boats capsizing. While the videos garnered millions of views, the risks to the sailors on board were seldom, if ever, discussed or considered. In a capsize, most sailors didn’t have time for emotions, instead focusing on the mechanics of securing whatever was left on board and getting themselves and teammates off the water safely. But the chasm between the experience of a fan watching the sport and a sailor on board only seemed to be widening, even though, ironically, there were more cameras on board than ever before.
With the introduction of the foiling New Zealand, the sport had been instantly redefined. Anyone hoping to have even the slightest chance of competing against the Kiwis was going to have to do a major overhaul of their catamarans to incorporate foils.
Kevin watched the flying boat and his thoughts were clear.
Oh, shit.
•
The Oracle team had the same problem as the Artemis sailors, which was that their boat was not designed to foil in the first place. Many years and millions of dollars into the competition, the team would have to turn their boat into an airplane—at a breakneck speed and without being able to compare notes with anyone else.
It wasn’t going well. During a test run in October 2012, the Oracle, the best-financed of the America’s Cup boats, to the tune of at least $8 million,72 capsized.
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A few weeks later, those standing on the rim of San Francisco Bay saw a perplexing yet oddly majestic sight. It looked as if two giant red hot dogs were suspended in the air by an unseen thread. Only a few days after the Oracle crash, the Artemis was arriving.73 Dozens of onlookers watched under clear skies as a massive crane lifted and gently deposited the two bright red hulls into the water, the white letters ARTEMIS legible from far away.
She was late. The boat was supposed to have launched weeks earlier, but it had been damaged in tow-testing74 on the morning of the original launch, causing delays.
The news of the Oracle crash had jarred the Artemis team members. If that boat, with its brilliant engineers, hefty financial backing, and strong sailors, had capsized after adding foils, what did that mean for everyone else in the competition? Like the human body, so many things on a boat could go wrong, sometimes without a clear explanation, and it seemed miraculous when all of the pieces actually lined up. It looked as though New Zealand had done its sailing due diligence, but now the Oracle, Artemis, and Luna Rossa teams would have to play catch-up. Still, the Artemis sailors thought that their boat was as safe as it could be, considering the engineering challenge of adding foils under a tight deadline.75
The sailors stood on board with their red, white, and black practice uniforms on, their hands on their hips, cradled by views of the Bay’s bridges. During a structural test on the water, a beam of the large boat was damaged. The team hauled the boat out of the water so the design team could assess what had gone wrong. “Already broken?” a headline from the blog Sailing Anarchy76 read. “At least they haven’t capsized … yet.”
The skirmish also delayed the christening of the boat by a month, a slight embarrassment considering the pride that typically accompanies the event. Still, on November 13, Kevin and his Artemis teammates cautiously launched their boat onto the waters of San Francisco Bay. The effort was closely watched by many who questioned whether or not the boat should have been refashioned for foiling.
“Think about a car when you’re driving down the road at sixty miles per hour,”77 Artemis skipper Terry Hutchinson said, “and you stick your hand out the window, in essence, that will slow the car down. If you have a smaller car that’s capable of the same type of speed, but doesn’t have the arm sticking out the window, that car is inherently going to go faster. The boats will go faster, and they’ll be more dangerous and on-edge. My personal opinion is that people leading the event aren’t applying any logic or reason. They’re just trying to make something that is perceived to be cool and have zero forethought into the actual consequences of what they’re proposing.”
By the end of November, Hutchinson had what he later called “a massive falling out with the owner of the team and CEO about the safety of our yacht,” which he said was their cause for deciding to terminate him.78 Hutchinson said he wasn’t tech-averse; rather, he was concerned with the possible consequences for his fellow men on board with the changes to the boat. He added: “It was a known thing that the boat was not safe.”
Three months after that, with seven months until race day, a new fleet of sailors79 joined the Artemis team, a considerable investment in high-quality payroll. Among them was 2012 Olympic silver medalist Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson of Great Britain, who added their most recent Olympic performance to follow up the 2008 gold medal he had won in Beijing. Kevin was excited to have Simpson on the Artemis; through the tight social network of the international sailing circuit, the two had known each other for a decade.80 Those in and out of sailing liked and respected Simpson, including those he had sailed against. Kevin was seven years Simpson’s senior, and the two had first met in 2003 when Kevin was sailing the Finn ahead of Athens and Simpson had been hired as a coach to help the United States sailing team. At the time, the Americans needed outside expertise from the established British sailing squad, and Simpson was a supportive voice, as well as a great guy to just hang out with. Simpson’s nickname was Bart, a nod to the spiky-haired, devious, yellow-skinned cartoon character from The Simpsons who shared his last name. Kevin and Simpson both had Olympic and America’s Cup experience and had risen through the sport during a similar era, making them familiar faces to each other in an otherwise chaotic tableau.
The same month as the announcement of Simpson’s joining the team, representatives from the team said that they had sent the Artemis to the shed for modifications.81 Kevin and his teammates continued to go to work every day, certain that their engineers were improving their boat, but some were privately concerned like Hutchinson about safety.
When Amanda saw her husband leave the house each day, kissing her and their kids goodbye in his superhero-like plated protective wear, she couldn’t help but wonder.
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The conditions on May 9, 2013, appeared to be perfectly sound for sailing. On board with Kevin that day were ten of his teammates, including several Olympic champions like Simpson. There was nothing happening on the water that day that they hadn’t all seen a million times in their respective careers.
To turn away from the wind in an ultra-high performance boat i
s one of sailing’s trickiest feats, known as a “bear away.” For Kevin and the men on the Artemis, however, it wasn’t a new move, and it was standard fare for a practice run on the waters between Treasure Island and Alcatraz Island, home of the famous prison that has counted Al Capone and James “Whitey” Bulger among its inmates. The boat started its turn. The vessel seemingly moved in slow motion—Kevin had seen those kinds of angles and maneuvers on smaller boats over the years and knew when something was off.
Then came the sound of a crack that was as sickening as it was sharp. Most of the sailors on board didn’t know until that moment that a professional sailboat was capable of making a noise like that, a series of snaps that curdled the blood.82
The left side hull of the boat dug into the water, a structural failure that made the entire balance of the boat careen.83 The tall wing sail, black and white with horizontal lines like a Japanese shoji screen, the blue and yellow of the Swedish flag at the top, tilted away from the sky and toward the water. From the distance, the men on board looked like little black specks as they clung to the high side of the boat, one half of it going higher into the air as the other half plunged more deeply into the water. A violent crash of white waves fanned around the vessel, temporarily blinding anyone who was near it.
Some of the sailors saw it happening in slow motion, the boat that they had worked on for two years, that had cost millions, collapsing before their eyes and taking them down with it. They clung to the red of the hull with all of their strength, some suspended only by their arms, their legs dangling beneath them, kicking and searching for grounding of any kind and instead meeting air. The horizontal plane of the boat became a wall, then a ceiling, in just a few seconds. A support boat sat nearby, unsure what, if anything, could be done.
It became clear amid the chaos that Andrew Simpson was in trouble. And Kevin wasn’t entirely sure whether the scene before him was really happening.
AMANDA
As Amanda sat with Rainer, now eight years old, at the orthodontist’s office, her phone buzzed with a text message. It was from someone with the Artemis team who needed to speak with her right away. She immediately knew that something had gone wrong.
The last time she had seen Kevin was that morning as he left for work with a smile, as always. She knew he would have been on that boat and have left his cell phone ashore, as he and his teammates did on all their practice runs. Locking into emergency physician mode, she debated whether to call the Artemis office (too slow, too bureaucratic) or one of the other sailing spouses (not likely to have any more information than she did). She decided to dial her workplace, San Francisco General Hospital, reasoning that if anyone had been injured on a boat of the Artemis’s size and stature, they would likely have ended up in her hospital and if not, her colleagues would know where they were.
She dialed. She waited.
KEVIN
Shortly before one o’clock, the San Francisco Police Department’s marine unit responded to the call84 and met the Artemis, or what was left of it, on the water. The red frame of the boat had “turtled”; no mighty sail was scraping the air. Instead, two white triangles of rudders lay flat on the water, a mess of tangled metal.85
Andrew Simpson was trapped, wedged between a few tons of carbon fiber, fighting to break free. His teammates dived beneath the water, hoping to free him, and handed him an oxygen bottle86 to give him some air until rescue crews arrived.
By the time the police came, an Artemis chase boat had nosed up to the capsized catamaran, where numerous sailors were still on board, as the vessel had stopped moving. They had finally succeeded in pulling Simpson out of the water and onto a backboard and had begun CPR. The police and crewmembers quickly transferred him onto a more stable platform and carried him onto the chase boat to get him to an ambulance. They continued doing CPR on the way, trying in vain to dry off Simpson’s chest and apply the defibrillator pads. They kept slipping off, and one responding officer lost a razor kit and the child set of defibrillator pads in the process.
When they landed at the San Francisco Yacht Harbor, the medics took over.
Andrew “Bart” Simpson was declared dead.
GORDON
The headline flashed on Yahoo News when Gordon, now retired from medicine and living in Oregon, logged in to check his email. An America’s Cup boat in San Francisco had capsized that afternoon. The report was live, only an hour or so after the accident had happened.
Preliminary reports indicated that the Artemis capsize, unlike the Oracle one before it, hadn’t happened because the sailors had pushed too hard or had made a mistake. Rather, the boat had simply buckled87 under its new flying loads, then flipped over. The Oracle capsize had happened in rougher conditions, but what little was known of the Artemis capsize didn’t make any sense.
Before Gordon could try calling Kevin and Amanda, his phone rang, Kevin’s name flashing across the screen in a comforting display of pixels.
Gordon’s blood pressure returned to normal when he heard his son’s voice. Kevin said that he was safe. He told him that he had seen the crash and was one of the sailors who had pulled Simpson’s body up from the water. He was devastated, and still very much in a state of shock.
The conversation lasted only a few minutes, and after hanging up, Gordon struggled to process what the accident might mean for Kevin and his mental health.
A couple of days later after the crash, Gordon and Kevin were on the phone again.88
I want to understand things better, Gordon said to Kevin, trying to get more information about what had transpired on board.
Kevin’s answer to his father was clear. He never wanted to talk about the accident with him ever again.
KEVIN
Immediately after the crash, Kevin and his teammates threw themselves back into work. Some of that was necessary, as they tried to examine any kind of data that could point to what had gone wrong and help law enforcement understand the nuances of professional sailing. Kevin worked ten days straight, the time drain also affording him distance from people he knew who would want to talk about the more emotional aspects of the crash. All of the sailors were in a state of shock but went into analysis mode as professionals as much as they could. At least his teammates could relate to what he had gone through, sharing in the horrible experience and subsequent stress.
Kevin had met Amanda on shore shortly after the accident that afternoon, both relieved that he was okay. Grief took a robotic turn, and in a strange way, going back to work to try to understand what had gone wrong was the only thing that felt right to Kevin and some of his teammates.
More and more, research has shown that human beings may be more hardwired than they think to have a hard time accepting what science reveals about the universe: that it is inherently unstable. Kevin handled uncertainty nearly effortlessly on the water, steering a craft according to the contours of the wind, reading data with both scientific methods and his gut. But handling instability when not on the water was something else altogether. Somehow, the mental tools he could apply so well in one realm weren’t fully translating into another one.
More and more, too, researchers were finding that personality isn’t as fixed as had been previously thought—rather, it can be flexible and malleable,89 and changes both over time and in a variety of situations. Human beings rewrite their memories as they revisit them, so the memories themselves in a way seem to change, even though most think of memories as static photographs, solids that can be picked up whenever one wants to recall them. Really, a memory can be more like a photograph that looks different than it did before each time it is retrieved. The benefit of that is that one can use the brain’s pliability to overcome mental maladies like post-traumatic stress by taking control of behavior, and become a functional, happy person. The negative is that those very same forces can distort or destroy. The aim for human beings, the psychology professor Walter Mischel of Columbia University says, is “to not be victims of their biographies.”90
&nbs
p; Kevin picked up the ever-morphing photographs in his mind of the crash over and over again in the following weeks, splicing them together with moments from his past regattas, episodes of The Show, and time spent with friends and family.
In the wake of the crash, he continued to be a man full of questions.
KRISTINA
It was a song Kristina had heard a million times at countless different Grateful Dead shows, yet it felt almost unfair and a tad spooky for the band to be playing it now. From the first time since she had heard it in college, she couldn’t help but think of Kevin. It was called “Lost Sailor.”
The song tells the tale of chaos at sea, of not being able to find oneself in the vast void of stars and the moon. That even though the shore beckons, “there’s a price” for the freedom of the ocean—broken dreams, not being able to belong properly on land, but of being a lost sailor who has “been away too long at sea.”
Even the most mentally stable of people would struggle under the weight of the violent crash and the loss of a friend. She thought of the drive they had taken after her brother’s Tokyo episode, and how he had described to her the world he lived in—the manic episodes, the depressions, the feeling of being on the edge of losing reality’s grasp. How different it all was from her world. She thought of the psych wards, the victories on the water, and the photo of her brother on the front page of USA Today parading as an Olympian. She still couldn’t really grasp how he had narrowly averted death at the America’s Cup.
Bud stood at her side as the crowd gently swayed, and she wondered again, as she did every time she heard the song, whether she should send it to Kevin. She never had, because she was worried that the similarities in it to his own life could trigger something in his mind. She knew how he clung to coincidences, particularly when in a manic upswing and didn’t want to encourage them, lest he spin out of control again.