In Loving memory

Da'La'Mauron

Alinghi present sailing & design team in Valencia; announce imminent construction of yacht

Alinghi, the Defender of the 33rd America's Cup held on Thursday a media day in their base in Valencia, presenting their sailing and design teams and giving an update on the status of design and construction of their multihull yacht. Don't hold your breath there wasn't anything spectacular announcement, although we do know now that the start of construction is "imminent".
Sailing Team. There might be a number of reasons why one could be critical of Alinghi but the quality of its sailing team is without any doubt not one of them, quite the contrary. Out of the Defender's 27-strong sailing team, 14 were already part of the 31st America's Cup winner and another 12 joined in the lead up to the second victory in the 32nd edition of the event. That leaves us with just two newcomers, John Barnitt and Alain Gautier.Barnitt, a three-time America's Cup winner, joined Alinghi as sports director while Gautier is a French multihull specialist whose role in the team is described as multihull consultant. When he was asked to explain his job in the team he described it as "to answer questions". As a result, it's a closely-knit group of top professional sailors that has won two consecutive America's Cups and there isn't any inherent reason why they shouldn't be able to quickly reach a winning level in multihulls as well. According to Gautier there isn't any preparation deficit in the current structure and no need to change a winning team. This is the reason why they just didn't "buy" an already-established multihull team and renamed it Alinghi. Unlike BMW Oracle, we weren't surprised with any big-name addition to the team and we were greeted by the same familiar faces we have been seeing in the last 3 years but then, BMW Oracle's sailing team was hardly a brilliant success last year. Alinghi's sailing team shrank from 36 members to 27 but that was a result of change of scope, passing from two fully-crewed America's Cup yachts to two small multihulls or a big one.