Unsteady winds idle big boats, postpone Race 1 of America’s Cup between Swiss, US crews

America’s Cup opener postponed by unsteady wind

VALENCIA, Spain — Having two of the fastest, most technologically advanced sailboats ever built doesn’t do much good if there’s not enough wind to sail them.

It’s almost as if Mother Nature pulled a fast one on the two bickering billionaires contesting the America’s Cup.

The opening race of the eagerly anticipated showdown between two-time defending champion Alinghi of Switzerland and American challenger BMW Oracle Racing was postponed Monday because of light, unsteady wind.

The giant multihulls USA and Alinghi 5 were towed out of port before dawn to get to the starting line some 28 miles off the Valencia coast. They floated idly for nearly four hours in the cold before the race was called off.

“This is just the nature of the beast, I think,” USA tactician John Kostecki of Reno, Nev., said shortly after the 90-by-90-foot trimaran arrived back at its boatyard in a steady rain. “Because this time of year, you get more frontal action, and that’s what this is, a front passing.”

So after Alinghi’s Ernesto Bertarelli and BMW Oracle Racing’s Larry Ellison poured all that money, time and effort into sustaining a court case for 2½ years and building their massive boats, they’ll have to wait until Wednesday, when officials will try again to get in Race 1 of the best-of-three series.

Bertarelli, Alinghi’s president and helmsman of Alinghi 5, a catamaran, said he was convinced Sunday night and Monday morning that they were going to sail.

“But from 10 o’clock this morning, the meteorologists told us the chances weren’t going to improve.”

That was just before the huge boats were to begin the prestart maneuvers behind the half-mile-long starting line on the Mediterranean.

“We’re going to have to wait,” Bertarelli said.

“It could take a while to get races in,” Kostecki said. “It depends on how the weather develops.”

BMW Oracle meteorologist Chris Bedford was only “hopeful” the race will get under way Wednesday.

“In the afternoon it could turn into a sea breeze,” said Bedford, who expects choppier conditions after a new weather front pushes through on Tuesday. “For sure today it was the right call.”

The teams are finally settling their differences on the water after the sailing classic was disrupted by a bitter court fight over rules, dates and the venue.

Monday’s conditions illustrate how difficult this regatta could be.

There were reports throughout the late morning and early afternoon that the wind was blowing at 6½ to 10 knots at the top mark. The problem was, that mark was 20 miles from the starting line, so the two areas were in different weather patterns.

There was little, if any wind, at the starting line.

“We prefer having consistent breeze to race in, and obviously we didn’t have that out there today,” Kostecki said.

The entire race course encompasses 400 square miles.

“It’s a big ask to get that much runway that has consistent wind direction,” said Bedford, a veteran of eight America’s Cups. “It’s going to be quite difficult.”

This is the first time an America’s Cup has been contested in the Northern Hemisphere winter, just one of the outcomes of the ponderous legal fight between Bertarelli, a biotech tycoon, and Ellison, the CEO of Oracle Corp.

“The conditions just weren’t good,” Bertarelli said. “It’s the winter. Ideal conditions in Valencia would have been May — that’s what we asked initially, but we were forced in February.”

Because Alinghi and BMW Oracle Racing couldn’t agree to rules for a conventional regatta involving several challengers sailing for the right to meet the defender, it defaulted to a rare head-to-head showdown, or Deed of Gift Match.

The Deed of Gift, the 1887 document that governs the event, calls for a best-of-three series. Races 1 and 3, if necessary, are 20 miles into the wind and 20 miles back. The course for Race 2 will be a triangle with 13-mile legs, the first one into the wind and the next two across it.

USA and the equally immense Alinghi 5 are capable of sailing three times the speed of the wind — when there is wind.

Alinghi did find enough breeze to sail around USA and the committee, apparently trying to show it was OK to get a race going.

“We wanted to sail a little bit to show them that that’s what we like to do,” Bertarelli said. “We wanted the public to have some fun, to make it a little bit like a party. The America’s Cup should be a party.”

Although Ellison and three-time America’s Cup winner Russell Coutts were aboard USA for the tow-out, they weren’t on the crew list. Ellison had said he would sit out Race 1 due to weight limits. Coutts, the syndicate’s CEO, had said in recent days he wasn’t sure if he’d sail.

Kostecki was the only American among the 10 crewmen listed for a boat that’s trying to recapture the America’s Cup for the United States for the first time since Dennis Conner lost it to Coutts and Team New Zealand in 1995.

AP Sports Writer Paul Logothetis contributed to this report.