Sunday, August 26, 2012

Remember The America"s Cup? Me Either

Apparently, the America's Cup in yacht racing is still going on.
From the San Francisco Chronicle: In a wild finish to the America’s Cup World Series, the winner of the final fleet nearly capsized at the finish. The bigger issue was the action that followed immediately thereafter.
Italy’s Luna Rossa Piranha won the race Sunday, and skipper Jimmy Spithill‘s hard-charging Oracle Team USA forced Team Korea into a critical penalty around the final gate, giving Spithill second place and the overall championship of the San Francisco regatta by a single point.
Spithill was in ninth place out of 11 boats on the third leg of the seven-leg race. Even after losing the earlier match-race final – by one second – to the other Oracle boat, skippered by Russell Coutts, Spithill’s team was harder to stop than the tide.
“It’s a sign of a champion team when you can come back from a bit of adversity,” Spithill said, “and the boys showed that in the fleet racing.”
Spithill entered the final fleet race with 61 points. Team Korea and Piranha each had 45, behind second-place Energy Team with 48. The so-called Super Sunday race was worth 40 points to the winner, 25 for second and 20 for third. So in the home stretch, Spithill needed to finish second to keep Piranha from winning the title.
He did, just three seconds behind, and that gave him 86 points, one more than Piranha, skippered by Chris Draper. Team Korea with skipper Nathan Outteridge was third with 65.
“Honestly, it didn’t really change what we were going,” Spithill said. “In that race were in comeback mode. All we were trying to do was keep chipping boats off and climb our way up there.”
The thrilling race in the sunniest weather of the week finished a highly successful first stop of the new ACWS season. Round two on the Marina Green takes place Oct. 2-7 before two stops in Italy next spring.
 http://blog.sfgate.com/americascup/2012/08/26/spithill-rallies-to-win-americas-cup-prelim/
I think this was a preliminary race before the big America's cup.
America's Cup sure lost it's luster since Ted Turner stopped racing.  

No comments:

Post a Comment