From
Sailing World "A Bit of a Mutiny"
As was widely reported, Race 2 of the 33rd America's Cup was the race that almost didn't happen—and not for the reasons with which most sailors are familiar. Struggling against a fickle breeze and with poor weather looming for the foreseeable future, 33rd America's Cup principal race officer Harold Bennett kept the two multihulls on the water until late into the afternoon on Sunday. A half hour before the 4:30 p.m. cutoff for the start, the breeze finally solidified, 7 to 9 knots from the east, and Bennett indicated the he was aiming for a 4:25 p.m. start.
Courtesy
www.AmericasCup.comNew Zealander Harold Bennett was the principal race officer for the 33rd America's Cup.
However, the Swiss team on Alinghi 5 didn't want to race, feeling most likely that the waves were too high, and relayed that to members of the Société Nautique de Genève working on the race committee boat. What happened next is just one last piece of absurdity in what has been a fairly unique chapter in the history of the America's Cup. Bennett sat down with four journalists yesterday (myself, Stuart Alexander of the Independent, Angus Phillips of the Washington Post, and Jim Doyle of the San Francisco Chronicle) to talk about the incident.
Harold, what happened on the boat when you tried to start Race 2? Is it true that the SNG members on the boat refused to perform their jobs?
We had a bit of a mutiny. I don't think SNG wanted to go, so they decided they weren't going to do flags. So Tom [Ehman, BMW Oracle Racing's head of external affairds] took the AP down and my boat driver, who's also an international umpire, he shot up forward and did the rest of the signals.
Does this stray into Rule 69 territory. Would you normal write a report for ISAF?
Yes I do have to and obviously that's going to be included in any report. That's what you do, you've got outline what's going on on the boat, whether it's good or bad.
What could've been their motivation? The wind was as light as it could get and still be stable.
We had a perfect breeze the way I saw it. I had good weather information from the Alinghi weather team. It was perfect, everything lined up, 8, 9 knots up the course. And it was like, well, let's do it.
Have you heard of a race committee at any regatta deciding they want to prevent the race being run?
No. Well I've certainly never experienced it. No I've never heard of that before.
When you said, 'Let's get this race off.' They just said, 'We're not doing it.'? No reason?
Well one guy was over my shoulder, telling me that the waves were too big, that the boats were going to break. I just said, I don't believe that. I know that boat boats when they were going upwind the alarms were going off. I understand that, I was told by the sailors of both teams afterward, last night. They were taking a little bit of strain. But crikey, if the boats are that flimsy, I guess it's a problem, isn't it.
They said they were pushing the boats as hard as they'd ever pushed them.
I think the guys have said that to me, that they did push them hard.
Strain in those situations is a matter of mainsheet load, and a lot of other things. There are a lot of things they can do to ease the strain.
You're right with that. But I guess if you look at the intricate systems that's underneath that cat, God you'd only need one of those to fail and the whole thing would fold up like a pack of cards.
But they always knew that?
I guess they would, they would know that.
I don't know of any race boat that you don't push hard on occasion.
Isn't that what you do with the boat, you drive it, you drive it hard. I don't know, I guess both of them have built their boats to a, I don't know, a fairly low spec as far as strength is concerned. They're obviously very strong, if you have your alarms going off yesterday, stuff like that…
Well it depends where you've set the alarm?
I guess it is, yeah.
I said in the press conference, after the first or second day we didn't race, I had now idea where the limits where in these boats. Up until we'd had these boats on the water that was the first time I'd seen the Oracle boat, apart from one day it came past us and then went in. I'd not seen that one wound up in anger, if you like to put it, around us. I'd seen the Alinghi boat a bit, we ran a couple of races for them leading up to the regatta. I had no idea where the limits are, I don't know, but I've got a better idea now. I don't think you would be able to put them out into much seaway, it would be dangerous for them.
What kind of wave heights were you seeing yesterday?
I would've thought the swells were close to a meter. They were some quite big swells that came through at one stage. They were long; they were fairly well apart. But I think for those boats they were probably not quite straddling them. They were into them and over them, so I guess that was putting quite a lot of pressure on them, when they dipped the hull into the wave in front.
In the U.K. there's an obsession with health and safety, duty of care. Were those concepts being voiced at all by fellow members of your race committee.
No their concern was more over the club's insurance on the event, liability for the event, if there was an accident, which if I understand it, surrounded the notice of race. So what was written in the original notice of race, and subsequently pulled out, left them in a bit of a position where it was like, 'Wow, if we're outside of these parameters, we've got a problem.'
So the concern was financial and not for people?
I can't answer that. I don't know what their thinking behind it was. I certainly was concerned about the safety of the guys on the boat, if one of these things folded up, or they had a collision, that was a concern that I had. That was one of the reasons with the length of the starting line. I had no idea what we should do with the starting line. I know that for match racing, a 30-second line is ideal, but with these boats, a 30-second line is only like 400 meters. You put them head-to-head doing 20 knots, that's a 40-knot collision course as they're coming together. If one of them got it wrong, you'd have a real problem. That's why I settled on what I did, which was like 800 meters. At the end of the day I don't think that was too far wrong.
What parameters did you think the conditions yesterday exceeded?
Yesterday, that was the point that was being made to me, that the waves were too big.
It's a tough job, being a PRO. There's no real hard and fast standards. Everything is on a variable scale. There's no way of saying this is OK and this isn't other than common sense.
Absolutely. It's common sense, it's what you see; it's your gut feeling. Which was a point I was trying to make with the guys on the race committee with me was that you can't make a committee decision on every thing that's going to happen on the water. It doesn't work. One person has got to deal with that and that's what a race officer does. From my perspective looking at that, it's your gut feeling about what you think is going to happen, what you can see, and you do it. From my point of view; that's worked out fine. But there are people probably have other views about that. I did it the best of my ability and I don't see an issue with that.
Who was on the race committee boat?
Lucien [Masmejan, Alinghi counsel] and Tom Ehman were the two observers from the team. Not participating, there just to observe. Then myself, a boat driver who's Spanish, who's also an international umpire. Then another Spanish guy who coordinated my thoughts about what I wanted on the race track as far as position on marks and stuff like that. He did all the communications for me. The guys on the mark boats, they were all Spanish as well, so his role was vital. The SNG guys there were four of them, one was Fred Meyer, he didn't really participate, he watched. The other three guys, two of them were doing flags, one was doing the time keeping and calling the flags. I have to say that Pascal, the guy doing that, he stood by his post, he did the job, doing the time and calling the signals. I applaud him for that. I thanked him sincerely for that. If he'd have walked off too, we had a problem. So my boat driver did the flags on the front, Tom Ehman took the AP down when it was time and we just got on with the rest of it.
Can you remember the names of the other two guys from SNG?
One was Marcel and the other was Nicolas Grange. Granche is the cat sailor, who was, I guess, the expert for multihull sailing. [ed's note: Grange is president of the Swiss Multihull Assocation]
Technically they were under your direction?
Absolutely. That's how you operate on a boat. My role was to coordinate the whole thing and make the calls and the rest of them were to do the job.
Larry Ellison made a definitive statement at his victory press conference that he will use an independent body to manage and run the 34th America's Cup. How do they do that so that you can do your job, without your impartiality coming into question, warranted or not?
I think the concept of America's Cup Management [the body set up to run the 32nd America's Cup] was fine. It got to be an ugly animal, there was a lot of people involved in it. But the race side of that, the racing part of it, was like it's own group that was in ACM. Dyer Jones headed that and Peter "Luigi" Reggio and I were the two principal race officers doing the job, well he was principal and I was senior. There was a committee there that was three of us, plus two Spanish guys who were our deputies, that was the race committee and we would discuss things. When you go to the water, the two race officers, they do that. I think what Larry Ellison has pointed out, and Russell has mentioned it as well. An independent body to run the racing, yup, I think that's a damn good idea. You pull n from wherever the key people to take up those roles. As long as it's not all from the same country, or something like that, then you probably have a pretty good mix of people.
How do you make it independent? ACM was ostensibly independent, but we still had these questions.
I would think they may set up a company that has a board which involves people from all the teams, or something like that. That's what I would think, I don't know, but that would be sensible and they'd hire the right people to do the job. If I happen to be one of those, then so be it. I'd probably do it again. But that's for someone else to decide.
You're probably going to need your flame suit.