Thursday, September 26, 2013

2013 America's Cup

Recently I posted about the America's Cup in general.  That post can be found at:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-americas-cup.html.  Well, the current Cup event is over, finally.  This post summarizes my thoughts on how it went.

First, the results:  The defending team, titled "Oracle Team U.S.A." ended up winning beating the challenger, titled "Emirates Team New Zealand" (Emirates money coupled with New Zealand technical and sailing expertise).  They retained the cup in a titanic battle consisting of 19 finished races spread over 16 race days (days on which at least one race was completed) spread over 19 calendar days.  The final score was 9-8 but Oracle had to actually win 11 races because they started out with a 2 race penalty.  Judged either by the number of days from start to finish or the number of completed races (or the number of races including cancelled ones, for that matter), it was the longest cup series ever.  In the early days the event was a "one and done" event.  It morphed into a "best of 3" event and later into a "best of 7" event.  So historically only a few races were necessary to determine the winner.  So what do I think of it all?

Let's start with the observations and predictions I made in my previous post.  I guessed that the Oracle team would have a slight edge.  It turned out to be more complicated.  In the early going the Kiwis had an advantage in all three important categories:  boat speed, crew work, and tactics.  The Oracle boat was slower, but not by much.  There were only a few races in which either boat showed a substantially better turn of speed than the other boat.  The preparation work that the Kiwis did before the regatta started resulted in a boat that was initially slightly faster.  That preparation work, coupled by the "trial by fire" that the Louis Vuitton Cup represented resulted in a boat that was sailed better and had a better understanding of the tactics.  So the Kiwis dominated in the early races.

But the Oracle people learned fast.  Both teams did but the Oracle people were able to make more and better improvements.  By the middle of the regatta both teams were performing at such a high level in terms of both crew work and tactics that neither team chad a significant advantage in either of these categories.  But the Oracle boat kept getting faster throughout the entire regatta.  The Kiwis were probably improving their boat speed too.  But day by day the boat speed of the Oracle boat kept improving relative to the Kiwi boat.  By the end the Kiwis were no longer competitive.  The speed difference was small but it was enough.  No one wins 8 races in a row against a skilled competitor without having a faster boat.

I made (but did not include in the post) a number of other predictions.  I did not expect the series to go the distance.  I expected one boat or the other to be substantially faster.  So I expected the two race penalty to not be a factor.  And, in a perverse way I was right.  I expected that either the Kiwi boat would be faster and they would wrap it up long before the Oracle boat got close to the nine "official" wins the Oracle boat would need.  Or I expected the Oracle boat to be so fast that having to win a couple of extra races would not be enough to put the Kiwis into the hunt.  It turned out that the Kiwis were dominant in the early going.  The official score was 8-1 in favor of the Kiwis at one point.  But then the Oracle boat ran off a string of 8 wins in a row (not counting races that were abandoned either after they started or while they were within seconds of starting - those all went to the Kiwis but didn't count).  So my prediction that it would not go the distance turned out to be completely wrong.

Another unpublished prediction I made was that it would be a dull event.  The races would turn out to be parades where one boat quickly took control and the other boat was forced to follow at a suitable distance.  This too turned out to be wildly wrong.  Most of the races were extremely close.  In a lot of cases the behind boat was not able to make a pass but they were able to stick with the ahead boat.  And there were a surprising number of passes, more so than in any other Cup.  We even had a couple of races where one boat passed then the other boat passed back later in the same race.  The races themselves were quite exciting.  A major component was the blinding speed of the boats.  These boats are three times as fast as a traditional "competitive racing" boat of only a few years ago.  But the fact that the boats were never far from disaster (the "Nascar" effect) was always present too.  And finally, there was the "he's up -- no he's down" aspect.  It seemed like an actual contest where either boat had a serious chance of winning in a lot of the races.  This aspect has not been present often in Cup competitions.  

A final unpublished prediction was that the event, and here I mean the actual America's Cup, would be well administered.  Here too I turned out to be totally wrong.  The plan was to do two races per day and roughly a two days "on" and one day "off".  This should have resulted in 4 completed races every 3 days.  The actual result was 19 completed races in 19 days.  The organizers were only able to complete two races in one day on 6 occasions.  This must be balanced against the two different days on which no scheduled races were completed at all.  The smallest contributor to this delay were the teams.  Each team was issued a "get out of jail free" card that allowed them to cancel the second race of the day without penalty.  But only one of these cards was exercised (by Oracle).  Races were cancelled due to too much wind (frequently), not enough wind (two races one day, one race another day, and one race after it had already started - technically for "time limit expired"), and (shockingly) wind from the wrong direction.

Some of this can be attributed to a combination of mother nature and safety concerns.  The high wind limit was put in after the Artemis fatality.  But the low wind was a result of trying to schedule two races (expected duration - about 30 minutes each) into a 2 hour "TV" time window.  TV constraints also stopped the organizers from shifting  race starts to earlier in the day, which would have avoided the "wind builds late in the day" problem that caused several races to not go off.  And the organizers had opted to have a single course, whose layout could not be changed.  Normally Cup races take place in a circular area out in the ocean.  So organizers lay out the direction of the course based on the wind direction on race day.  Races only need to be cancelled or delayed when the wind direction is changing wildly and rapidly.  This was done to enhance the "fan appeal".  The course could be seen from many parts of downtown San Francisco.  And they built stands along the shore to accommodate the crowds.  But crowds never materialized.  A planned expansion of the stands was cancelled and the stands that were built were mostly empty.  So losing the flexibility of being able to change the direction of the course to accommodate the wind direction was lost and this translated directly into delays.

Finally, there is one problem that is completely inexplicable to me.  Between the Louis Vuitton Cup and the America's Cup, races were broadcast in four different places.  Races could be seen on You Tube and ESPN3 (both internet only) and on both NBC and NBCSN (both broadcast).  I can somewhat understand the NBC/MBCSN split.  The event was not expected to be a ratings powerhouse.  So pushing races off to NBCSN kept it in the family.  And You Tube is neutral.  It's owned by Google.  So pushing a race that is not expected to draw NBCSN sized ratings on to You Tube makes sense.  You Tube ran an "America's Cup" channel where you could view a lot of video of cup related content.  But ESPN3 is owned by ABC, arch competitor of NBC.  What's going on there?  The only theory I can think of is that it was a clever plot top depress ESPN3's ratings.  But, since the same broadcast crew was used for all the races, the cost to ABC of this move would be modest, and that's on a good day.

And frankly, this was not a big problem for the actual America's Cup itself.  The first two races were on NBC and all the other races were on NBCSN.  Once you got used to that, and the fact that TV coverage went from 1 PM to 3 PM (on the West Coast -- add 3 hours for the East Coast times) the races were not that hard to find.  But Oracle is a technology company.  Their core product is their Oracle database but they pride themselves on being full service.  You can buy hardware, applications, and, most germane to our discussion, internet expertise from Oracle.  There is an America's Cup web site at americascup.com.  There is a section on the site where you can look up details of TV coverage for anywhere in the world.  The schedule kept having to be changed and extended as the racing went on and on and on.  But after we got through the first few days when things were on schedule the TV information on the web site was no longer correct.  On many days the TV schedule for that day was completely missing, even if you checked a few minutes before the first race was scheduled to start.

To update the information would have required adding or changing text in an amount equal to a single Twitter tweet.  And a giant, highly capable (to her them tell it), company that prides itself on being able to provide solutions to company web sites that need to handle millions, perhaps even billions, of transactions per day, should be up to the challenge of making a small single update per day to the Cup website.  And many of these companies Oracle is selling to need the information on their web site to be accurate on a time scale of seconds or less.  But apparently the event organizers could not manage to handle a "1 update a day" traffic load.  That is truly pathetic.

Looking forward, as I indicated in my previous post, I expect that the next cup will be raced in catamarans with solid sails.  And apparently my suggestion of downsizing to a boat that is 55-60 feel long has also occurred to a lot of other people.  I outlined the pros and cons of changing boat sizes in my last post so I won't repeat it here.  Since the Larry Ellison / Oracle people will remain in charge I do not expect the course to move.  If they can address the safety concerns the wind limit can be removed.  The low wind problem can be addressed by expanding the period during which races can go off from 2 to 2 1/2 hours.  With appropriate lead time I think TV people can accommodate this.  If nothing else they can do a delayed broadcast.  As someone who lives on the west coast I am way too familiar with this.  Many "live" shows are delayed three hours routinely for west coast broadcast.

And it is important to give them credit for some things they got right.  Affiliated events like "Americas Cup World Series" and "Youth Americas Cup" (both sailed in the smaller 45' boats) give more people access to and a reason to develop an interest in the main event.  The decision to go with wing sail catamarans is also a good one.  Organizers did not envision "foiling" (technically:  hydro foiling) but they have embraced it and I expect it to stay.

On the negative side, safety needs to be addressed.  But, as I indicated previously, I think this can be done between cups.  I expect the next cup in 3 years, plenty of time to figure out what changes need to be made and give participants ample time to implement them.  The big problem is cost.  Rumor has it that an AC72 boat costs between 8 and 10 million dollars to build.  If you include other costs, (paying the crew, a large and sophisticated development effort, on shore support, perhaps a second boat) the cost of an entire team is estimated to run $100 million or more.  Ellison is supposed to have spent $250 million to win the cup last time.  The fact that his boat kept getting faster and faster as this Cup event continued indicates to me that he did not stint on his "support" operation this time.  So I would guess he spent between $150 and $250 million this time.

The Kiwis came with a well run and presumably amply funded operation.  And they got slowly ground down by the Oracle operation.  Potential participants usually go with one of two approaches.  There are the "we just want to participate" bunch.  They don't want to be embarrassingly bad but mostly what they are looking for is exposure.  That can probably be done at the $100 million level, perhaps for a little less.  That's a lot of money to shell out for exposure, effectively an ad campaign.  If you want to be one of the "in it to win it" bunch, then it looks like you will need at least $150 million and perhaps a lot more.  You have to ask how many people there are out there that are willing to plunk down that kind of money.  That's what happened this time.  We had one defender and three challengers.  Of the three challengers the only one that had a chance was the Kiwi team.  So did Artemis and Prada get their money's worth?  And how much more will it cost to put together a Kiwi class effort.  And, remember the Kiwis failed, so you better plan on spending more money than they did.

The America's Cup has always been the kind of event where it is considered ok to pour lots of money in, to try to buy a victory.  So it goes against the grain to try to stop the "money fire hose" approach.  But it has gotten so expensive to play that it may be necessary to do something.  This has happened before.  The Cup went to "12 meter" boats in the '50s because the "J" boats had just become too expensive.  The whole "foiling" thing was come up with by the Kiwis a challenger.  Putting wings on keels was also an idea that a challenger came up with.  Dennis Connor put a "wing" sail on a catamaran first when he was desperate to successfully defend the cup.  Larry Ellison put one on a trimaran when he successfully challenged a few years ago.  No one, including Larry, thought the "trimaran" idea was a keeper.  So I don't think we will be seeing that idea come back, even though it worked in that race.  We should see how the 35th America's Cup will shape up within the next six months to a year.