America’s Cup? Nevermind!

In my previous posting I was really pumped-up about the multihull matchup for the 33rd America’s Cup. After coming up to speed on the run-up to the event, I have changed my mind. After a lifetime of sailing, I’m fed up with wannabe clowns who have no business on the water.

From SailWorld.com:

There is little doubt that the many Court actions over the 33rd America’s Cup have been a major turn-off for the sport and sailing fans generally.

In a couple of days the sport will see a sailing match of the likes that has never been seen before and probably will never see again. Two of the highest performance yachts will square off against each other in a fascinating contest, conducted under the bare minimum of sailing rules.

Two of the world’s most “successful” guys are in the midst of a protracted battle royal that will culminate 25 miles off the coast of Valencia, Spain, when one or the other cheats his way to two out of three meaningless wins in the 33rd America’s Cup sailing regatta.

My Bay Area neighbor, “successful” self-made Larry Ellison, the 66 year old founder and CEO of Oracle and 9th richest man in the world, is spitting, scratching, and yowling in his fight with Ernesto Bertarelli, the European aristocrat who rates as the 52nd richest in the world by virtue of the bio-tech empire he inherited

It’s interesting, and very sad , to watch these two going at it, but the lessons to be learned, as I suggested in my previous post, the secret of “successful” people is their aim to manipulate the system to their personal advantage rather than improve the system so that everyone can win.

I would argue that the purest form of sailboat racing is called “One-design“. In one-design is like a controlled experiment. The course sailed, the “Olympic Triangle” for example, is designed so that boats and crews must sail on all points of the wind—beating, reaching, and running, in the same place and at the same time. Also, each crew races on a boat that is, to the extent possible, identical to the the other boats it will compete against. The one-design approach tests boat design and crew methods in the realest of real-world situations—on the water. By tradition, contestants in one-design agree to honor that rules and the spirit of those rules. This is sometimes referred to as the ”Corinthian Spirit” . This collaboratively competitive model allows us to observe the system of sea, boat, and crew methods and draw conclusions about what works and what doesn’t work. For example, it allows us to say that a boat’s is robust, or that the strategy and tactics used by one crew are superior to those used by other crews.

Traditional offshore racing does not have the purity of the controlled experiment but it excels as a test of technology and method in a broader universe in which the various boats sailed, courses taken, and strategies used, are played out over great distances and in varying conditions. The interaction of the elements in play require that each boat crew employ judgement based on an understanding of the system as a whole. No single boat characteristic or crew attribute can determine the outcome. It is a game of systems optimization in the grandest sense, in in the long-run, the outcomes cannot be bought. As with one-design, the Corinthian Spirit must govern the enterprise if the offshore test of men and the machines they have invented, are to teach us anything.

Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli

In both one-design and offshore racing, it is understood that transparency is the key to making our tests of our systems—boats and crews—-valuable, and we call that understanding, the Corinthian Spirit. That spirit dictates that the competitors will abide by the rules because the test becomes meaningless when the contestants engage in deceptive opacity. For example, the Corinthian Spirit call upon a competitor who has intentionally or unintentional broken a rule, to report their error, even when unobserved. Why? Because the test would become meaningless if competitors did not do so.

Despite its decadant 18th Century origins, the America’s cup did evolve over the course of the 19th Century towards a more interesting and useful rule-based format, but it seems that trend is over now. Throw-backs Ellison and Bertarell have spent the last 31 months battling each other in the courts in hopes of gaining advantage. Each time one realizes some edge, the other twists what rules there are in a tit-for-tat that has produced mismatched boats, neither of which are fit for sea, and a competition that is not fit to enlighten audiences about anything other than which of these two men can squander their wealth to prove who can piss farther than the other. As for Corinthian Spirit, these two infantiles won’t even share the same room, much less shake hands. Well before the first race is sailed, the matchup is already a Jerry Springer Show-like travesty of devious opacity that offends the intelligence and sensibilities of  landlubber and sailor alike.

So what more evidence do you need to grasp the secret of “success”?