‘The America’s Cup has always been pushing boundaries’ – Matt Sheahan

Matthew Sheahan

America’s cup history – in miniature – reveals a lot about how and why the event has such an enduring appeal. Matt Sheahan takes a look at the AC of old

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For a great pub quiz question, when was the first America’s Cup race? The answer to sailing fans is obvious: 1851 in the famous race around the Isle of Wight. For a bonus point you could add that it resulted in a humiliating British defeat and an apocryphal quote given to Queen Victoria about the absence of a second place.

Except this wasn’t the first America’s Cup race. The 1851 event was actually the £100 Cup. The first America’s Cup race was in 1870, 19 years later in New York and was a 40-mile race starting from Staten Island and heading out to the light ship off Sandy Hook and back. It was a fleet race with 14 American yachts and one British yacht, James Ashbury’s 113ft, 188 ton Cambria, which finished 10th on corrected time.

The yacht that won the very first America’s Cup race was the centreboard schooner Magic and while I’ve read the story many times, it wasn’t until recently that I realised what an impressive performance this was.

Magic was 90ft LOA and 80 tons, the smallest yacht in the race. Yet not only did she take the win on corrected time, but took line honours, beating the second boat home, the 114-footer Dauntless, by a minute and a half.

This was brought to life for me as I looked at Magic alongside Cambria in the New York Yacht Club’s famous model room recently.

I’d heard descriptions of the club on Manhattan’s 44th Street and its impressive model display and it’s been my ambition for many years to see it for real. Thanks to the kind invitation of the NYYC I got there a few weeks ago. When I did, nothing had prepared me for what the club and its collection of yachts looks like for real. Aside from the ornate grandeur of the club, inside and out, this has to be the most impressive display of yacht racing history I’ve ever seen. It’s incredible.

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Not only are there over 1,300 models throughout the club, but within the model room lies a unique collection that includes every America’s Cup Challenger and Defender from the yacht America through to the 12 metre Liberty.

These fully rigged, beautifully made models built to 1/32 scale are arranged in chronological order and grouped to reflect significant eras. Seeing the variety of shapes and sizes through different periods reinforces what the quest for the most prestigious trophy in sailing has created. Among those revelations is the striking example of just how small, flat bottomed and shallow Magic was, especially when compared to the deep draught ship-like style of Cambria.

The contrast and extremes of designs is a theme that repeats itself for decades until we get to the turn of the century and the biggest of them all, the 201ft Reliance.

Designed by Nathaniel Herreshoff as defender for the 12th America’s Cup she had a crew of 64 and was considered to be a ‘racing freak’, suitable only for certain conditions – after her win Herreshoff himself proposed the Universal Rating Rule to ‘avoid such extreme, dangerous and expensive vessels’.

Given the comments from those who don’t buy into the modern America’s Cup and accuse it of straying into extremes, this model – along with many other examples of pre-1930s designs – puts the Cup into context. The Cup has always been about pushing the boundaries of design and technology.

The J Class era that follows is beautifully represented both as an illustration of the elegance of the designs and also as an example of how class rules were trying to calm the arms race down, reduce costs and improve the racing.

And as we know, after World War II that scaling down came again with the era of the 12 meters, where the NYYC collection portrays perfectly what some think was the golden era of the Cup.

Travelling to Staten Island the next day to stand on the hill where tens of thousands of spectators had watched the first America’s Cup was also fascinating. Having not been to New York before I had little idea of the geography, let alone how similar the racing area is to the Solent. Narrow passages, shallows, strong tidal currents and the influence of the land on wind conditions: no wonder it was such a difficult trophy to try and win.

Having seen the models, artwork, architecture, trophies and topography related to the Cup, at the very least I now feel a bit better prepared for the pub quiz.

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