EXCLUSIVE: Now I Want to do it For Britain....But We'll Need £25m ($36) to Get the Job Done, says Ainslie after America's Cup Triumph
Sir Ben Ainslie has set his heart on finally winning the America’s Cup for Great Britain — but needs £25million a year to bankroll the dream. No sooner had Ainslie started celebrating Oracle Team USA’s victory in the winner-takes-all final race than he started plotting victory for his country.
JONATHAN MCEVOY: It was the stuff of Hollywood fiction. Yet it was the most predictable thing in the world. Briton Sir Ben Ainslie beat insurmountable odds.
Triumph of a Born Leader! You could have Bet Your Life on Ainslie Pulling off Comeback
By Daily Mail UK, 27 September 2013
It was the stuff of Hollywood fiction. Yet it was the most predictable thing in the world. Sir Ben Ainslie beat insurmountable odds. But you could have put your mortgage on him.
Top team: Oracle Team tactician Australian Tom Slingsby, skipper Australian Jimmy Spithill, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and helmsman British Sir Ben Ainslie stand with the America's Cup trophy
Those were the conflicting certainties that fizzed through the mind of every person who knew our great sailor and his golden body of work as we watched what, for us, was his inevitable America’s Cup victory on the sparkling waters of San Francisco Bay.
If there is one sportsman on whose performance you would gamble your life, it is Ainslie. He is also the first with whom you would share a drink.
VIDEOs: Scroll down to watch The greatest comeback in history: Sir Ben Ainslie
Victory: Sir Ben Ainslie holds up the America's Cup trophy with his Oracle Team USA team-mates
You could say that Ainslie was just one member of Oracle Team USA and that to single him out is a British peculiarity.
But lest we forget, the US team were down and out before Ainslie was drafted in as tactician to replace John Kostecki. They fell 8-1 behind in the first-to-nine before the great rally. That is a mark of Ainslie’s contribution.
You could ask whether the revival was down to the technical boys refining the state-of-the-art boat. Undoubtedly so to a degree. And a fast boat is a tactician’s best friend, covering up any of his bad calls.
Yet any Ainslie observer knows that he is at his best when his back is against the wall. Most famously, but hardly uniquely, he fought back from the abyss (with a back so injured that it later required surgery) to win Olympic gold at London 2012 after telling his rival Jonas Hogh-Christensen:
‘You don’t want to make me angry.’
He is calm under pressure, able to discern the critical elements of what the tide is doing, where the boundary is, where the wind is blowing. That is what he did in San Francisco, along with strategist Tom Silinsby.
THE GREATEST COMEBACK IN HISTORY: Sir Ben Ainslie
Champagne spray: Simeon Tienpont (left) sprays Ainslie as Australian skipper James Spithill (right) looks away
Playing chess while doing press-ups and with salt water being thrown is an apt description of the tactician’s role. But never has that adage been more true than in this America’s Cup, with Ainslie taking on the physically demanding work of grinding as well. We could hear from television that his voice remained calm, the instructions clear, his mind liberated.
What was interesting was that as the key moments arrived, he — rather than the skipper Jimmy Spithill — gave the final pep talk. ‘This is it, this is it, work your a**** off,’ he told the crew. Again, his voice was matter of fact.
Old sea dogs who remember his previous forays into the America’s Cup say that the younger Ainslie could be overawed and his personality pushed into the margins by senior team-mates. They wondered whether Ainslie, shy in his youth and still reserved in an English sort of way now — and with the obsessive qualities and attention to detail required of the Olympic sailor — could be a leader capable of inspiring his men to go over the top for him.
Incidentally, barely any of the America’s Cup rivals who belittled his Olympic achievements could ever have matched him in that environment.
Home hero: Ainslie won gold in the Finn class at the London 2012 Olympic Games
Now, at 36, he seems fully equipped for the responsibilities of team leadership and has spoken of revelling in the group atmosphere.
That comes as no surprise to me, having visited him at various regattas and taken part with him in the Round the Island Race, off the Isle of Wight.
In passing, it was from the Isle of Wight that Queen Victoria is reputed to have watched the first America’s Cup, dominated by the New York Yacht Club schooner America, from which the competition took its name.
‘Which is second?’ she asked. She was told: ‘Your Majesty, there is no second.’ As a nation we have not won the world’s oldest international sports event from that day in 1851 to this.
Shipshape: Sportsmail's Jonathan McEvoy crews for Ainslie in the Round the Island race in 2011
Righting that omission is now Ainslie’s stated mission and he will look to leverage his achievements to raise the financial backing he needs to accomplish the feat.
So what has most gone into the making of Ainslie, the remorseless competitor and the most reliable of men. One factor was the bullying he received as a boy.
He suffered from a photo- sensitivity of the skin that manifested itself in rashes and blistering. Aged eight, at Treliske School in Truro, Cornwall, the marks would appear on his face.
‘Unfortunately, it began at my first day at school and continued through to the main school as I stuck with the same pupils over a seven-year period and they never really gave me a break,’ he recalled in his autobiography Close to the Wind.
‘Like all things, the teasing came and went, but I guess it did have a profound effect on how I developed. It made me ferociously determined to be good at something, to prove to myself that I could be a success and that there was more to life than school and being picked upon.
‘Sadly, it also meant that I found it hard to trust people, was very defensive and found it very hard to open up to people emotionally.’
Younger days: Ainslie celebrates his gold medal success at Sydney 2000 with his parents Roddy and Sue
Another formative influence was a loving middle-class home shared with his father Roddy, himself a former sailor of distinction, his mother Sue and elder sister Fleur. Young Ben found solace in the Swallows and Amazons life on Restronguet Creek, near Falmouth — ‘a world of childhood fantasy’, as he described it later.
He was bought his first dinghy, a second-hand Optimist, when he was eight. Wearing a duffel coat, he sailed it to the pub where his parents were waiting for him over Christmas lunch.
Selected as a teenager for the Atlanta Games of 1996, he made the only important mistake of his Olympic career: he merely took silver. He was then hell-bent on beating his conqueror of that day, Robert Scheidt, in Sydney four years later. He, legally, blocked the Brazilian out of the final race.
Crowned: Ainslie with his gold medal for winning the Finn class at Athens 2004
‘That’s racing,’ said Ainslie, a fair but pathological winner. Four gold medals make him the most successful sailor in Olympic history and tellingly in two classes: Laser and Finn.
I have asked him more than once which drives him more: the dread of losing or the joy of winning. He finds it hard to know the answer but I marginally suspect the former.
This patriot’s richly deserved knighthood has undoubtedly bolstered his self-esteem. Winning the America’s Cup in the blue, red and white of home — rather than of America — is the impossible dream I would happily bet my life he will achieve.
It was a very close call and the US would not have beaten New Zealand without Sir Ben Ainslie, and being allowed to change the rules mid competition..
America's Cup 2013: New Zealand Skipper; Defeat is 'Very Hard to Swallow':
This is for Bart! Ainslie Tribute to Tragic Friend after Incredible America's Cup Win:
***Sir Ben Ainslie’s America's Cup success has come under a flag of convenience. One raised in the name of 'Corporate America'.
The competition has even more to do with capital wealth than canny seamanship.
Happy man: Oracle CEO Billionaire Larry Ellison sits alongside Ainslie after their victory
As for the good ship Oracle, it was manned not so much by native Americans as by a consortium of high-powered mercenaries bought in by large chunks of New Yorker Larry Ellison’s vast fortune.
Never mind Ainslie, even the skipper was Australian.
Although Britannia ruled at least one of the waves, this motley crew jigged to the tune of the Star Spangled Banner.
Mr Ellison is a billionaire computer software magnate who spared no expense in constructing a boat conceived of a virtual reality fantasy.
When his Oracle trailed its New Zealand challenger 8-1 with just eight races to go, he hired British Ben to engineer what is being acclaimed as the most phenomenal come-back of all sporting times.
America, rejoice.
Britain, eat our hearts out.
This event was born in Britain's Isle of Wight in 1851 yet has never been won by a British yacht.
This year’s regulations, as imposed by the Americans, demanded a vessel of such exorbitant cost that only three countries could raise the ante.
Then, even though they had rigged everything in their favour, Team Oracle sought additional advantage by cheating a little in preparation and were docked two points before the first race.
In the event, that served only to set up Ainslie’s outrageous comeback.
Out of chicanery, history.
It would not have happened had Ellison not been allowed,
in mid-competition, to sink yet more money into
hiring Ainslie and modifying the Oracle.
Unwavering loyalty: Lord Admiral Nelson would not have sailed under any flag other than the English
Expect the New York Yacht Club, as holders, to adjust the terms of engagement still more heavily in their favour four years from now.
Can, by then, this sea-faring nation of ours raise the finance to mount a challenge?
The publicity for Ainslie’s latest exploit is exciting that notion but it is an enterprise which will require massive backing, probably from a conglomerate of British corporations.
For Ainslie’s sake let us hope it can be done... before he sails off into the sunset for the last time.
If not, expect us to find ourselves once more in the humiliating position of cheering as an Englishman brings home the
beacon for America.
As America danced on the deck of the Oracle, it did not pause to consider that the Kiwi boat it had out-manouevred was manned entirely by New Zealanders.
Oracle Team = Tactician Australian Tom Slingsby, Skipper Australian Jimmy Spithill, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Helmsman British Sir Ben Ainslie
At the onset of his finest, and final, hour, Nelson exhorted his fleet:
Quote:
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‘England expects this day that every man will do his duty.’
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Had he been in San Francisco harbour this week, rather than the Bay of Trafalgar more than two centuries earlier, he might have added:
Quote:
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‘For England, pray, not some foreign realm.’
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The romantic tinge to Ainslie’s achievement has distracted from the coarse commercial reality which has submerged the gentlemanly origins of sport’s oldest trophy.
Ainslie would much have preferred to be at the helm of a British boat this past fortnight in San Francisco.
The repetitive changing of the America’s Cup rules, as permitted by the holders, put that dream beyond price. As it has since the last UK challenge 30 years ago.
At sea: Oracle Team USA and Team New Zealand sail by Alcatraz Island near San Francisco