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Michael Beaumont
The Americas Cup Ian Dear (Hutchinson, Australia £6.95) The Ultimate Challenge Barry Pickthall (Orbis £12.50) ast summer, the imagination of the Brit- ish public was caught by the Americas Cup. The magic in that hideous piece of Victorian silver rubbed up the genie 'Publicity' as effectively as ever it had before the war, when the King's grocer and yachting friend, Sir Thomas Lipton, chal- lenged again and again and, watched by the world's press, failed every time. This time, of course, the Australians won, broke a record unbeaten for over 130 years, made a technological breakthrough with a mysteri- ous 'winged' keel and wiped the eye of the New York Yacht Club which had been por- trayed around the world (in America too), as being unscrupulously determined to keep the Cup at any cost. Australia rules the waves but America tries to waive the rules. That, roughly speaking, is how the challenge was fed to us in 1983. Now that the news stories are yellow on the spike, the books that write the history are appearing, and probably the best is Ian Dear's. The illustrations are splendid, ranging back from modern colour photography of some of the most aesthetically satisfying racing boats sailing today, via the classic pre-war Beken portraits of yachts in the heyday of yachting, to early watercolours and line drawings from Victorian illustrated magazines. The saga of the Cup is well researched, not surprising from the author of the best modern book on the pre-war J class, those vast yachts in which the challenges were made in the 1930s.
The drawback to all this history is that it leaves too little room for an imaginative description of what happened this time the time the Cup was won. The atmosphere
in Newport last summer, the training of the crews, the work by the backup team, the moment that sailing was over for the day, what your job was as winchman or sail- trimmer, what it feels like to steer a racing boat on which someone has spent £5 million — all that is lacking, as are some technical descriptions of the races themselves. This criticism is open to the response that this kind of writing would prove too unfamiliar and specialist for the general reader, but I doubt it. This is partly because sailing is now so tremendously popular a partici- patory sport — some two million people in this country alone — that a very wide market would understand the jargon necessary to bring the races to life; and partly because it seems doubtful that anybody with no knowledge of the sport at all would ever bother to read this sort of book.
In a different way, the live television coverage last year made the same sort of mistake when the studio editors clearly demonstrated that they had training in visual effects and little else by lovingly showing the spinnakers being peeled off at the leeward mark — interesting, but only really significant if done badly — and then cutting, before showing the really impor- tant next step, which is how the leading boat covers its pursuer as they start up the new, windward, leg.
Ian Dear pays tribute, quite rightly, to the professionalism and determination of Peter de Savary who financed and ran the British Syndicate. Had there been more time allowed by what was presumably a rush to publish, it would have been interest- ing to have had a discussion of the manage- ment decision to keep three or four helmsmen on tenterhooks as to who would win the competition to steer his boat, Vic- tory '83. With hindsight, it looks as if this proved as good a way of training a sharp crew and afterguard as the alternative, adopted by the defender and all the other challengers, of naming a team early and training them up. The British boat was well managed, well sailed and well handled, but beaten by a crew just as good and a design breakthrough that cracked even the American's 12-metre skill and experience.
If the Americas Cup seems to be the only yachting event that catches the imagination of the general public, it cannot be simply because of the costs involved. Round-the- world yacht racing must cost its sponsors enormous sums too, even when, as chronicled in The Ultimate Challenge, there is only one man involved. This is the story of single-handed racing, with an opening chapter or two on Joshua Slocum, who went round alone in 1898, and the Francis Chichester generation of the 1960s. The bulk of the book concentrates on the BOC race that started from Newport in 1982 and ended last year when the boats got back after sailing to the southward of every land mass in the world. An extraordinary race and an extraordinary feat by those who finished. But who remembers it now, just nine months later? The book is really an adventure story with appalling descriptions of rescues at sea, of boats being flipped stern over bow by waves over 100 feet high, of guts' seamanship and technical skills. Actintra" tion for those who can do that sort of thing is boundlesss from those who can't; on the other hand, individuals in a sufficiently tinY minority of any type have generally been considered mad. Take your pick about the participants, enjoy the book if you are an armchair adventurer, and wonder, as the r reviewer does, whether this may be one the last of such books ever to be publishen, the video camera poses no threat t° literature or to scholarship, but seems destined to overtake this sort of writing within a decade.
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