Red Bull Youth America’s Cup Offers Chance to Race AC45 Boats
Sailors Age 18-24 Can Compete Next September on High-Tech Multihulls
San Francisco, USA, October, 2012
Top young multihull sailors will have the chance to sail at the leading
edge in the Red Bull Youth America's Cup.
Photo:©2012 ACEA/Gilles
Martin-Raget
The Red Bull Youth America’s Cup will be staged on San Francisco Bay next year in between the Louis Vuitton Cup and the America’s Cup. The youth iteration of the Cup, to be raced on the AC45 catamarans currently being raced in the America’s Cup World Series, is intended to provide a gateway for young sailors into the big show.
At the America's Cup World Series regatta in San Francisco in August, Regatta Director Iain Murray had a few more details about this exciting new aspect of the 34th America’s Cup.
“We’ve received 13 or 14 entries and five or six deposits,” explained Murray. “Entries are open to teams represented by the countries competing in the America’s Cup World Series.”
The plan is for current America’s Cup team to support the entrants -- for example, Oracle Team USA would support the American entrants, Ben Ainslie Racing would support the British entrants, etc.
“Clearly, Oracle is looking to mentor some of these young people into potential America’s Cup future sailors,” Murray said. “What we’ve seen in this round of the America’s Cup is that the guys who started in ’87 or ’92 and hung around through all the bigger, heavier keelboats get off the boats and complain about how sore their backs are! These boats demand the sailors be in very good physical shape, so it’s fast becoming an opportunity for the younger guys to have their strength and agility match their sailing skills and earn their positions on these boats at a much earlier age.”
Murray believes that all 15 AC45s that have been built could be put into service for the Red Bull America’s Cup.
“Our expectation is we will have between 12 and 15 boats participating. All the boats will be branded with a combination of the country, the sponsor and Red Bull. So the boats will be quite similar looking.”
Final deadline for entry closes on October 31. “We will be moving through those entries with the help of the Red Bull people -- Roman Hagara and Hans-Peter Steinacher, two-time 49er Olympic gold medalists and current Extreme 40 sailors.”
Interestingly, the nationality rule is firmly in place for the youth series. Sailors must have a passport from the country for which they compete, with one team per country. The format will be fleet racing only and for the $30,000 entry fee, teams would get to race an AC45 complete with hard wing, and soft sails similar to the ACWS sail inventory (small code zero, small jib) branded primarily in the country colors.
Since the youth cup’s mission is to open doors for younger sailors and provide a feeder system of sorts into this new age of the America’s Cup, the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup requires that sailors be no younger than 18 and under the age of 24 at the end of 2013. But if younger sailors currently working with Cup teams are thinking about putting a team together for the Red Bull Youth America’s Cup, there’s a catch of sorts: you can’t do both.
“One of the requirements is that these are non-professional sailors,” says Murray. “So if some of the young guys who are active members or sailors on the Cup teams were interested, they’d be regarded as professional sailors, so they’d have to quit their jobs.”
For a 20-year-old offered the chance to sail and race their own AC45, that might be a real easy decision-making process.
---Diane Swintal for CupInfo/©2012 Cupinfo.com
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