Cowes Port Handbook 2014-2015 April 2014 | Page 95

COWES PORT HANDBOOK 2014 - 2015

Sadly second is the closest a British boat has ever got. Britain has
challenged many times, but never once wrested the Cup from the
Americans. That feat has still only ever been achieved by three nations in
163 years: Australia, New Zealand, and Switzerland.

Ian Roman

Might the 35th America’s Cup be the one to change that? It was of course
a Solent yachtsman, Sir Ben Ainslie, who directed Oracle Team USA to
victory in San Francisco last summer. If the America’s Cup were ever
to be held around the Isle of Wight again, he would be the first person
to call, having set a new course record in the 2013 J.P. Morgan Asset
Management Round the Island Race by blasting around in under three
hours (some eight hours faster than America all those years ago).
Mr J.P. Morgan himself won the Cup twice, when Columbia defeated
British tea mogul Sir Thomas Lipton’s Shamrock yachts in 1899 and 1901,
and today the American finance house sponsors Sir Ben. Can Ainslie raise
the funds to create a winning British challenger? We’ll all be watching
developments closely throughout 2014. But if Ben can win the America’s
Cup back from San Francisco to the Solent it won’t be tea we’ll be drinking.

By Helen Fretter, Deputy Editor at Yachts & Yachting Magazine; freelance
journalist and editor at True Angle Editorial.
COWES.co.uk

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