In Sailing’s Most Famous Race, Britannia Definitely Doesn’t Rule the Waves
It’s been 173 years since Britain first competed in the America’s Cup. And in all that time, the greatest naval power the world has ever known has never managed to bring home the trophy.
The annals of sporting futility are full of sad-sack teams that run into humiliating defeat, season after season, only to come back for more. The NFL’s Arizona Cardinals, for instance, have never won a Super Bowl in 58 years of trying. The Toronto Maple Leafs have gone more than half a century without a Stanley Cup. The Seattle Mariners have never reached a World Series.
Yet all of those streaks are just drops in the ocean compared with Britain’s record competing for the world’s oldest international sporting trophy.
The America’s Cup was invented in Britain and first contested in 1851. And in all that time, the greatest naval power the world has ever seen—the country of Horatio Nelson, Sir Francis Drake and “Britannia Rules the Waves”—has somehow never won the most famous race in sailing.
But this week, on shimmering waters off the coast of Barcelona, a British crew will attempt to undo 173 years of national ignominy when it takes on the defending America’s Cup champions from New Zealand. To lose again would represent more than the failure of a $140 million project. It would also perpetuate nearly two centuries’ worth of shambolic embarrassment.
“It has been a source of derision around the world that the British, who invented this damn thing in the first place, managed to lose it,” said Royal Yacht Squadron chairman Bertie Bicket, whose club is represented in the America’s Cup by the Ineos Britannia team.
“I would describe it as getting a new football, kicking it over the garden fence, and 173 years later, they still haven’t given it back.”
The thing is, Britain’s history in other maritime contests had made the country quite accustomed to winning on the open sea. British schoolchildren can recite the names of famous naval victories the way kids in Brazil can rattle off World Cup wins—the Battle of Trafalgar, the Battle of the Nile, repelling the Spanish Armada.
“We might not have won the America’s Cup in the 20th century, but the Royal Navy was existentially important in winning both World Wars,” said Andrew Lambert, the Laughton Professor of Naval History at King’s College London. “That we take seriously.”
But from the moment a boat named America from the New York Yacht Club first took down the Royal Yacht Squadron in a race around the Isle of Wight, it was clear that this battle would be different. Since then, U.S. clubs have held the America’s Cup for most of its existence. The Auld Mug, an enormous silver pitcher, has also been won by crews representing Australia, New Zealand, and the landlocked country of Switzerland—never the U.K.
It isn’t for lack of trying. British boats have been America’s Cup challengers on 16 previous occasions. Across all of those series, Bicket said, they have scored just five points. Experts agree that the problem through much of that history was that Britain treated it too much like a gentlemanly pursuit and not enough like a cutthroat, boundary-pushing competition that might tar British sailors as losers.
“There’s always been a bit of the Brits calling up the rules, saying, ‘Hold on, old chap, are you cheating?’” Bicket said.
What makes the America’s Cup uniquely frustrating is that the competition is so stacked in favor of the previous winner. The reigning champion is known as the Defender, who has the advantage of writing the rules for the next America’s Cup, setting the specifications for the boats, and choosing a course on home waters. Then it awaits the Challenger of Record, which is now selected through a grueling regatta that stretches over a month. In order to face the Kiwis, Ineos Britannia had to hold off four other teams from Italy, the U.S., France, and Switzerland.
And whatever happens now, the team can at least be sure it can’t go as badly as the last time a British team became the Challenger of Record. Back in 1964 a boat called the Sovereign traveled to Newport, R.I., to take on the U.S. defender known as the Constellation. Even by the standards of a 100-year losing streak, the 4-0 rout was particularly demeaning.
“The debacle at Newport,” the Daily Express called it. “Staggering and humiliating,” said the Daily Telegraph.
“The roses have wilted,” wrote the yachting correspondent of the Times of London. “The days of hope and excitement are things of the past.”
In short, the 1964 British challenge was a fiasco.
“They were all a fiasco, quite frankly,” Bicket said.
That’s because for most of the Cup’s history, Americans and Brits took opposite views on what it represented. American skippers dreamed of racing hard and going home with the Auld Mug. British crews saw it more as a friendly challenge between chums.
“And the British are surprised to find, ‘Oh, the Americans are quickest,’” Lambert said. “The British gentlemen who would go over and contest this weren’t obsessed with winning.”
That much has changed. Bicket believes that Ineos Britannia is the most professional outfit that the Royal Yacht Squadron has ever put on the water. Backed by the British petrochemicals billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, who also owns stakes in Manchester United, the Mercedes Formula One team, and the Ineos Grenadiers cycling team, the current boat is the result of nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of development.
The 75-foot yacht uses a state-of-the-art hydrofoil system to fly above the waves. The sails are moved by a crack squad of elite athletes pedaling stationary bicycles. And its skipper is Ben Ainslie, a four-time Olympic gold medalist, and possibly Britain’s finest sailor since Lord Nelson.
Ainslie, who is making his third consecutive run at the Auld Mug, has said that he would trade all of his medals for one America’s Cup. And by now, he adds, Ainslie feels battle-hardened enough to claim Britain’s most elusive naval triumph.
“The Royal Navy’s been the best navy in the world for the past 400 years,” Lambert said. “When it comes to war, we’re professional.”