Here Come the Aussies!

By Frederic Golden

Will they waltz away with yachting's most hallowed prize?

Imagine one of his myriad challengers actually kayoing Joe Louis in his prime, or a 20-game loser burning the ball past the lordly New York Yankees of the Babe Ruth era. For the sailing cognoscenti along the gilt-edged waterfront of Newport, R.I., an upset of such proportions is a very real possibility. Not in anything so plebeian as boxing or baseball, to be sure, but in the patrician world of yachting, where, over the din of clinking champagne glasses, the chitchat is about fears that the longest winning streak in sports is about to end. After 132 years, the U.S. could finally lose the America's Cup.

Such foul-weather forecasts have rattled Newport before. Yet ever since they first wrested the old silver mug from a fleet of the best yachts the British could muster in 1851, the Yankee sailors have somehow managed to beat off all comers. What is different about this America's Cup summer is not that the Americans have slipped, but that the competition has got noticeably better, especially the yachtsmen from Down Under.

Neither the American yacht nor the challenger has yet been picked. But there is little doubt that when the two square off in the waters of Rhode Island Sound on Sept. 13, the foreign contender will be a white-hulled marvel called Australia II that has set the yachting world back on its scuppers. The Australians seem to be doing everything right, beginning with a spectacular success at what has always been the heart of the American game: building yachts that are technologically superior to those of all their challengers. Measuring 64 ft. 7 in. from its snub-nosed bow to its raked-back stern, Australia II has the most radical keel ever to hang from the bottom of a 12-meter-yacht*. Though the Aussies ostentatiously drape a shroud over the keel when the boat is hauled out after each day's sail--psych is everything in the America's Cup competition--just about all of Newport knows what Australia H's secret weapon looks like: it is bulging in the front, separates into delta wings at the rear, and could pass for a cross between a whale and the space shuttle.

The New York Yacht Club, custodian of the Cup and grand panjandrum of its defense, has howled that the radical keel is an infraction of the 12-meter rule, even though it passed muster earlier this year before keen-eyed measurers, including the club's own tape man. With its lowered ballast and jetlike wings, the innovative yacht can slice through the water with less turbulence, turn virtually on a dime, and stand much more erect than its rivals when they beat into the wind, thereby drawing more power from its sails. Remarkably, all this seems perfectly within the rules. Even more remarkable, the new design has been working in Rhode Island Sound, where fickle winds and the backwash from the spectator fleet have broken many another seeming breakthrough.

Since June, when seven yachts from five nations began competing off Newport for the right to face the Americans, Australia II has repeatedly trounced not only its two Down Under rivals, Challenge 12 and Advance, but also Canada 1, France 3, Britain's Victory '83, and Italy's Azzurra, often by embarrassingly wide margins. The two other Australian boats have already been eliminated, and at week's end, as the challenger selection continued in its fourth round, Australia had compiled a record of 42 wins and only five defeats. Its closest competitor, Victory '83 (30-17), finally did manage to beat Australia II in one race last week by a surprising 2 min. 50 sec., provoking an outburst from Dennis Conner, skipper of Liberty, the leading American boat. He charged that the Aussies were "sandbagging" (deliberately losing) to take the limelight off their disputed keel.

Conner's cranberry-red Liberty, the favorite, is currently at the top of the heap in the skirmishing among three U.S. boats for the honor of defending the Cup. The other two: Tom Blackaller's Defender followed by John Kolius' nine-year-old Courageous, which nonetheless upset Liberty and Defender six times last week and was still in the running. Though the challenger is picked strictly on results, the choice of the American boat is entirely up to the blue-blazered gentlemen of the New York Yacht Club's race committee. If they believe a yacht is coming on strong at the finish of the trials in early September, they could pick a boat that did not necessarily have the best overall record.

Whichever American boat is tapped, its skipper will have more to worry about than the novel design of the expected challenger. Australia II's crew is also in superb trim. Once better known for hoisting pints than hoisting sails, the Australians are up at 5:50 each morning for an hour of calisthenics and road work. "The whole thing has become deadly, deadly, deadly serious," says Australia II Executive Director Warren Jones. "We train like commandos." The eleven-man crew enjoys impressive backup support. As Australia II was maneuvering before the start of a race last week, its carbon fiber boom buckled, making a forfeit seem probable. But its tender came alongside, and within ten minutes a $9,000 aluminum boom was in place and the yacht was ready with time to spare.

That snappy performance reflected the damn-the-expense attitude of Alan Bond, 45, the swashbuckling tycoon from Perth (real estate, mining, oil), who heads the Australia II syndicate. Bond, a onetime sign painter, is making his fourth try for the Cup, a record surpassed only by Britain's indomitable Sir Thomas Lipton earlier in the century. In his latest bid, Bond could spend as much as $3.5 million for a prize initially valued at only 100 guineas (about $70 by current reckoning).

Bond's chief designer is Ben Lexcen, 47, who as a youngster in the small town of Boggabri in eastern Australia built such superior model racing sailboats that he had to give some away to keep his friends interested in competing. He gives nothing away now. Lexcen spent months in The Netherlands tank-testing eight different 25-ft. model hulls in secrecy to prevent the Americans from learning about his new keel. Indeed, reports surfaced last week that the Americans tried unsuccessfully to get the Dutch to reveal details of the design. Lexcen snaps: "They would flash it on their boats in a minute if they could get their hands on it." Nonetheless, he disclaims having produced a revolutionary product. Says he: "There are some boats in Australia with the same thing. I just made it bloody work."

There are those who find yacht racing no more exciting than watching the bubbles in their glasses of Perrier. Of course, they are wrong, as this summer's battling has already shown. For the September finale, the action will heat up even more, both on the 24.3-mile-long triangular course and along Newport's palazzo-lined shore, where the late-night partying has included the likes of Britain's Prince Andrew and the Aga Khan, patron of the Italian effort.

With their towering masts, vast expanses of Mylar-Kevlar sails, monstrous winches and computerized navigational aids, 12-meter yachts are the nimble-footed heavyweights of their sport. Add the tactical elements of chess: when to defend against an opponent's move, when to ignore it, when to sail off in a different direction. The unmatched combination of required resources has made modern Ahabs of the obsessed competitors.

For all the years of preparation, the contest can founder on the merest wisp of bad luck. But Australia II's performance so far, along with the New York Yacht Club's anguished reaction to that success, has created extraordinary confidence in the Aussie camp. Australia II's skipper, John Bertrand, 36, is already contemplating how Australia will change the rules after it captures the Cup. "If we win," he says, "we're going to make sure all sailcloth must be made of kangaroo hide. Then we are going to fill up a salt lake in the outback and defend the Cup there." After this wild America's Cup summer, stranger things could happen.

-- By Frederic Golden Reported by Richard Hornik and John F. Stacks/Newport

* A number that refers not to its length but to a value obtained from a complex formula involving, among other variables, sail area, waterline and displacement.

With reporting by Richard Hornik, John F. Stacks This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.