For the past two months New Zealand has been inundated with coverage of the Louis Vuitton series. This is where teams vying for the right to challenge for the America’s Cup compete against one another in order to sail against the current holders.
Does anyone in the USA really care? Any SDMB yachting fans?
People who care about yachting care. I have yet to meet one, though. In fact, I’ve heard nothing about this year’s Cup. Or last years. Or the year’s before…
I thought that might be the case. Here its rammed down everyones throats after we ended up winning the thing off San Diego back in the late nineties.
Just in case you may want to know what happened since then:
The last one was a couple of years ago when TNZ defeated Prada 4-0. The next one’s in February. There’s four challengers left: Alinghi (Swiss) Oracle (US) OneWorld (US) and Prada (Italian).
It’s kind of fun for a while, but it’s not exactly thrill a minute stuff, very little passing for example.
Imagine a wind powered Formula One with only two cars racing each other and you’ve pretty much summed it up.
I never watch it on TV, seems like a sport for the elites. I did like that movie about it a while back tho.
There was more interest in the U.S. when we first lost it after so many years holding it. People wanted to see the U.S. win “our” trophy back. But now that it’s gone back and forth a few times, it’s become just another international sporting event, and one that’s not very interesting to most people any more. There’s some coverage, but not very much.
What was the movie called cainxinth? I didn’t know there was one.
There’s a couple of races on today, OneWorld’s currently three lengths ahead of Prada, and I think Alignhi’s leading Oracle.
It’s going on now?
Hmmm…after flipping through the channels, I don’t see it on TV anywhere.
Yep, Here in NZ there’s been livecoverage on TV1 every raceday.
There’s an internet thingie called Virtual SPectator which you can download for a price if you can be bothered.
(can I link to such sites or is it against Board etiquette?)
Cheers for that cainxinth, interesting mix of comments on the imdb site, kind of mirrors the Cup itself. If you like boats, then you’ll like it and so on.
Might be a rainy day choice if there’s nothing better to watch…
when i see it on tv, i can’t help but watch. it isn’t exactly an exciting sport to watch, but I can appreciate the skill it takes to sail a boat
I try to catch the coverage on the Outdoor Life Network when I can, but the truth is that AC racing doesn’t make for very good tv. I love the tactical aspects, and the boats and crews are amazing, but it just doesn’t translate to tv very well.
This seems IMHO stuff. Or what are we supposed to debate?
Should Americans be watching the America’s Cup? Why or why not? 
As I work from home I tend to watch the starts over lunch, and sometimes end up watching whole races when it gets interesting (close race, gear failures etc).
The crew work and technology this time seems to have definately improved over the last one, there seem to have been fewer breakages and so on (although spinnakers/genoas still get shredded and Alinghi did lose the top third of its mast on the way to a race last week, the wind was way over the 19kt cap at the time).
For the record, today’s results (today’s races have just finished):
Alinghi bt Oracle to win their match 4-0, Alinghi moves on to the LV finals Oracle to the repercharge where they’ll face the winner of the OneWorld/Prada match.
OneWorld bt Prada this morning to lead their match 2-1, they also raced this afternoon but I didn’t catch that result.
Yeah, sailor’s right, it was a mistake on my part to post in this forum.
Sorry.
Well, just for the record I’ll say I do not generally like to watch any sports. I’ll watch sailing if it’s on but I won’t go out of my way looking for it. When it comes to sailing I like doing it rather than watching it. The only thing I like to watch is sex and that’s because I can’t be doing it all the time. 
So if the 17th man was replaced by the 17th-20th threesome you’d watch more coverage? No doubt the Stars & Stripes major sponsor tried to have it included.
(Viagra put a huge sticker on the S&S boom - yep, right next to the mast…)
Just imagine the tactical opportunities innovative afterguards could dream up if this were the case…
“Right girls, next tack we put in I want you getting right in their bowman’s face…”
Basically, nobody in the US wants to watch a sport you can’t even get near, let alone play at.
I lived in Perth, Western Australia in 1983, when the US lost the cup (for the first time ever) to a team sponsored by a local-boy-made-good (Alan Bond). The whole country went sailing mad! For the next 4 years, Americas Cup was one of the regular features of every sports channel, newspaper, magazine etc. Then we lost it again. Now - who cares!