For those of you who don’t know, the Americas Cup is a big sailboat race. It’s an international race between whoever currently has the cup and the current challenger. It happens every 4 to 7 years, depending on when the nation holding the cup issues a challenge. Like I said in the beginning, I don’t know anything about sailing. Although I grew up spending every other weekend on a Venture 22, I never actually learned how to sail and I viewed the sailboat as a glorified tanning salon where I could read books and get a tan at the same time. So when the Americas Cup rolled around last year I wasn’t exactly fired up to watch it. My boyfriend Mitch, however, is a big sailing fan and somehow he got our entire house hooked on watching not only the Americas Cup but the races beforehand, called the Louis Vitton Cup, that determine what nations actually sail in the Americas Cup.

The Americas Cup has a long history that can be found in any number of books or places on the web and of which I am pretty ignorant. I know that we won the Americas cup for a long, long, long time, mainly because we made any challengers sail over here in order to challenge the cup. That resulted in us (the U.S.) always having lighter, faster boats, and pretty much kicking everybody else’s ass. The basic idea with the cup is that whoever holds the cup issues a challenge. And in the challenge they lay out the general guidelines for the race, i.e. what kind of boats will be sailed. There was a period of disgrace for the Americas Cup when the guidelines were vague enough (they just referred to the overall waterline of the boat), that catamarans sailed against single-hulled boats and the whole thing was considered a big joke. But the whole thing is back on track now and these days the boats are big and light and fast and they are exciting as hell to watch.

The 1999 Louis Vitton Cup had all these excellent close races with lots of race tactics and some boats breaking and guys yelling and boats going really fast. Boy were they ever exciting. Add to that the fact that we had a great team called America One skippered by this guy, Paul Cayard, who looks a hell of a lot like Tom Selleck during the Magnum P.I. days. I could watch that guy sail boats for hours...Not to mention the Italians (who actually ended up winning the Louis Vitton Cup to go on to race in the Americas Cup) who were extremely civilized and their sweet captain, (Francesco De Angelis) whose nickname was Il Barone (the baron). All in all, the races were a very good time. The only disappointing part was that I got pretty darn attached to the Italians, watching them sail all those races in the Louis Vitton Cup and then they just got schooled by the New Zealanders in the Americas Cup. The poor guys didn’t win a single race. Those New Zealanders are damn good sailors.

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