Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

http://www.wired.com/playbook/2012/08/ff_americascup_ellison/all/

by lnguyen • 14 years ago

56 22 14 years ago

marquis• 14 years ago

Yachting is a fascinating sport: it's extremely technical as well as exhilarating and team-building. I've had the pleasure of being in the tech area during some races where the GPS equipment is managed, stressful stuff! If you're near a body of water and have some time to take some sailing lessons before the cup next year, I guarantee you'll get hooked on many levels (it's also great exercise).

tedunangst• 14 years ago

It takes an active imagination to see sailing as a spectator sport

Don't let that stop you from writing 5000 words about it. This reeks of "pick someone to hate, find a reason to hate them, write it up".

vidarh• 14 years ago

That's not the tone I get from the article at all. It starts that way to play up the difficulty of what he's trying to achieve and set it up so that the people it covers later seems even more gutsy and/or amazing for trying and/or achieving the goal.

In this case, the hero and focus of the article is not Ellison, but Stan Honey, the guy behind the new software system, and Ellison is just the force of nature that set the stage.

A lot of Wired features are written that way and there's very rarely any venom in it.

In this case even Ellison is painted relatively sympathetically, as the eccentric billionaire trying to do something slightly crazy but that might yet have a chance of success against really tough odds. It describes some problems he's run into, but it also cites people who see what he's done as positive.

carmen• 14 years ago

NBC aired a race from Newport a month ago, and a similar round of articles circulated. does anybody remember all the 3D racecourses and SGI logos everywhere in 1992 america's cup? or all the wild Quokka webcoverage of the 95-98 stuff?

lancewiggs2• 14 years ago

The sailing in the Olympics used much of the technology mentioned, including painting virtual lines on the water. The article feels overwrought, but the racing will be amazing. The new big Team NZ yacht is just near me here in Auckland, and feels like a tethered wild beast ready to be unleashed. Watch out for the rise of fixed wing sails, possibly transforming the yachting industry.

bartonfink• 14 years ago

Somewhat off topic, but do you mind if I drop a line to ask about the tech scene in Auckland? My wife and I are planning to emigrate to Auckland from the U.S. in the next few years and I'd love to hear your thoughts on the scene, whether a Yank like myself would be able to find a job, etc.

lancewiggs2• 14 years ago

Sure thing. Email, blog, twitter all the same.

Gibbon2• 14 years ago

I'm also in Auckland.

We went down to the wharf to see it the day it was launched.

Staggering size...

It's a catamaran with a 13m (42.7 ft.) tall solid wing and is expected to be able to hit 50 knots (90+ km/h).

They have to anchor it to a tonne and a half of ballast just to keep it from taking off on it's own.

cobrien• 14 years ago

Hey Gibbon -- I'm not sure what catamaran you were looking at, but the America's Cup boats are actually even LARGER than that ...

The AC45 (the boat being used in current cup events while the larger AC72's are being designed and built) uses a 21.5m (71ft) wing ... and the boats that will be used in the actual Cup (the AC72) are even larger beasts -- a wing 40m (131ft) tall [1].

The design of and technology going into these AC class boats is fascinating. It's been a lot of fun watching the AC45's race and the AC72's will be quite a sight out on the water once they begin pushing 'em to their limits.

[1] http://www.cupinfo.com/en/americas-cup-2013-boats-ac72-ac45....

Someone• 14 years ago

I think the racing in the Olympics also showed the limitations of this technology. Many times, the boats are what, on television, looks like miles apart, as some of them think they will get better winds by tacking now, and others think it is better to wait a few minutes before doing so. Between such groups 'meters to the finish line' is a bad approximation to 'seconds to the finish line'. Even with this technology, the sailors commenting on races often could not tell who was ahead.

You can diminish that by placing more buoys to round (effectively making the course smaller), but I am not sure it still is sailing, then.

cfn2• 14 years ago

Distance to finish is a poor estimator because the wind will be different in strength and direction in different places of the course. We use to have three marks in the Olympics but at some point it was reduced to two. I don't know why but I guess that the idea was to simplify the course for the sake of the spectators.

Not for the first time I heard spectators of the Olympics say that sailing is a very confusing sport and I hope that what is being done in the America's Cup and continued in London 2012 will help. On the other hand, I as a sailor, would like to see certain aspects of the race which are not spectator friendly at all.

Groxx• 14 years ago

Doing it for (American) football made it much easier for me to follow along. I suspect the same will be true for yachting. Personally, I love it.

suyash• 14 years ago

Can't wait, best time to be in SF and work for Oracle!

nirvana• 14 years ago

This is great news, as sailing is a wonderful sport, and the TV coverage of it in the past has often been hard to find, quite inconsistent and very poorly done.

I don't know why WIRED is increasingly becoming such a snotty, hostile and tabloid publication. I guess it's cool to hate on Ellison for putting money into a wonderful sport.

While we can't afford these huge multi-million dollar boats, we can have much of the same excitement in our own lives racing $20,000-$30,000 boats. And you don't even need a boat-- since crews tend to be 5-7 people owners are often looking for crew!

Good coverage of the Americas Cup will hopefully help bring more people into the sport of racing.

jfb2• 14 years ago

"I guess it's cool to hate on Ellison for putting money into a wonderful sport."

There're a lot of better reasons to get your hate on towards Larry Ellison, in my mind.

bofussing• 14 years ago

I am sure the legions of budding professional sailors hope that the America's Cup series will be a commercial success too. The line-up of sailors in the current series is literally a who's who of elite sailors, if they cannot do well out of this series the prospects are not bright for those further down the food chain.

cfn2• 14 years ago

I would add that you can have a lot of fun on a Laser that goes for £5,000 new and anything down to £500 used. I am very happy with ACs coverage both TV and web and it is the first thing ever to bring this sport to the forefront.

jfb2• 14 years ago

I saw some of this at the ballpark this afternoon. It was pretty nifty, and the boats are unbelievable. Helped that it was gorgeous out.

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

    Part of the problem with hockey on TV is that flying pucks
    move so quickly they are almost invisible to the at-home
    viewer. Honey proposed digitally inserting a blue glow
    around the puck that would lengthen into a contrail whenever
    it was moving faster than the eye could see.

Funny, the first place I ever read about this was in Wired in the mid-90s. I think they called it "pucktrax." There's virtually no mention of it online anymore, except for a handful of snarky forum posts deriding Fox's use of a "gaudy blue flame."

see: http://www.tribalwar.com/forums/archive/t-606021-p-37.html, among other places.

nikcub• 14 years ago

> The software for the NFL’s virtual yellow first-down line has been rewritten so that it can paint course boundaries on the surface of the water.

Sounds like bad software design. Should have written one generic program that can paint lines and expose an interface to it

sirribbett• 14 years ago

I just found out that the monohulls are gone... I doubt I will watch any of the next America's Cup races.... The catamarans never will have the class and beauty of the real sailboats! Just like in skiing..... I'd rather watch a downhill than a half-pipe! The America's Cup is about sailing.... Bring back the sailboats... Please!

Inside Larry Ellison’s Insane Plan to Turn America’s Cup Into a TV Spectacle

Related Stories