The Where's America's Cup

One cool thing about Blogger is that you can change the date of the post. So I could have changed the date of this post to yesterday and say I think Alinghi (Swiss boat) is going to squeak by Team New Zealand (TNZ) by less than two seconds today and win the America's Cup. Sort of makes this quirky, but I'll take it. I'll try to post some stuff from past events and pre-date them. So I apologize for not posting but Spencer and work have taken up a lot of time and energy.

But my first non-Spencer post is about one of the most exciting and tense sporting events I've seen on TV. America's Cup. Race 7. I taped from Race 4 on, because usually these are routs (the last three were 5-0 wins) and I thought I would just watch the last leg (4) and be done with it. Wrong. You have to watch the whole race (about 2 hrs) to get the whole feel for it and what other sport has excitement and gameplay 5 minutes before the race starts? I would rather watch an America's Cup match in full than an NBA Final game (with no local team involved) in full. The NBA game, you can just tune in the last five minutes of the game and not miss anything. In the AC, you'd miss TNZ nearly forcing Alinghi way out of position before the race started, TNZ blowing two leads, Alingi luffing TNZ into a stall, a near head-to-head collision between the two boats, and a rare AC penalty (on TNZ), and therefore not realize that Alinghi nearly choked and why TNZ stopped and turned before the end. Because of the penalty (TNZ needed to do a penalty turn before it finished), Alinghi, leading 4-2 in the Best-of-9, was on its way to successfully defending the AC with huge lead and TNZ still needing to take a penalty turn. All Alinghi had to do was coast to victory (literally).

Then Alinghi had a mast break (not a big deal cause they could coast). But then the wind crazily shifted 180 degrees, stalling a flat-footed Alinghi team who still had their spinnaker up while TNZ had already compensated for the wind change, TNZ roared past Alinghi toward the finish line. Problem? Penalty turn. It's a 270 degree turn (not full circle) but TNZ turned too soon and by the time it exited the turn and headed for the finish line a few yards up, Alinghi recovered and was soaring forward and beat TNZ by just over one second. Closest AC race ever. And how does a land-locked country win the AC... twice?