The America's Cup Takes the Fun Out of Snooping on Competitors --- Secret surveillance and frogmen are banned as espionage goes legit at top yacht race

 

The America's Cup Takes the Fun Out of Snooping on Competitors --- Secret surveillance and frogmen are banned as espionage goes legit at top yacht race.

"The America's Cup spies have come in from the cold.

For generations, teams in pursuit of yachting's top prize have dispatched undercover operatives seeking crucial sneak peeks at their rivals' boats and technology. Now the surveillance teams, long-lens photographers and frogmen have gone legit.

"Do you have what it takes to be an America's Cup spy?" asked one solicitation from the Cup's New Zealand organizers. Applicants should be "capable of capturing good recon at 45 knots" on the waters off cities including Barcelona, Auckland, Cagliari and Pensacola.

Known as the "Joint Reconnaissance Programme," the effort aims to improve transparency, increase safety and reduce costs ahead of next year's Cup competition in Barcelona -- scattering what had become an armada of chase boats and slashing the number of covert operatives on the payroll.

Now overt, the operatives work in groups of two. One drives a high-performance motorboat, the other takes photos, readings and video recordings. The captured intel goes to a central repository shared with all teams -- and the general public.

"It just struck me as a bit of a ridiculous situation, where every team has a team following every other team, all gathering exactly the same information," said Dan Bernasconi, chief technology officer for defending champion Emirates Team New Zealand, and architect of the program.

That marks a big change for the trophy known as the Auld Mug -- one of the oldest in international sports -- where yachting etiquette has always tolerated a certain amount of snooping around.

The winner of the roughly quadrennial sailing competition plays a key role in setting the general design of the boats used in the next contest, but the rules allow enough leeway that technological edges can swing the competition. In 2017, for example, New Zealand upset the defending champion U.S. team in part by installing bicycles on their boat to power its control systems -- and bringing in an Olympic bronze-medal cyclist to help pedal. Equally as important as the technological edge was making sure their competitors didn't catch onto their advantage and copy it.

Some clandestine operations have gone further than others. In the 1880s, Boston reporters stole and published what they thought were plans for a famed Scottish designer's boat. In fact, he foiled them with a decoy, said R. Steven Tsuchiya, chair of the America's Cup Hall of Fame selection committee.

A century later, the shrouding of Australia II's mysterious keel drove Canadian frogmen to try some underwater photography. Security spotted a diver coming out of the water. Doug Riggs's "Keelhauled: Unsportsmanlike Conduct and the America's Cup," recounts how an inflatable British boat nicknamed the Rubber Duck shadowed the Americans so persistently that sailors dragged fishing line to try to foul its propeller. Then they fired a mock warning shot with a starting cannon.

By the 1990s, espionage was a regular job. One operative -- discovered in 2009 taking photos near the Swiss team's base on Lake Geneva -- said in court papers he worked for Larry Ellison's U.S.-based BMW Oracle Racing team as a sail analyst earning around $13,000 a month. He also noted he didn't think he'd violated any laws or America's Cup traditions.

"Spying has been pretty much an integral part of every one I've witnessed," Tsuchiya said.

Ray Davies, a Cup-winning coach and sailor for ETNZ, said one of his favorite recent operations involved sending observers disguised as tourists to pretend to get off cruise ships near the American base in Bermuda.

"We were getting really good photos of Oracle that way," he said.

Few know better than the Kiwis how much intelligence can matter: Some team members are still kicking themselves after the viral spread of a grainy photo of their 72-foot catamaran soaring above the waves on underwater wings called hydrofoils a decade ago spurred other teams to develop hydrofoils of their own.

New Zealand lost that Cup to the U.S. by one race. Hydrofoils are now standard. So are the bicycles that helped the Kiwis win the rematch off Bermuda in 2017.

"We did that really well with the bikes, kept that under wraps until the very end," Davies said. "That was a key winning factor in Bermuda."

Bernasconi, a former engineer with the McLaren team in Formula One, said he came up with the intelligence-sharing effort because the fleet of recon vessels circling each team's daily sea trials seemed a waste of manpower and fuel, and increasingly unsafe. He also thought the increased visibility would help fans and media keep up in the years between regattas.

Because winners host the next competition and play a major role in setting the rules, ETNZ's victory off Auckland in 2021 provided an opportunity to do something about it. Now, each team contributes a member to an oversight panel. The panel chooses the spies following each team, with those-to-be-surveilled abstaining. All other forms of espionage are prohibited.

The syndicates then provide the spies trailing them with their chase boats.

And paychecks.

"Each team basically pays for the days the recon unit following them is doing," said Bernasconi. "So the more sailing we do, the more we have to pay the recon team to spy on us."

Rodney Ardern has been a Cup sailor and multiple winner since the early 1990s, when recon helicopters whirled above practice. Teammates once caught a diver lurking beneath the launch to photograph their vessel's undercarriage, then paraded him through the base in a wetsuit. Ardern had already started talking about doing recon for the Swiss Alinghi Red Bull Racing team when the new protocol was released.

"I was like, 'Oh well, I guess I'm out of a job,' " he said.

Instead, he became a spymaster -- Alinghi's representative on the recon panel. As a team new to the hydrofoiling 75-footers under development for the regatta, the intelligence has particular value.

"There's a full-time job just going through the thousands of photos and deciphering what's good, bad and useless," he said.

One group delighted with the new transparency: fans. Generations of boats were built and tested in secret around the world, hidden from view behind high fences and nondisclosure agreements. Now those eager to geek out on bleeding-edge developments in sailing -- or just watch the boats capsize -- can do it in near real-time.

Tom Morris is a U.K. dinghy-sailing champion and YouTube creator, whose Mozzy Sails broadcasts analysis of the boats' hulls, foils, sails and systems to around 25,000 subscribers. Last Cup, he only ramped up once racing started -- there just wasn't enough material available in advance. And what videos and images he could find often were highly stylized, or blurred out key details.

Now he posts regular analyses, with titles such as "America's Cup Winner Returns. . .here's what she's hiding."

"It's been fantastic to get this level of access and discussion at a time in the Cup cycle when teams would normally be silent," Morris said." [1]

1.The America's Cup Takes the Fun Out of Snooping on Competitors --- Secret surveillance and frogmen are banned as espionage goes legit at top yacht race. Kuriloff, Aaron. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 29 June 2023: A.1.