8701060136
DETROIT FREE PRESS
870201
Sunday, February 01, 1987
STATE EDITION
1C
MITCH ALBOM
SEE ALSO METRO FINAL EDITION
Copyright (c) 1987, Detroit Free Press
WEATHER GUY'S ANSWER WAS BLOWING IN THE WIND
FREMANTLE, Australia -- A steady rain was falling by the time the skinny
guy came out of the boat shed. He was dressed in a Budweiser T-shirt and khaki
shorts, and he poked his glasses back up his nose. All around him, the burly
crew members of Stars & Stripes were shaking each others' hands and picking a
restaurant for dinner -- a victory dinner, thank you, for they had just won
the first race of the America's Cup final, against Kookaburra III, in the
weirdest weather anyone could imagine.
Anyone but the weather guy.
"Not bad," someone said to Chris Bedford.
"Yeah," he said. "Thanks."
Forget muscle and power and all the other sports cliches you are used to.
This is boat racing, and what they worry about in boat racing are sails and
keels and position and wind. Always the wind. Where is the wind? How strong
is the wind?
On Saturday afternoon off the coast of western Australia -- with thousands
watching from shore and millions watching via satellite -- no one could figure
the wind. Where was it? In the morning they were saying 18 knots and by noon
it was actually less than 10 knots, and the difference, for racing purposes,
was not unlike the difference between a Subaru and a Schwinn 10- speed. Where
was the wind? What sails should they use?
The Australians checked with their weather guy. Then, with just minutes to
go before the start, they pulled down their mainsail and put up a heavier
one. The wind would pick up. That's what they figured.
"Well?" came a voice over the radio.
"It won't pick up," said Chris Bedford.
It was gut-check time
And that was that. The race was essentially over before it started. The
wind never picked up. Kookaburra III was stuck with the wrong sail for these
conditions and the wrong spot at the start of the course. It was too late to
change either one.
"How did you know?" someone asked Bedford, after Stars & Stripes won the
race handily and took a 1-0 lead in this best-of-seven series. "How did you
know? Better data? Better computers?"
"Gut instinct," he said.
Gut instinct. How weird was this race? The weather guy went on gut
instinct. The winds were suddenly gone. The sun was gone, too. The conditions
said "Australia's race" -- the Kookaburra boat was supposedly faster in light
winds -- but someone in that organization misread the signals, picked the
wrong spots and the wrong sail.
And Chris Bedford was right on the money. Said the winds would stay light.
Keep the lighter mainsail up.
Gut instinct.
You might expect the Stars & Stripes crew to slap him on the back, except
that Chris Bedford doesn't even sit in the boat. He doesn't even sit
outdoors. He has a little cubicle office in the Stars & Stripes headquarters,
and when he gets a reading from his computers he radios it to the Betsy, the
support boat, and it is radioed to Stars & Stripes -- all the signals are
scrambled for secrecy -- and skipper Dennis Conner reacts accordingly.
In such ways are America's Cup races decided.
"Are you even a sailor?" someone asked.
"No," said Bedford, who graduated from Michigan last May. "Actually I'm a
meteorology student. I'm using this to write my master's thesis."
"Your master's thesis?"
"Yes. It will be called Mesoscale Analysis For The America's Cup, 1987."
Naturally.
Hey, nobody's perfect
These are sophisticated boats chopping through the waters. Millions of
dollars go into their development. Years of training go into their crew. There
are thousands of journalists here for this showdown, and the fancy of this
entire country seems to ride on the outcome.
Yet every day, all those people wake up and the first thing they need to
know is the wind. How is it blowing? How much? What can we expect?
"Why did you choose the mainsail that you did?" someone asked Kookaburra
skipper Iain Murray after the loss.
"We thought there would be more wind," he said. "Obviously we guessed
wrong."
So it goes. This is the most sophisticated kind of warfare, and the most
vulnerable to nature. Race 1 in the 1987 America's Cup belongs to superior
sailing, superior tactics and a superior start.
And it belongs, in some part, to a blond-haired graduate student who made
the right guess, and who was now standing outside the gate as the others drove
off for dinner. A drop of rain ran down his glasses.
"Did you predict this, too?" he was asked. "Did you know it was going to
rain?"
He smiled sheepishly.
"Actually, I missed this one," he said.
COLUMN;SAILING;RACING;AMERICA'S CUP