Winning skipper of Alinghi, Brad Butterworth, talks about how he feels, and what he learnt from his fourth consecutive Cup victory.
Brad, congratulations. How does it feel a day after winning the Cup?
I’m incredibly excited about what happened. It’s been such a windy, twisty road to get to here, and to win in that fashion is something we all work towards.
Is victory sweeter after such a close contest?
Yes, that last race was a real match race. There was good breeze. It was a real match race with lead changes, more through our bad crew work than anything else! But anyway, a really enjoyable race. For us it was just like a race we’d had between 91 and 100. A real, drill work, crew day.
Did having the extra responsibility of skipper make it more special?
No. Nicer for me to get my old job back. And Coutts can come in, he can handle that. He used to tell me how hard he was working and I never believed him. Anyway, now I believe him.
What was different this time, what with not having Russell Coutts around?
I think it’s all about the people side of it. He’s got a great way about him, and I’ve learned a lot from him. This team was set up by him, this time as well, so we’ve had a great bunch of people, and we’ve added people over the time since he’s left. And we carried on this philosophy that we’ve had in our group, and it’s ended up being a strong one.
The first race of this regatta was your first Cup without Russell. Did you need to make any adjustments to your approach?
We’ve been sailing with Ed [Baird] and Peter [Holmberg] a few years now, so not really. I talk to Russell every day. So he was giving me a lot of advice about what I was doing wrong!
What advice did he offer you?
He said keep it close, so I did.
Although we saw some big separations early in the regatta. Why that big split on the final run of Race 2, for example?
Race 1 you saw a very tight race, Race 2 the same thing, but we made a mistake by going around the wrong gate mark – it just got us out of synch for the beat and put ETNZ in synch for the shifts. We weren’t strong when we sailed up the second beat. The lee bow tack wasn’t a great one from us, but I think they would have gone past us anyway. We learned a bit that day, and the next day we sailed a really great race to come back from a huge windshift that we didn’t know was there from the beginning. But down the final run we crossed ETNZ about two boatlengths ahead. We had nine minutes on one gybe and two minutes on the other. As we crossed them we went for a couple of minutes we just got headed and headed. From that time on, we were behind, so we just had to keep on going, and keep faith in what we thought was more breeze ahead. But it was a mistake, although gybing these big boats in light air is not easy and if we’d have gybed ahead of him, he would have gybed off onto the long gybe and chances are he probably would have beaten us. From then on we didn’t change our game a lot, but we learned a lot. The gates, especially, how to manage that – proved to be a big thing for us.
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