Experts’ warnings about hosting this year’s America’s Cup in Valencia, Spain – where winds tend to be light in April – are looking mighty smart right now, and unfortunately so for the 11 syndicates that have plowed hundreds of millions into building boats and training crews for the last four years.  The opening round of the Louis Vuitton Cup (the regatta that determines who will face Alinghi, the champ) was delayed a fourth straight day today for lack of wind.

So there, in the photo, sits Larry Ellison (who just joined the afterguard and will be co-helming with skipper Chris Dickson) aboard one of the two yachts that Ellison’s top-ranked contender BMW Oracle hope to race …. sometime soon.  The forecast for Friday as well as the weekend isn’t optimistic. 

More details from the BMW Oracle racing blog.

Larry Ellison has to like his chances after his team pulled off a stunning win today in the opening round of  America’s Cup racing in Valencia — a 7th to first comeback on the last run, during the first of several fleet races with all 12 AC teams. This via the AC AC website: 

In one of the most extraordinary races ever witnessed in America’s Cup racing, BMW ORACLE Racing sailed from 7th to 1st on the final fickle run of Race 1 in Valencia Louis Vuitton Act 13. Starting in 7 knots of breeze, the American team had won the left-hand end of the start line an hour and a half earlier but, with Emirates Team New Zealand next to them, sailed into oblivion as the boats on the right started to benefit from better wind from that side of the race track….

Interesting item today in the International Herald Tribune, pegging the long-term market value of this year’s America’s Cup in Valencia, Spain, at $8 billion.  I’m not sure how exactly that was tallied up – or by whom – but at face value that’s a big surprise, considering (a) next year’s summer Olympics, a much bigger event, are expected to generate just $3 billion; (b) sailing gets hardly any revenue from television advertising – in fact it’s pretty hard to find coverage of it at all. For other comparisons to the market value of top sporting events, check out this recent piece from Forbes.  I dunno. Sounds like fuzzy math to me. Here’s the Tribune clip:

VALENCIA, Spain: The America’s Cup will generate €6
billion (US$7.96 billion) and 61,300 jobs for Spain over the next eight
years, according to a report released Monday.

A document called "The economic impact of the America’s Cup"
analyzed the benefits of the sailing event between 2007 and 2015 on
host city Valencia and the rest of Spain.

After spending more than €2 billion (US$2.65 billion) on
infrastructure — including the building of the Port America’s Cup,
which is expected to host 1 million visitors over the event’s three
months — the province of Valencia is expected to gain €3.7 billion
(US$4.9 billion) and generate more than 40,770 jobs, mostly within the
service and industry sectors.

If you’ve seen how coverage of America’s Cup racing has evolved on the Web over the last 7 or 8 years, you also know how the latest virtual 3D viewers make the spotty television coverage seem hopelessly lame, uninteresting, and slow. (Of course, if you’re a sailor, you watch both, since ANY sailing coverage, which is hard to find, is better than nothing.) It’s no fault of the producers, really:  fixing a camera on a boat that moves at a relative snail’s pace against a fixed horizon is about as exciting for most non-sailors as watching grass grow.

Good news, then, that New Zealand’s Animation Research Ltd. just landed the gig to provide virtual/3D America’s Cup coverage when the action starts next month in Valencia. ARL handled the impressive 3D coverage in the 2003 contest, and the viewers and interactive features only get better this time around.  Each AC boat will have an ARL "kit" on board that relays boat performance and location data to ARL servers, which serve it up on richly detailed 3D maps with course lines, markers, and laylines are clear to see from any angle.