Sailing: Alinghi keep upper hand over patched-up Oracle

Stuart Alexander
Tuesday 14 January 2003 01:00 GMT
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A day's break in the racing could not come quickly enough for the Oracle BMW team after they went 0-2 down in the final of the Louis Vuitton Cup yesterday.

The American team still looked very slippery downwind in the second race, but just could not match the power their rivals, Alinghi of Switzerland, have been able to build into their upwind performance in the series, consisting of nine races which are each staged over six legs – three upwind and three down.

Nor were the San Francisco-based Oracle helped by breaking their spinnaker pole for the third time since the series began in October, the month Alinghi last lost a race. They were again able to strap a splint bandage round the 25-foot carbon-fibre tube and continue. The damage will be examined today.

Confidence is oozing from every section of Alinghi, with the Swiss team even able to continue using old sails. They are restricted to 45 during the Louis Vuitton Cup and can have another 15 if they reach the America's Cup final against Team New Zealand, for which this is the eliminator.

But that may not be help enough, as the agreement by the chief measurer, Ken McAlpine, to the hull extension device on Team New Zealand could put the match beyond their rivals' reach.

* The Italian Simone Bianchietti, on Tiscali, continued to push Graham Dalton (Hexagon) every inch of the way into his home port of Tauranga, New Zealand, yesterday as they fought for third place in the third leg of the Around Alone race. The Kiwi, 171 miles from the finish, had an 18-mile advantage over Bianchietti, while in the battle for fifth and sixth places, Britain's Emma Richards, on Pindar, had a narrow lead over Bruce Schwab, on Ocean Planet. The first two finishers, Bernard Stamm and Thierry Dubois, have already reached Tauranga.

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