Saturday September 7 was one of those absolutely perfect days in San Francisco, clear, no fog, quite warm and thankfully quite windy on the water, because it was the first 2 races of the 2013 America’s Cup. After a long summer of preliminaries, there are 2 finalists. The defending team are the American Team sponsored by Oracle, and the challenger is the New Zealand team sponsored by Emirates Air.
On Saturday there were 2 races and New Zealand won both of them! And again on Sunday there were 2 races, New Zealand won the first and the USA won the second. The races are FAST, each over in about 30-35 minutes and watching these incredibly fast boats is thrilling.
The races continue on San Francisco Bay until there is a winner…New Zealand needs to win 9 out of 17 and the US has a more difficult job, they must win 11 out of a possible 19 races.
The America’s cup is the OLDEST trophy sport in the world, pre-dating the modern Olympics. The first race was in 1851! The yacht, named “America” represented the newly formed New York Yacht Club and beat the British Royal Yacht.
