Sometime on a humid, windless afternoon yesterday, defending challenger champion Prada was ousted from the America's Cup.
It came when there was neither time enough, nor wind enough and finally not even hope enough to sail the two races scheduled yesterday in a seven-race semifinal series between Prada and Seattle's OneWorld Challenge.
PHOTO: REUTERS
The Italian yacht needed to win both races yesterday to turn around a 1-3 series deficit, tie OneWorld and force their semifinal into a sudden death race today. There was barely enough wind for one race to be completed.
``That's the game,'' said Prada skipper Francesco de Angelis, on the point of tears. ``I think the problem was to find ourselves in the situation where you don't control your destiny.''
At the end of racing yesterday, an unbreakable deadline, challenge regatta organizers had no option but to award the series and a place in the semifinal repechage to OneWorld, who led 3-2.
The series was to be awarded to the first team to gain four points. OneWorld won four races but carried into the series a one point penalty incurred last week for regatta rules infringements.
It will carry the same penalty into a semifinal repechage against its American rival Oracle, sailed over the best-of-seven races starting Friday. Conditions for the opening races of the next stage are expected to be light.
``It's been a tough two years for this team,'' said OneWorld chief executive Gary Wright. ``We've had a few hurdles put in our way. The team has just kept rising to the challenge and I'm confident they'll do it next time too.''
Two years ago Prada was the toast of Auckland, winners of the challenger regatta before losing to New Zealand in the 30th America's Cup match.
Yesterday they sampled a much earlier and much more punishing defeat and they returned home quietly.
``It's not something I was prepared for, this sort of evening, and I'm still trying to regroup a little,'' de Angelis said. ``But that's the law of the sport. You can't change it.''
There was one race yesterday that started at 4.10pm local time, 10 minutes after the usual cutoff for racing on the Hauraki Gulf, and it had no obvious point other than its appeal to Prada's dignity.
It ended at 6.03pm in silence and gathering darkness. When there could no longer be two races, Prada had no hope of saving the series. It could have agreed with OneWorld not to sail the final race and saved itself one of the most prolonged and excruciating of Cup exits.
Instead, it raced in the faintest wind and won by 17 minutes, 46 seconds, the largest winning margin of this Cup series.
Oracle lost 4-0 to Swiss yacht Alinghi in the other semifinal and was forced into the semifinal repechage. The winner faces Alinghi in the challenger decider in January, with the winning finalist challenging Team New Zealand for the America's Cup in February.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier