French Chance In America’s Cup ‘Slim’

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32382, 22 August 1970, Page 6

French Chance In America’s Cup ‘Slim’

(Newsweek Feature Service)

To hear one of the contestants talk, it might be just as well to call off the America’s Cup races this year.

“Our chances are very small, very slim,” says Bruno Bicb, aged 23, the son of the owner of the French challenger, France. “We like to sail, and we have a competitive spirit, but it is a lost cause.” From anyone else, such poor-mouthing might be taken at face value as an embarrassing display of defeatism. But the Bich family thrives in the role of underdog. After the war, Bruno’s father started a small pen company with just $lOOO. In 1958, the French government told him his pens could never crack the American market. Now Baron Marcel Bich controls a quarter of the world market in ballpoint pens (including half the United States market), and the billion tough little Bic pens he sells every year have made him a multi-millionaire.

As his presence on the waters of Narragansett Bay off Newport, Rhode Island, attests, he even has enough loose change to mount what will probably turn out to be —when all the biHs are In—a $3.5 or $4 million exercise in futility. For while disaster may not be as inevitable as Bruno Bich claims, the French challengers do have a good deal to be modest about

Before they can even earn the right to race the Americans, they will have to beat the Australian boat, Gretel 11, in a series of elimination races this month. If they beat the Australians, who have had experience in America’s Cup racing (drear though it was), they will go against a crew and a boat that by all odds, should be invulnerable. In the 119 years of America’s Cup racing, the Americans have been unbeatable. There have been 20 races since 1851, and the United States has won them all. America has what are usually agreed to be the world’s best yachtsmen, the world’s best materials, the world’s best boat designers, the world’s best sailmaker and the world’s most advanced technology. America also has the power to make or change the rules of the race.

“We could not have a mast like the Americans because we cannot work titanium as they do,” says Bruno Bich. “We cannot equal them in technology. And we cannot know the currents and complexities of the wind here.

But then, that is why we are the challengers. They have been obsessed with the challenge for five years—ever since the baron, a driven sportsman and imperious individualist, bought the Sovereign, the 12-metre yacht with which the British last tried to wrest the cup from the United States. Faced with apparently overwhelming odds, Bich decided to overwhelm them with his own great weapon, cash. First he hired a naval architect, Andre Mauric, to improve the Sovereign. Mauric thought he should study the American yacht Constellation, too, so Bich bought it for him. Last year, when neither of those two boats seemed to be living up

to the baron’s expectations, he called on an American designer, Britton Chance, who designed Chancegger, France's trial horse and the model on which she was built

France arrived in Newport in June, and she is, everyone agrees, a lovely boat—deep blue hull, gold-coloured aluminium mast all told 62ft 6in of mahogany, titanium, Dacron and aluminium. Armada From France

With her came an armada and an army: the two trial boats, two 30-foot tenders, a 72-foot committee boat, 33 sailors, four mechanics, five sailmakers, a carpenter, two chefs, two maids, a waiter and a dishwasher. The grocery bills alone run to $lOOO a week.

The entourage Is lodged in the Miramar School for Girls in Newport, and they live a spartan life of old-school discipline. The crew rises at 6.15 a.m., exercises for 20 minutes, then musters on board the boats. By 10 a.m., the boats are tuned and ready to be towed into the bay for a day of practice. The sailors eat no starches, drink no wine during daylight, and observe a 10 p.m. curfew. Each evening before retiring, they are assembled so that Bich can deliver himself of a half-hour recital of ways he thinks they could improve.

There is little levity in the camp, for the crew knows how long the odds against them are, and they also know that approximately five million of their countrymen are

avidly following their progress—an jmpressive figure for a country that has only 217,000 boats of any and all description. They also have the imposing, autocratic Baron Bich to contend with. He wants to win the cup, and be has promised that even if he doesn’t qualify this time, he will keep bringing France back until she wins. Many yachting experts here and in France are convinced that American technology will keep the United States dominant in yachting for at least the rest of the lifetime of Marcel Bich. And those most charitable to the French believe the only way America could lose its cup would be by beating itself—permitting the crew to make a succession of unforgivable blunders.