BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — English soccer fans have been waiting almost a lifetime to win another World Cup. Just imagine what British sailing fans feel when the America's Cup rolls around.
Their best yachtsmen have been trying — and failing — for 173 years to conquer the Holy Grail of sailboat racing.
The schooner America won the race's very first edition back in 1851 in a loop around the Isle of Wight, where Queen Victoria herself was in attendance as the Royal Yacht Squadron was bested off the English coast. Since then, no country has challenged to win the Auld Mug as many times as Britain — only to always come up short.
And this for a country that holds a record 30 Olympic medals in sailing and whose ships used to rule the oceans in the times of empire.
Ben Ainslie, the most successful sailor in Olympic history with four golds and a silver, heads the latest British effort to end the wait for the oldest international trophy in sport.
“It’s massive for us because we’re a proud sporting country and our maritime heritage is massive for us as an island nation,” Ainslie told The Associated Press after a race in Barcelona. “The America’s Cup is the one international sporting trophy Britain has never won. And it originated in the UK.
"So that’s a big motivator for us to try, as we say, and get the America’s Cup back home.”
Ainslie's description of the weight of history on his team's shoulders echoes that of England's soccer team, whose anthem, “Football’s coming home,” sums up the mission of trying to lift its first title since winning the 1966 World Cup.
While the country is soccer crazed and its wealthy Premier League the envy of the sport, Britain's history has for centuries been closely linked with its nautical might.
The 47-year-old Ainslie has the unique role at the America’s Cup in his dual position as INEOS Britannia's skipper and its team principal. That means he runs the team in every facet and calls the shots on the waves from his starboard cockpit on the 75-foot foiling monohull.
Britannia has made a promising start and topped the challenger standings in the opening round-robin phase, which included beating a strong Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli of Italy twice.
That gave the British team the right to select its rival for the challenger series semifinals, and on Friday it picked Switzerland's Alinghi Red Bull Racing. That meant Luna Rossa was paired with NYYC American Magic in the other series to be decided by the first boat to score five victories.
The last boat standing after the playoffs will win the Louis Vuitton Cup and face defending champion New Zealand in the America’s Cup finals.
Ainslie already knows what it feels like to win the America’s Cup, albeit for the Americans.
He was on the 2013 winner Oracle Team USA. After the Americans fell into a large early deficit against New Zealand, Ainslie, a tactician, was promoted from the backup crew to the race crew. New Zealand expanded its lead to 8-1 and match point, but Ainslie helped the American-flagged crew pull off one of the greatest comebacks in sport, winning eight straight races to become the first British sailor to win the America’s Cup in 110 years.
As to why the cup has proven so elusive to a nation that excels at sailing, Ainslie insists that it is just “incredibly hard” to dethrone a sitting champion in a winner-takes-all event like no other — the champion sets the rules, picks the venue and gets a ticket to the final of the next edition.
“(So) much goes into the competition, the technicality, the boats and the competitive nature of it," he says. "And the fact that we know that the defender is really in the hot seat. They’re rewriting the rules for the next event and are in the final. So if you have a strong defender, like the Team New Zealand that we’ve seen in previous America’s Cups, it’s very, very hard to beat.”
Britannia has the backing of billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, the owner of petrochemicals giant INEOS who bought into storied soccer club Manchester United this year. His sailing outfit also shares a technical director and design expertise with the Mercedes Formula 1 team.
Ainslie first challenged for the cup in 2017 in Bermuda. INEOS came aboard the following year and they made a run at the cup in 2021 in Auckland. Both times New Zealand won.
The America’s Cup was born some four decades before the modern Olympic Games, and only four countries have even won it. The Americans successfully defended the title 24 times until that incredible 132-year run ended in 1983 at the hands of the Australians. The Swiss were the last country to join the select club.
The first step for the Brits is emerging as the best challenger. They haven’t reached the match final since 1964.
“The only thing we have in our mind is trying to win the thing. I think we can win it,” Ainslie says. “If we can keep that momentum going, we can be dangerous. Are we going to do it this time or not? Only time will tell.”
AP sports: https://apnews.com/sports
FILE - Skipper Ben Ainslie steers the boat as the British team crosses the finish line in the second fleet race of the SailGP series in Sydney, Feb. 29, 2020. (AP Photo/Rick Rycroft, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) —
Vice President Kamala Harris struck a measured tone, even steering clear of mentioning Donald Trump by name Tuesday in an interview with Black journalists that starkly contrasted with the former president's own, highly contentious, recent appearance before the same group.
The session with the National Association of Black Journalists was one of the few extensive sit-down interviews Harris has done since replacing President Joe Biden atop the Democratic ticket in July. She repeatedly criticized Trump on issues including his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and opposition to abortion access, but was careful to refer to him as the former president and in other ways that avoided naming him directly.
Trump was ramping up his campaigning, too, after the presidential race was roiled by Sunday’s second apparent assassination attempt against him.
The former president was holding an evening town hall in Flint, Michigan, and has appearances later in the week in New York, Washington and North Carolina. Trump re-upped his past retaliation threats against election workers, donors and others as he tries to stoke fears about the integrity of the upcoming 2024 election.
He posted Tuesday on his social media site, “Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before.”
Harris has her own stops in Washington, as well as Michigan and Wisconsin in coming days, with the two candidates overlapping in concentrating on the industrial Midwest and Pennsylvania and North Carolina — all swing areas that could decide an election expected to be exceedingly close.
Harris answered questions from three association journalists at a small, relatively quiet venue at the Philadelphia studios of public radio station WHYY. That was very different from Trump's addressing the NABJ conference in Chicago in July, when he was antagonistic to the moderators and sparked an uproar by questioning the vice president’s racial identity.
Her manner was a departure from her campaign rallies, where Harris often receives some of her loudest applause by declaring that her professional background as a prosecutor means, “I know Donald Trump's type.”
Pressed about reports of eroding support among Black male voters, Harris said she wasn't “assuming I’m gonna have it because I’m Black.” She ducked a question about whether she'd support efforts by some congressional Democrats for reparations from the government to compensate descendants of slaves for years of unpaid labor by their ancestors.
Biden has backed the idea of at least studying reparations.
As for Sunday's arrest at Trump's Florida golf course, she said she reached him by phone, checking in "to see if he’s OK.”
“I told him what I have said publicly, there’s no place for political violence in our country,” the vice president said. The White House described the conversation as cordial and brief.
In an earlier interview released Tuesday, the vice president told Spanish-language radio host Chiquibaby, “Like all Americans, I’m grateful" Trump was unharmed.
The former president has claimed, without evidence, that months of criticism against him by Harris and Biden inspired the latest attack. That's despite Trump's own long history of inflammatory campaign rhetoric and advocacy for jailing or prosecuting his political enemies.
So far, Biden and Harris have tried to avoid politics in their responses to Sunday's incident, instead condemning political violence of all kinds. The president also urged Congress to increase funding to the Secret Service.
Authorities say Ryan Wesley Routh camped outside the golf course in West Palm Beach, where Trump was playing on Sunday, for nearly 12 hours with food and a rifle but fled without firing shots when a Secret Service agent spotted and shot at him.
Subsequently arrested, Routh’s past online posts suggest he has not been consistent about his politics in terms of supporting Democrats or Republicans. The attack came barely two months after Trump was wounded during a rally in Pennsylvania.
Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, said at a Georgia Faith & Freedom Coalition event that “it’s popular on a lot of corners of the left to say that we have a both sides problem.” But “no one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump."
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during her briefing with reporters Tuesday that there should be zero tolerance for violence-inciting rhetoric. She bristled at the suggestion that Biden and Harris have stoked division by calling Trump a threat to democracy, saying that there were concrete examples of the former president being that — such as when he helped incite an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In response to Vance's comments, Jean-Pierre said, “When you have that type of language out there it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous because people look up to that particular national leader, and they listen to you." She said such comments open the door for "people to take you very seriously.”
Associated Press writers Darlene Superville and Matt Brown in Philadelphia and Jill Colvin in New York contributed to this report.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Phoenix Awards Dinner in Washington, Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Phoenix Awards Dinner in Washington, Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump arrives at Harry Reid International Airport to board a plane after a campaign trip, Saturday, Sept.14, 2024, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
