On this special day, big hugs to all our wives and mothers, whom we hold dear throughout the year, but especially today when many places in the world we say....

Last Sunday was Mother's Day in Spain, and today in Germany, the USA,
and many other countries around the world.

After all, this is 2006 not 1966, and we have already had an AC "Women's Team" (see our post entitled "Equal Opportunity" a week or so back), so it is no big news that there are a number of women in key positions with Cup teams, including some sailors, and even one team general manager (K-Challenge's Dawn Riley). Indeed, the new chair of the Challenger Commission is Alessandra Pandarese (ITA, Mascalzone Latino - Capitalia Team).

One of the key women in our campaign is staff lawyer Gillian Williams (NZL). A keen racing sailor who did an Olympic campaign in the Europe dinghy, Gilly is a former associate in the prestigious NZ law firm Bell Gully. (There must be something in the office water-- two other Bell Gully alumni are involved in the Cup: Jury member Graham McKenzie and Alinghi General Counsel Hamish Ross.)

Gilly's fingerprints are on just about every important piece of paper that our team's business department deals with, and her quick mind and keen eye for detail are a help to every department. And given her racing background, Gilly is also a member of our rules compliance team.

Another cool person, and woman, involved in the Cup is international umpire Maria Torrijo Moll (ESP). A former sailor in the Optimist, Vaurien and Europe, she has served on the Jury at the OK Dinghy Worlds among other major championships, and was an umpire observer and assistant during the 2005 Louis Vuitton Acts.

We met Maria earlier this week on a day of "friendly" race-training with Desafío Español.

When two teams hook up for practice racing, normally one team tender serves as the race committee, and the other team supplies a chase boat to set the marks. Each team also supplies an umpire who work together on a chase boat supplied by one of the teams. And it's the only time you see people from different teams, wearing their own team gear, together on the same boat!


Cool people on a chilly late-winter day off Valencia: BMW ORACLE's
Gillian Williams (NZL) and Desafío Español's Maria Torrijo (ESP), aboard
the umpire boat earlier this week during a break in the "friendly"
racing between our two teams.

Nice ink for our team, and for Grant "Guthrie" Davidson (NZL), our Base Operations and Logistics manager, who is featured today in the first installment of ACM's new series of stories on their website called "A Day in the Life"....

"My job entails everything from transportation and relocation of the team and its equipment to the construction of facilities at all venues where the team trains or races, including the Valencia base and its daily operation," he explains from the team base in the Port America's Cup where Davidson is overseeing the final fit-out. "I helped with finding accommodation for the team when we first arrived and coordinated moving all the equipment around, along with helping 100 or so people move halfway around the world."

Not surprisingly, with that kind of responsibility, there is no such thing as a typical day for Davidson, who just smiles and shakes his head when I ask him about it.
[More....]


The entire team relies on a smooth and efficiently-run Base.


Base Operations and Logistics Mgr Grant Davidson -- "What
me worry?"


Guthrie's also pretty good when it comes to the logistics of a
barbecue.

Bridget Baker is the wife of sailing team member Ian "Box" Baker (NZL). She is quietly making a significant contribution to the well-being of BMWOR families living in Valencia, and families of other AC teams as well, through her weekly email newsletter Valencia Cronica. She emails it each Thursday to a list that has grown to over 200. And we post each week's issue on the Challenger Commission Blog, albeit behind a password to protect the privacy of the personal phone numbers and email addresses of Bridget and her contributors.

If you are an AC family member and wish to be added to her mailing list, or would like the password to access the Cronicas on the CC Blog, write Bridget at valenciacronicaspain [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] nz.

Bridget is taking a holiday break for the next few weeks. In the meantime, the CC Blog has a post today with links to three nice articles about Valencia that have appeared in major newspapers this year. Nice ink about our adopted hometown.

And a special thanks -- for volunteering all the time and effort that goes into the Cronica each week -- to Bridget, another of our team's "Cool People."

Ravishing redactor Bridget Baker.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Below, one of the more interesting and simpático (und sympatisch) people we have met during AC 32. See today's story on our main team website.

BMW's Prof. Dr. Raymond "Wizard" Freymann.

Our "Port Office", near the Darsena, is where the Marketing, Design, and Business departments are headquartered until the new base is complete. With the RCNV base all but dismantled, and the new Base not quite ready, the Port Office is busier than ever.

We could not run the campaign, let alone have a shot at winning, without the people pictured below. They go about their important jobs quietly and largely behind the scenes (and "Acts" for that matter), but are just as professional in their approach, and intense in their focus, as our sailing team. Cool people all.

Lunch at the Port Office: Clockwise from left, Rodrigo Azcueta
(ARG), Frank Albina (FRA), and Asim Khan (PAK) of the design team;
Diana Puketapu (NZL), business department; Joseph Ozanne (FRA)
and Juan Kouyoumdjian (ARG), design team; Gillian Williams (NZL),
business department.

Our search engines turned up two articles of note this morning among the many related to Larry Ellison.

First, there was this paragraph in the story on the website of Red Herring, the Silicon Valley business bible, about Larry's keynote address yesterday at OpenWorld:

The conference has been the Redwood Shores, California-based company’s biggest so far, with about 35,000 customers, partners, exhibitors, media, and analysts attending. Mr. Ellison occasionally strayed from weightier themes, joking about Microsoft’s security levels and answering questions from the audience about his sailing team. He’s an accomplished sailor, competing in the America’s Cup with his BMW Oracle Racing team.

Talk about promoting the sport. Whenever an ACC yacht is on display in the middle of 35,000 people from around the world, to say nothing of having the boss getting questions from them about the Cup and our team...well, "nice" as Ian "Fresh" Burns is fond of saying.

Then there are these quotes from Larry Ellison: The new software statesman by ZDNet's Dan Farber:

During his Oracle OpenWorld keynote, Larry Ellison outlined his major initiatives for the next 24 months. As I wrote earlier in the week, Oracle is becoming more stateman-like, talking about giving user choice, lifetime support (for a price as yet undetermined) and being a model open standards citizen. It shows that Ellison and team aren't living in a reality distortion field....

(We know Mr Farber was referring to his Oracle Corp team, not BMWOR. But you gotta love the expression "reality distortion field." That's how some used to describe working and living in the America's Cup. Now, LOL, seems more like MTV's "Real World Valencia.")

...If Ellison and Oracle can actually deliver on the goals set out for being most open in an open standards world and giving customers what they want, when they want it, the company will set the standard for others to follow.

...Ellison the conquerer and sometimes bawdy sailor has turned into Ellison the statesman....

Wonder what Larry will think of being called a "statesman." Sounds a bit old and staid for him, or maybe too spießig as our German friends would say. Nonetheless, very nice ink all around.


During Act 6 last month: afterguard member and alternate helmsman,
with Dicko (left) and tactician Bertrand Pace (right) the day we beat
Luna Rossa.


At OpenWorld yesterday: software statesman.

Another of the multi-talented, and multilingual Cup vets in our campaign is operations coordinator Saskia Green (GBR). Six or seven days a week you will find her beavering away at her desk processing a small mountain of paperwork for Laurent, Guthrie, and others, as well as handling any number of other important tasks such as keeping the team fed and healthy. In fact, by all appearances the only waking hours Saskia does not spend at her desk are when she is at yet another friend's wedding. Either she has a lot of friends, or her friends get married often! We all keep her mobile number handy -- even if no one else has the answer, likely Saskia will.


Good operator -- Saskia Green.

Design team member Mat "Gimp" Bird (USA) and his wife Amy are expecting their first child in a few weeks. But, says the email from Amy that accompanied the wedding picture below (no, not Mat and Amy's wedding!), "Mat has broken a big toe, and we're not sure how he did it." Uh-huh.

Fine timing, Mat! She's due in three weeks and your toe will take 4-6 weeks to heal. You're lucky Amy finds some humor in this -- her email went on to say, "it was a funny site with us at the emergency room at 4 in the morning and me trying to convince Mat that he should be in a wheelchair, to say nothing of me waiting on him hand and foot at the wedding ...."

Not sure how you did it? 0400? Broken in two places? Matty, you are going to take some serious Scheiße over this.

Congrats to sailing team member (grinder) Andrew Scott and his bride Karen Amsbaugh, whose wedding Amy and Mat were all dressed up for. Mat says it was quite the international affair with at least 3 AC teams represented. So who's sending the Blogster some pix of the new couple?


A lame Mat Bird and la embarazada Amy, looking good at the wedding
of Andrew and Karen Scott. You can tell Mat is an AC 31 vet by the nice
LV tie.

Keeping the comms gear and other electronics functioning on the yachts, support boats and on shore are our team "electrons" Rodney Ernst (USA) and Matthew "Mugs" Ulvr-Green (AUS). Both are popular members of our team, in part because they are upbeat, hard-working guys, and in part because almost all of us directly rely on them to able to perform our individual jobs. They work closely with our IT manager, Brian "Toaster" von Oven, who literally keeps the entire organization wired together.

Modern-day Cup teams are 24/7, global, and, in some ways, "virtual" operations that simply would not function without them. It seems like only yesterday when, in 1985, our team (NYYC's America II Challenge) began using fax machines for comms between our offices in Fremantle, Western Australia, in Newport, RI and in New York. As big a step forward as that was at the time, little could we imagine how AC teams would be operating today, and the technology that would be employed by Rodney, Mugs, Brian and the rest of us 20 year later.


Rodney "Electron" Ernst working in his container-office in Malmoe
yesterday.