Sep 18, 2024
The interview with Kevin Shoubridge Director of Operations of Team New Zealand conducted by the Louis Vuitton 37th America's Cup Barcelona gives us his insight into the origins and history of the team.
"We're a team that's run by yachtsmen, not by businessmen. We've never lost sight of the main goal in the America's Cup. To this day, there has never been a shortage of desire and motivation to win.
The America's Cup is hard to win because it's such a multifaceted challenge. It's a technical game, it's a sailor's game, and it's a team and people's game. It often takes multiple efforts to get everything to align.
When we first started in the '80s, we were the new kids on the block. New Zealand, in the windward position, has crossed onto the port. We didn't know what we didn't know, like we knew nothing, and we were on a crash course to try and be competitive. The big lessons learned from the first campaign really were that constant development is a necessity that we didn't realize at the time.
We are proud of KZ7. We sailed that KZ7 boat on the first day in Fremantle. I don't think we changed it until the last day, whereas now we don't go a day without changing something.
America's Cup 95: You will certainly be rooting for the Kiwis today. For me, '95 was the first of the really strong teams that came out of New Zealand for the America's Cup. If New Zealand holds this position, the America's Cup is coming to New Zealand. That was just such a great campaign; it was one of those campaigns where, right from the start, you knew you were onto something. The America's Cup is now New Zealand's Cup.
After the win of '95, bringing the cup back to New Zealand, the team just got bigger, stepped up a gear. The design process took another leap forward again. We were sort of just riding the wave of '95. It's "black to the future" on March 2, 2000.
The failure of 2003: You know, there are many ways to break it down. 2003 was a pretty young team, and they were plagued with reliability problems. That was the worst thing about the campaign: watching them in the water breaking masts like matches. It just snapped. The problem with that is that we then went into the 2007 campaign, and we almost carried that baggage with us.
In 2007, one of our key decisions was that everything had to be reliable, and that can be detrimental to your performance. New Zealand is coming down and is going to get there. In a way, we had to lose again in 2007 to take another step forward.
Even in the 2013 campaign in San Francisco, to a certain extent, we restricted ourselves. We wanted the boat to be at its peak for our first race, and it was. We went out there and basically hammered everyone, but we were on this slow, slippery slope. The lead now has gone out to 115 meters, and a minute and a half ago, it was within 30 meters. I always remember to this day, even when we were way ahead...