New CC Dox Password

Due to recent changes in Challenger personnel, the username and password to access protected CC documents here on the CCB has this morning been changed. The former username ("beat") and password ("alinghi") have been replaced.

CC Assistant Michael ten Bokum has been asked to email the new username and password to all Challenge Reps and Alts. Reminder that, as usual, they are case sensitive.

Happy Easter! (And, LOL, that's not the password.)

New Rep for +39

Yesterday the CC was notified by +39 that Paul Henderson (CAN) is no longer their Challenge Representative or a member of their team. Their general counsel, Stefano Feltrin (ITA), formerly the Alternate Rep, will now serve as Challenge Rep.

A revised CC Directory, as usual password-protected to preserve the privacy of contact information, is available here. It is also available by clicking on "CC Directory" in the right sidebar.

And while we are at it, the CC welcomed Victory Challenge's CEO, Johan Stenman (SWE), to our meeting yesterday. Johan filled in for their Challenge Rep, Bjorn Ohde (SWE), who was unable to attend the session given the short notice.



New +39 Challenge Rep, Stefano Feltrin (ITA). File photo by TFE.

Victory Challenge CEO Johan Stenman (SWE) at the CC meeting Saturday morning. TFE photo.

Happy Birthday Ale!

Today is the birthday of our esteemed chairwoman, Alessandra Pandarese (ITA, Mascalzone Latino Capitalia Team). She has been in the hot seat since early last year, having taken over for George Clyde after he ably led the CC during 2005 and then some. By all accounts, and no surprise to any of us who have known her since she got involved in the Cup (back in, what, 1988?), Ale is doing a terrific job.

Under CC rules the Chair must be a rep of a current challenger, and the joke at a recent CC meeting was that we should give Mascalzone a bye into the LVC finals to keep Ale as our fearless leader as long as possible -- irrespective of when her team might get "excused from further participation." No doubt Alinghi and ACM would support that as well.

And it is not an easy job, especially having to deal with the likes of Hamish Ross, the Michels Bonnefous and Hodara, and your Ed. -- to say nothing of the AC Jury. Nonetheless, Ale is weathering the job, and all of us, reasonably well.



Chairlady: Alessandra, who doubles as general counsel for Mascalzone Latino, with her Alinghi counterpart Hamish Ross (NZL) at an AC dinner soon after assuming the chair in early 2006...




...and after the CC meeting earlier this month.


N.B. We don't normally post personal messages here on the CCB, but in honor of Ale's birthday we thought we would make an exception.

100k

The CC Blog was established to aid communication among challengers and (at the time) prospective challengers. When setting it up two years ago the CC's original thought was a private website. However, we decided we had nothing to hide, and that it could only be good for our teams and the Cup to give our friends and fans the same information going to the teams, and a bit of an insider look at Cup deliberations, rules, politics and personalities.

And by keeping it a public site we knew the CCB would also give the Challenger Commission a public voice if and when necessary.

Certainly the goal was not big visitor or page-view numbers. So we were are more than a bit surprised, and gratified, by the level of interest that is shown by the Sitemeter clicking past the 100,000 visitor mark in recent days. Cheers!


February was another record month with 7,000 visitors and 12,000 page views. No doubt the numbers will go even higher as racing gets under way again next month.

Eye in the Sky II

This is in follow up to Thursday's post. The CC will be discussing this issue at its meeting tomorrow morning here in VLC. Further info that any team may have will be appreciated.

In the meantime, Challengers received yesterday this communique from ACM after CC chair Alessandra Pandarese wrote asking for an explanation:


...regarding the helicopter flying over the Port and the Race course, it has been verified that it was chartered by the Ministry of Infrastructures (Ministerio de Fomento) and the Ayutamiento of Valencia with the production company MSL to get images of the coast and the port's infrastructures.

Due to all this, we would like to take the opportunity to clarify the airspace situation:

The approach path to Valencia's airport crosses the race course area, thus being a busy airspace, and restrictions cannot be placed beyond that agreed for official race days. However ACM has spoken to the helicopter companies we work with and have informed them of the sensitivies involved when filming the teams training and infrastructures. They have agreed to keep us informed whenever one of their helicopters will be chartered to get images of the port and the race course area, information which in turn we will pass on to the teams. We hope you understand that such collaboration can only be extended to the companies we work with and that we cannot be notified of all the airspace activity.

Finally on behalf of [ACM's] Julian Hocken, please find below further information on the rules governing the airspace:

Race day restrictions are set out in the Carta de Acuerdo between V07 and AENA (copy attached), and procedures in our own Air Operations Manual.

[Click here for the "AENA_carta de acuerdo America's Cup" - ingles.pdf.]

Outside official racing days observance of the Rules of the Air (ICAO Annex 2) and good airmanship should be enough for our purposes.

In this case key to the Rules of the Air are the Low Flying Regulations (Rule 5)

(i) Flight over Congested Areas

A congested area in relation to a city, town or settlement, means any area which is substantially used for residential, industrial, commercial or recreational purposes.

An aircraft (other than a helicopter) must not fly over a congested area:

+ below a height that would allow it to land clear of the area and without danger to people or property if an engine fails; or

+ less than 1,000 feet above the highest fixed object within 600 metres of the aircraft, whichever is the higher

A helicopter must not fly below a height that would allow it to land without danger to people or property if an engine fails. Nor (except with the written permission of the relevant Authority) may it fly over a congested area at less than 1,000 feet above the highest fixed object within 600 metres.

(ii) The 500 ft rule

An aircraft must not fly closer than 500 feet to any person, vessel, vehicle or structure.


One of the questions that will be asked at tomorrow's CC meeting is why, if the helicopter was filming only "to get images of the coast and the port's infrastructures", did it overfly a number of Challengers including hovering at length above Mascalzone Latino Capitalia Team? According to an interview that ran on the Eurosport website yesterday with MLCT chairman Vincenzo Onorato, at the time of the incident Masclazone's yachts were training twelve miles offshore. Another question will be why the event authority was not informed of such an extensive helicopter operation over the PAC; or, if they were, why did they not advise the teams of the operation and instruct the heli not to overfly teams?

Act 13 Sailing Instructions

Late last evening the long AC 32 paper chase came one step closer to completion, with the Regatta Director's issuance of the Act 13 SIs. Once again, the Regatta Director has met the applicable deadline, and the CC appreciates his usual timely diligence.

Section 16, Prescription for an 18th Person, is essentially the same language used in the LVC SIs but is repeated here as a reminder to all Challengers:

16 Prescription for an 18th Person

Pursuant to ACC Rule 37.2(a), the following procedure is adopted for approval of an 18th person:

(a) A Competitor may submit to the Jury the names and sailing resumes of prospective persons to race as the 18th person. If no Competitor objects to a prospective 18th person within 72 hours of such information being made available by the Jury to all Competitors, the person shall be permitted to race as the 18th person regardless of whether or not that person has “acknowledged technical or tactical skill”.

(b) A Competitor may submit to the Jury the names and sailing resumes of prospective 18th persons [whether or not submitted under (a) above], and ask the Jury to decide if the person has “acknowledged technical or tactical skill” and is therefore not qualified to race as the 18th person. In making its determination the Jury shall consider any guidelines approved by the Defender and Challenger Commission for determining whether a person has “acknowledged technical or tactical skill”, and whether to impose restrictions on the number of days or races that a person may race as the 18th person. If a Competitor submits a name and resume to the Jury by 0830 on a race day, the Jury shall give its answer by 1030 that day. In addition to answering in the affirmative or negative, the Jury may answer that it could not make a determination in the time permitted.

(c) In performing its responsibilities under this prescription, the Jury shall determine its own procedures, quorum requirements, and the means of notification of Competitors.

The CC will discuss adopting guidelines per paragraph (b) above at its meeting in Valencia (and via conference call) next Monday 5 March.

Eye in the Sky

Yesterday afternoon this chopper flew very low over the Port America's Cup for the better part of an hour, including directly overhead of Challengers' ACC yachts. Does anyone know to whom this heli belongs? Or who was in it and what they were doing? Only Challengers were out sailing yesterday. Note the camera pod or pods on the underbody. The Challenger Commission chair, Alessandra Pandarese, has asked ACM to investigate.

Happy Birthday: CC Blog Turns Two

"The agenda of the recent Challenger Commission meeting was leaked on Sailing Anarcy [sic] (nothing new there). Everyone said 'very interesting, I'd like to be a fly on the wall'. Now here's a dangerous precedent. You can be a fly on the wall. The full minutes [well not quite] of the meeting are published on the Challenger Commission website. That's the sort of open-ness bsuinesses and public bodies promise but rarely deliver. It quite shocked the America's Cup world, which thrives on rumour, leak and innuendo. Dangerous? Of course, if everybody promptly and honestly published details of all of their dealings what need would there be for a "Rumour and Speculation" page? And this [Mariantic Rumour and Speculation] page gets 80% of the site's hits. Only joking. The site is very welcome, keep it up....

-- The "Mariantic" AC News & Views website, February 2005


The Challenger Commission was formed by the Challenger of Record (Golden Gate YC / BMW ORACLE Racing) in April 2004 when +39 and then Shosholoza filed their Challenges. As additional Challengers came onboard, we realized we needed a better way to keep everyone informed, including prospective Challengers, than just email. We were also concerned about leaks of CC information, malicious or otherwise. Realizing it was inevitable in the digital age, we decided that there was little harm, and maybe a lot of benefit, in going public with much of our CC info -- after all, we are in the sports entertainment business. So why not give the public some insight into the inner workings of the CC and AC?

Obviously the solution was a website of some sort, perhaps a Wiki. But it had to be fast, easy and inexpensive. We had no webmaster, little budget, and for sure most CC reps were busy as hell. Moreover, none would be up for much of a learning curve, let alone a steep one.

In surveying various websites and formats, it was easy to recognize the popularity and success of Sailing Anarchy (then, as now, the number one sailing site) with its simple blog-style format. Sail-World was another good example, also essentially a blog, as is The Daily Sail subscription site. No surprise, they are now number two and three, or so we are reliably informed.

Why not a Challenger Commission Blog -- a simple website of articles posted chronologically -- to keep ourselves on the same page (no pun intended), provide an archive of important information for existing and new Challengers as they came on board, and to have a way to explain publicly our mission and, if necessary, our side of an issue?

The CCB was born in the early hours of 30 January 2005 -- a bitterly cold, -18 deg. C night in Ann Arbor, Michigan (USA) -- when your jet-lagged Ed. (having flown from Europe to visit family en route to CC meetings in San Francisco the coming week) signed onto Google's free Blogger service, clicked a few buttons, and typed in some basic information. Easy peasy. We had previously registered www.challengercommission.com, so it was a simple matter to sign up a hosting service and link them together with the new blog. All for a total investment of an hour or so and less than $100.

Our first post that morning was the agenda for the upcoming meetings, inasmuch as it had already been posted on SA. A few other seminal documents were uploaded and given sidebar links, and, voilà, yet another blog was born, but the first one related to the America's Cup. (Posts before 30 January 2005, that you will see in the Archives area on the sidebar, were back-dated to help give new Challengers a sense of the chronology of events and when documents were issued.)

When the subject was introduced at Tuesday's CC meeting, "blog" met mostly with blank stares. Few of the CC Reps had ever heard the word. But in a few minutes online they could see how simple it was to navigate, search, and find documents. The CC voted unanimously to adopt it, and, after only a brief discussion, decided to make it a public website. Only a few documents with personal or strategic information would be posted behind a password. On Friday 4 February the first official post went up -- the media statement from those CC meetings -- and the new site was warmly received both by the teams and the public.

In the ensuing two years there have been a total of 446 posts. The Sitemeter (at the very bottom of each page) shows that we will soon top 100,000 visitors. I am sure none of us ever imagined we'd end up with so many posts let alone visitors.

As a bit of a birthday present for the Blog, today we enabled "commenting" -- the previous post refers. We hope commenting will further improve our ability to communicate, both internally and with our readers and supporters.

Cheers!


In terms of visitors, January was the CCB's biggest month yet. As interest in the LVC and AC grows over the coming weeks, no doubt this Sitemeter graph will continue north. Click here for the latest. And it seems these days everyone has a blog -- even the AC 32 Umpires are starting one. Who will be next, Hamish Ross?

Cartoon courtesy of Jim Borgman, The Cincinnati Enquirer.

CC Meetings in Progresss

Working parties (sub-committees) on notices of race/rules, television and ACPI ("America's Cup Properties, Inc." -- trademarks and IP) met here in Valencia on Monday. Reports and recommendations from these groups are being presented to the full Challenger Commission today, which is meeting with a wide-ranging agenda that includes those topics plus finances, the rules governing the unveiling of yachts on 1 April, sail-handling amendments to the ACC rule, the umpire signaling system and security. A report on the main decisions and points of discussion will be posted ASAP after the meetings conclude tomorrow (Wednesday).



A light moment during Monday's Notice of Race working party meeting at the Holiday Inn Valencia after Katie Pettibone (USA, foreground right) of AREVA Challenge made a witty remark. To Katie's right are AREVA Challenge colleagues Dawn Riley (USA) and George Clyde (USA). Foreground left is Wolf Dietz (GER) of United Internet Team Germany.



Once again Louis Vuitton very kindly hosted the Challenger reps to a relaxing and enjoyable dinner at the Foredeck Club Monday evening. Here, LV's Christine Belanger (FRA, front and center) gathers with some of the late-stayers. CC Chair Alessandra Pandarese (ITA, red dress next to Christine) presented Christine with a framed poster of her "cover girl" appearance on a recent edition of BusinessF1 magazine. The January issue has a 48-page insert on the AC 32. Behind Christine is her longtime LV colleague, and former AC helmsman, Bruno Trouble (FRA). On Bruno's left is Commodore Dyer Jones (USA), AC 32 Regatta Director.



During today's CC meeting, a rather more serious-looking group around the table studying the paperwork projected on the screen. Foreground right is Bruno Finzi (ITA) of Luna Rossa.



Foreground, left is Chair Alessandra Pandarese (ITA) of Mascalzone Latino Capitalia Team, CC Assistant Michael ten Bokum (NED/ESP) and Stefano Feltrin (ITA) of +39.




Ross Blackman (NZL) of Emirates Team New Zealand.



Katie Pettibone (USA) of AREVA Challenge. One of the few female crew members in AC32, Katie is also (congrats!) a newly-minted lawyer recently admitted to the California Bar.



Michael Scheeren (GER) and Wolf Dietz (GER) of United Internet Team Germany.



Gillian Williams (NZL) of BMW ORACLE Racing.

Revised CC Directory

The CC Directory was updated before Christmas and previously circulated by our CC Assistant, Michael ten Bokum.

Belatedly, it is now available here as well by clicking on "CC Directory" under "Kiosk" in the right-side margin here on the CC Blog. As always, it is passworded to protect the confidential contact information of CC reps and other AC officials.