On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 05:27:05PM -0600, steve harley wrote: > on 2013-09-25 14:44 Steve Cottrell wrote > >OMG that was brilliant. > > amazing, i have seen almost no video of it - broadcast TV is useless > and my internet connection is too slow to stream much ? but i've > been following through news channels
NBC Sports Network carried live coverage of every race, which our TiVo dutifully recorded for us. While I'd have liked to get up to the city and point a Pentax at the spectacle, I just couldn't bring myself to dedicate the amount of time I'd need to stake out a decent photo spot for around 90 minutes of racing (if we were lucky enough to get both races), especially since with the exception of the last few days most of the shore-based shots I saw had a significant amount of haze. And, of course, fan attendance over the last few days has been much higher, so I'd have had to be in position even earlier! My opinion is that Oracle had what was basically a quicker boat, and they learned faster on the water than the Kiwis. Every day the Team USA boat was noticeably better than the day before. The Kiwis started off the event with a perhaps a slight edge, while Oracle were still coming to terms with their equipment. But the combination of Oracle switching in Ben Ainslie as the tactician, and the Oracle shore crew being better at changing the boat overnight to get more speed, tipped the balance the other way. Then a little bit of bad luck (like one race being called because the wind speed got too high, and another one because the race exceeded the extremely tight time limit) took what looked like two certain race wins away from the Kiwis, either one of which would have given them the America's Cup. That meant more days of racing, and every day Oracle got just a little bit faster. Put all that together with some rather uncharacteristic slips from the usually unflappable Dean Barker (the NZ helmsman) and the writing was on the wall. I'm disappointed, but not surprised, by the result. If the Kiwis had managed to pull off the win my wife and I were considering a return visit to Auckland in a couple of years. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
