Sir Ben Ainslie has questioned whether it would be right to hold the next America’s Cup in Saudi Arabia, saying that there are “better options” than Jeddah, which is yet to be ruled out of contention to stage the 2024 race.
Grant Dalton, chief executive of the champions, Team New Zealand (TNZ), is continuing to review his options before the deadline for announcing the venue for the 2024 defence on March 31, with the city in Saudi Arabia, where 81 people were executed on a single day this month, still an option.
It is thought that Jeddah has put up the most money to stage the 37th edition of the Cup, with the rumour mill suggesting that Dalton is also considering Barcelona or Malaga in Spain, or possibly a retreat to Auckland, where TNZ have so far failed to raise sufficient money to fund a second defence of the title they first won in Bermuda in 2017.
Among those who are uneasy about the prospect that Jeddah, which lies on the Red Sea coast, could yet be chosen is Ainslie, the skipper of Ineos Britannia, who hopes that the next Cup will be the one when Britain finally wins the top prize in world sailing.
Ainslie’s team are the official Challenger of Record for the 2024 event, which gives them a say in how the challenger series is run, but he has always made clear that the choice of venue is a matter for TNZ alone.
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“It’s not my decision,” Ainslie told The Times at the weekend when asked about Jeddah’s prospects, as he prepared to fly out to San Francisco for the final regatta of the SailGP season.
“We’ve said to TNZ all along, ‘You won the Cup, it’s your right, it’s your decision where you take it.’ That said, clearly there are, I would have thought, better options out there. From a geo-political standpoint and a sports politics standpoint, [Jeddah’s] got issues.
“But I haven’t been there and people tell me they are making great strides in terms of their human-rights approach and part of that — part of bringing lots of sporting events to Saudi –— is to try and increase that pace of change and obviously that would be a good thing to see.”
Ainslie is clearly uncomfortable about the prospect of spending time in Saudi Arabia in the wake not only of the recent executions, but also the murder of the journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. “Again I’ve never been to Saudi Arabia,” he said. “I just know what I read in the press and a lot of that can be negative so yeah, it’s a challenge.”
The venue decision apart, the British skipper is far from confident that Dalton will hit his self-imposed deadline for making the announcement a week on Thursday, noting that he certainly would not be putting his house on it. But he remains convinced that the next Cup will take place in 2024, whether it is in the Middle East, Europe or New Zealand.
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In the past two Cup campaigns that Ainslie has skippered, he has found himself contending with boats that were off the pace.
This time, as his team continue to bed themselves into the Mercedes Formula One headquarters at Brackley in Northamptonshire, he says he is more confident that the right decisions are being taken that will ensure the next British challenger will be competitive.
“I’m happier with that side of it than I was at the same stage in the past two campaigns,” he said, adding that the design tools his team are using to develop their new AC75 foiling monohull are at the cutting edge.
“The core issue for us last time was that our design tools were poor — not developed enough,” he said. “With the support of Mercedes, I’m confident we will get to the right design tools, which is absolutely critical.”
After his spectacular crash with the Japanese team at the SailGP event in Sydney in December, Ainslie and his crew are out of the running for the $1 million winner-takes-all jackpot in San Francisco this weekend. Jostling for the prize money will be the defending champion, Tom Slingsby, leading the Australian team, the United States entry skippered by Jimmy Spithill and (almost certainly) the Japanese outfit led by Nathan Outteridge.
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For Ainslie, San Francisco will be an opportunity to prepare his team for season three, which begins in Bermuda in mid-May. He admits that he and his crew have been more accident-prone than all their rivals in a high-octane stadium racing series in which mistakes can have catastrophic consequences.
“We’ve had a number of big errors at critical moments which have cost us dearly,” he said. “I certainly take the blame for that.” He said the team had looked long and hard at the way they have sailed and have concluded that they need to redraw the balance they strike between risk and reward.
“Clearly there’s a balancing act there that we perhaps have got the wrong side of and we also just had a bad run of it,” Ainslie said.
