Come Fly With Me

In the hypercompetitive sport of America’s Cup racing, Prada’s Luna Rossa pits science and human ingenuity against nature’s most fickle element, the wind. The result is . . . elevating.

- By Nick Sullivan

Modern sailboats fly. This is not a metaphor for their grace. They literally lift off the water. As these seventy-five-foot yachts glide around the course, the men pilot them to “windward” and “leeward,” words that hail from sixteenth-century English. This is one of the peculiarities of the America’s Cup, the Super Bowl of professional sailing and the oldest competitive trophy in existence: It is a mash-up of hypermodern science and ancient traditions. It is also becoming one of the world’s most thrilling sports.

The boats fly because of a technique called foiling, in which the entire hull of the yacht rises up on spindly looking hydrofoils. Friction is drastically reduced, and the potential pace is mind-bending: three times the speed of Fquired to maintain this speed of the wind, topping out at more than fifty knots, almost sixty miles per hour. Tremendous strength and stamina are quired to maintain this speed in ever-shifting conditions. This can mean constant, physical grinding for a half hour at a time. In other words, there’s very little lounging, as there was in the past—the crew needs to be fit.

Naturally, all that velocity can lead to spectacular crashes, which make for great TV. But it also means peril. In 2013 a British sailor, Andrew Simpson, died after the capsize of his Swedish challenge yacht at around thirty knots in San Francisco Bay.