Winning by Design

Over these past few weeks I've been looking at the role that academics have played in the quest for the America's Cup by the Swiss-backed Team Alinghi, which sailed to a smooth victory this month on the watch of Russell Coutts, the skipper. It turns out that some of the yachtsmen's clear edge in the regatta may indeed be credited to a team of scientists and professors from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, who worked on everything from research and design to the construction, outfitting, and modification of the craft.

"The university played a small part in a very large jigsaw puzzle that also included the boat builders and, naturally, the sailors themselves," says Jan-Anders E. Månson, the Swedish-born director of the institute's Composites and Polymer Technology Laboratory, who coordinated the interdisciplinary effort.

Although Mr. Coutts and five of the crew members are native New Zealanders who defected to the Swiss team in 2000, it's been hard for most Kiwi fans here to take much pride in the Alinghi victory. Yet I remain torn. Even as the Swiss boats -- with their apparently insurmountable technical superiority -- were swamping Team New Zealand and moving implacably toward victory, the same memory loop was playing over and over in my mind's eye.

It is the summer of 1973, and a childhood friend and his older brother have taken me out for my first sail on these South Pacific waters. I have long since lost touch with that friend, but the image is clear as day.

The New Zealand afternoon is radiant, with a pure light falling on the sea, and the blue, blue, transparent sky shading into a blur way off on the horizon.

The wind rushes by, the salt spray leaps into our faces, and the water churns below as we run out, waving at the tiny people shrinking behind us on the shoreline. We are living, for an hour or so, New Zealand's great sea myth.

Although this country is about the size of Colorado, its coastline is nearly as long as that of the contiguous United States. A majority of the four million people who inhabit these islands trace their origins to boats on water, whether it's the Polynesians who began arriving by canoe in the 1200s or the colonial British settlers who followed them in ships 600 years later.

Thirty summers ago, sailing was something people here did for fun, for adventure. My friend's sailing craft, a humble P-class dinghy built for him by his father, a construction supervisor, was typical of the times, but provided me with a lasting image and feel for the water.

My friend, all of 10 years old, was already a sure hand on the tiller, and was already, as most good sailors will freely admit, trying to push his boat to its absolute limits. His fate, and ours, was tied up in his skill and savvy and yes, the design of his boat.

So even as Team Alinghi appeared to be winning as much by peerless design as by skill, I occasionally found myself quietly cheering them on.

It helped, of course, that that childhood friend was Russell Coutts.

Right from the start this year, Team Alinghi was the one to watch. Every morning before a match, the team's 80-foot boat, which had been unveiled to the accompaniment of cancan dancers throwing their legs in the air to a pulsing rock 'n' roll number by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, departed the Auckland Viaduct Harbor with ruffles and flourishes, the blare of sirens and highly amplified Swiss-style yodeling.

Chase boats would shadow the black-and-pink yacht out to its position on the racing course off the coast, where the action would then commence in earnest along the regatta's six-leg, 18.5-nautical-mile stretch in the nearby Hauraki Gulf.

Though Mr. Coutts' nationality caused some confusion here about which country could claim victory, there was nothing confusing about the emphatic edge that Alinghi quickly took over the defending cup holders, Team New Zealand, prevailing 5-0 by the time of the last cup match, on March 2. In that race, like the others, Alinghi dominated its rival from start to finish, winning handily by 45 seconds.

The Swiss institute's role was "crucial" in achieving the clean sweep, says Grant Simmer, the team's Australian-born design chief.

The collaboration was forged in July 2001, when Alinghi tapped the institute as its official scientific adviser for the competition. (For its part, Team New Zealand relied, though to a lesser degree, on the skills of the University of Auckland, located a mile or so from the harbor.)

The Swiss institute, based in Lausanne, enrolls 5,600 students and claims some 3,220 scientific researchers, technicians, and support personnel in 12 fields of teaching. Fifteen of its senior scientists, drawn from four disciplines -- polymer technology, fluid mechanics, applied optics, and audiovisual communications -- became members of the advisory group, along with two dozen students.

In addition to getting the departments to function smoothly together as they took their first rough concepts from design to fabrication, the institute's challenges were technological: developing composite structures to handle extreme conditions, testing the material's resistance to more than the standard 50 tons of pressure applied to the mast under normal conditions at sea, and working out quality-control methods by digitally simulating hundreds of sail and hull profiles.

In simple terms, the scientists would later say, the success of that work was shown by what didn't happen to Alinghi's craft during the competition: Its mast didn't snap like a 70-foot carbon-fiber matchstick, as happened on Team New Zealand's vaunted Black Magic midway through the squalls and sharp gusts of the fourth race; nor did the vessel wheeze to a halt and let in tons of water, as happened to the Kiwis near the start of their first encounter with the Swiss.

As the Alinghi's engineering team fine-tuned its design, the scientists consulted with the sailing team long-distance, via e-mail, telephone, and monthly videoconferencing between snow-caked, early-morning Lausanne and Auckland, still sweltering in the warmth of late-summer, moon-burnt nights.

At the final videoconference a few nights before the first race, on February 15, yachting-team members gathered in a small room at the plush Alinghi headquarters to hear once more from their academic partners.

While both sides spoke the same language -- English, give or take the odd spot of French -- they occasionally had to make a conscious effort not to speak past each other. That had happened with some frequency over the past year, as the limitless possibilities of science in Lausanne seemed to run up against the earthbound limitations of the regatta's rules in Auckland.

"We've always had to keep in mind that this has not so much been about fighting physics as fighting rules," says Jim Bungener, who has worked as a consultant with the Alinghi sailors in New Zealand since completing his master's degree in mathematics at Princeton University in 2001. One of the "few problems" in working so closely with academics, he adds, has been "getting them to appreciate sometimes that a lot of the cool stuff we could do is actually against the rules."

The publicly financed institute's faculty members and students supplied thousands of hours of their time and expertise to Team Alinghi, operating within a budget of $374,000. Mr. Månson, the coordinator, says most of them believe that the time they spent on the project was well worth it.

"I've been involved mainly for the fun," says Martin Vetterli, director of the institute's Audio-Visual Communications Laboratory, a ski-racing specialist who believes that "the only really worthwhile research is pure research."

Still, Mr. Vetterli, who assisted in the area of video analysis, and most of his team members were happy to make a contribution to sailing history, particularly considering the alternatives. "All of my colleagues in the U.S. seem to be doing these days is working on 'Star Wars' and security issues," the onetime Columbia University professor says with a sigh.

The details of the Swiss institute's advisory role in the America's Cup defense -- scheduled for 2006, and most likely in the Mediterranean -- will be worked out over the coming weeks, according to Mr. Månson, who says his engineers still have more to offer the sailors, under a different blue, blue sky.