I am a cat sailor but of coarse the Americas Cup cat was a cheat. Like arriving in your F18 to race a 470 when the guy asked you for a match race.
KZ1 was the fastest sloop to ever go round an Americas cup course.....a grand vision....and Conners turned up like a petulant brat who did not want to be whacked by better saliors, tech and vision than he and the NY Republicans club fossils could muster.
He called one of the very best designers of our time 'a loser" and "full of [censored]' on live TV and generally dragged sailing to a lower place than it had ever been.
Final outcome for cat sailors in general.....they are cheats....thanks Dennis.
I wholeheartedly agree that Conner's team acted very childishly and said a lot of stupid things - but that cat was just as much within the rules as NZ's attempt to ambush the cup by trying to keep the US from having time to develop a similar boat.
Correct, Conner stretched the rules to the limit fighting Fay, who also stretched the rules in his favour. This is quite common in our sport nowadays - but it wasn't then.
I believe that those events played an important role in the disapearance of fair play from the sailing scenario. Today it is confined to RRS # 1, which is not enforceable. A way of life and a philosphy can not be enforced, they are acquired learning and copying from the "grownups". Are the AC contenders grownups? Have they ever been?
The NYYC usually managed to hold an edge for the home team. They stretched the terms of each challenge slightly in their favour. This went on for decades, until the challengers also started to stretch the rules, fair play gradually being pushed aside.
The first boats with reversed transoms stretched the rules. The hard to get construction materials stretched the rules. The wings in Australia's keel stretched the rules. Fay's maxi-mono-in-ten-months stretched the rules to new limits and Conner pragmatically followed his game using all he could. Fair-play? Forget about it.
Today the AC is the battle of loopholes with tactics ran by expert sea-lawyers (the most dangerous aquatic predators). Every contender tries to grab an edge, no matter how unfair the match may become. Soon we will see AC boats with names inspired by their values: "Pragmatic", "Killer Clause", "Small Letters", "Secret Weapon", "Deadly Ambush", "Hidden Ace", "Concealed Spy", "Double Meaning", etc.
I don't care if the Cup is held in Optimists, but it must be fair.
That said, I would expect faster technical evolution and growing interest in multihulls if they race 90 x 90 multihulls in the AC. After the Fay-Conner match most multihull magazines started to sell twice as much.