Thirty four sailors, one boat and a big decision, but not yet…. By 2007, the team will have a pretty good idea of who will race on the America’s Cup defending yacht, but in the meantime, the crew rotates and will continue to do so.

Ed Baird will be helming Act 10, last year both Peter Holmberg and Jochen Schuemann took turns at the wheel, and all three maintained a winning streak taking 31 out of 33 match race wins between them. This team rotation is quite unique: “We run a squad and everybody has a chance to sail. We hope that each guy is good enough in his position to sail on any given day,” comments Brad Butterworth, skipper and tactician. The advantages of this philosophy are two-fold; one, you have two world-class crews which keep the in-house racing competitive and two, when the America’s Cup match comes around in 2007, each crew member has a back-up. As for how the crew selection works, Baird gives his insight: “We have a very deep team, so it’s great to be able to switch people around and not feel like you are compromising your capabilities on the race course.” And compromise is not an option as – rotation or not – Alinghi expects to do well: “We would like to carry on in our winning form. There are a lot of changes that have happened, but our expectation is, that we would like to win the regattas,” adds Butterworth.

As for how the final selection process is done, it is really too soon to tell, but Baird gives some insight: “We have a group of people within the sailing team who is responsible for keeping track. They will slowly formulate those people that will go racing in the end.” Butterworth elaborates on the core of that group: “We have some pretty experienced guys which we sit down with and discuss who would be the best people to run during the regatta. Of course this time we’ve got Ed sailing the boat, so we asked him for his thoughts. It’s a process that’s run by me and in the end we’ll come up with a pretty good crew to sail the boat.” Ed and Brad will be the fixed crew for Act 10, but for the rest, as Jochen Schuemann, sports director explains: “We will have a starting configuration for the first day and then we start rotating and as people really perform when it is their turn, then they will stay longer or shorter in their positions.”

This squad style strategy keeps the team on its toes, fresh and all pushing in the same direction, to win the Cup in 2007

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