Poole admitted that he was ‘bummed’ not to have got his fledgling AC38 challenge over the line, but told me he had absolutely no regrets about giving it a go.
“A lot of people would have been too scared of the negative possibilities and just decide that it wasn’t even worth trying,” he said. “It was a ‘you won’t know unless you go’ kind of scenario. I knew I was getting into the deep end by doing this.
“The America's Cup is the pinnacle of our sport and the amount that I have learned in the last four months has been incredible. Although it didn't come to fruition for us to get to Naples next summer, we have made huge headway and we’ve definitely developed a lot of really valuable connections through our team.”
Poole added that he had been hugely encouraged by the positive responses of the existing teams within the America’s Cup Partnership (ACP) to the prospective Riptide Racing challenge.
“The guys from New Zealand and the other teams who I've talked to about trying to get our program off the ground were all really supportive,” he said. “Their comment was ‘we'll see you in 39 – we have no doubt you'll get there’. It was pretty nice to hear that from them.”
There’s no denying that Poole set himself a massive mountain to climb last December when he announced his intention to try to raise the necessary funds to mount an American challenge for the 38th America’s Cup. The team had more than 50 face-to-face meetings in the four months leading up to the extended deadline. So just how near did they get to making the dream a reality?
“We were frustratingly close,” he told me. “We had three major sponsors lined up and we were trying to get confirmation of each of their investment levels – which together would have put us almost at the $30 million we needed.
“Then we had a couple of private individuals that were open to the idea of a bridge loan to pay the entry fees and everything else needed to get us in the door. That would have given us the time to get the contracts sorted and for the money to be transferred. Unfortunately, we just ran out of time to line up those final pieces.”
Had they raised the funds for AC38, Poole said there was a plan in place to purchase an existing AC75 that would be modified in the US and then sailed initially from a base in the US before being shipped to Naples.
