Ruling the waves

By JULIE ASH

Most mornings at the crack of dawn you can find Bryan Willis smashing a ball around a tennis court.

Willis is not an up-and-coming tennis player, but the America's Cup chief umpire and chairman of the international sailing jury.

As chief umpire he oversees a team of umpires, while as chairman of the international jury he is involved in listening to protests in relation to the race conditions.

"It was decided that they be one in the same person, I think, in 1996," he explains as to the dual roles.

"There is a lot of overlap between the umpire work and jury work. I think it is healthy that the umpire team are fully briefed and consulted about the broader jury matters."

Willis' involvement in the America's Cup started in 1980 when he was a rules adviser for the Swedish challenge.

"I was asked to be the rules adviser when there wasn't such things as rules advisers, I believe I must have been the first one.

"Then I was with the Victory challenge. The next time I was with the Kookaburra syndicate. That was the first year I managed to convince a skipper, or a leading sailor, that boat-to-boat tactics, aggressive tactics should be a part of matchracing.

"That skipper was Peter Gilmour and he was the first skipper I met who took it seriously on board and exploited it to the full. Now they all do it."

In 1988, Willis became involved in setting up the umpiring scheme and wrote the umpiring appendix.

"Up until 1992 there were no umpires involved in the America's Cup. Teams raced and then there was always protests."

It is Willis' second America's Cup as chief umpire and chairman of the jury.

On race days, Willis, who has an office on syndicate row, starts early.

"I get up at 5.30am and go off and play tennis for an hour. I get in here about 7.20am and clear all the emails and so on. Then we have our first umpires' meeting to discuss what is going to happen during the day.

"We start with the weather, then anything special that has come up from the previous day, or anything we need to look out for.

"Then all the umpires get ready with their equipment and take off. We get out there an hour before the racing starts."

After racing, the umpires return and have a debrief to discuss the day's events.

"It is very different one day from the next. There could be no calls, in other words no decisions to be made, or there could be a lot of calls - some complex, some controversial, and they need to be talked through."

Willis' team started out with 17 umpires. Now that there is just one race a day it has been reduced to six. The umpires are positioned behind and to the side of the yachts, and generally do not umpire the teams representing their own country.

"What we are hoping to do is to have one umpire on the back of each boat. Hopefully, that will be the set-up for the challengers final and the America's Cup final.

"The reason we haven't had them until now is because a lot of the challengers didn't want that system, whereas Alinghi, Oracle and maybe OneWorld and certainly Team New Zealand do like this system."

It has been used at major matchracing events and still allows teams to have 17th men.

"The idea of these people is that they can look out and see if there is an overlap or not. It is very important because it determines the rights and obligations of the two boats.

"We normally do that with one of the wing boats, but when they are turning rapidly we can't get into position very quickly, and often can't make a vital call.

"That is the advantage of the system. The other is we can communicate certain information to the afterguards so when they get to the two boat-length zone, where rules start changing, the skippers know what the situation is.

"We tried to resolve this by making communication units where a light on the boat came up for certain information like an overlap. Unfortunately we had to abandon it because we couldn't get it to be reliable enough."

Willis and his umpires are totally independent and are appointed by the International Sailing Federation in conjunction with the challengers organisation and the defender.

The jury Willis chairs is a body of five people who he chooses from the umpire team on a case-by-case basis.

"The jury's function is just for certain technical matters - infringements or breaches of the conditions or sailing instructions."

So far, the jury has heard eight protests, which Willis said was about normal for the America's Cup.

Willis, who sits in a Magistrate's Court in Britain, is a keen sailor himself - "Like millions of others I started as a young child and loved it".

Remaining impartial is just part of the job.

"We don't mind who wins. Obviously we admire good sailing, a good performance, a good design of boat or cleaver gadgets. We marvel at those because we are all sailors."