Sport: Full Sail Ahead

Building a better 12-meter racing yacht for the America's Cup is a bit like trying to reshape Raquel Welch. A naval architect can trim her here, pad her there, but what counts in the end is how well all the parts move together. Last week, after years of designing and testing, the three U.S. contenders for the 1970 America's Cup showed their shapes in public in a five-day series of trial races. Snub-nosed and broad-beamed, none would win a yachting beauty contest. Yet once they were under sail, all their parts seemed to conjoin in swift, sleek harmony.

Most of the time, that is. The preliminary trials are a time for making mistakes, a time to work out the kinks in boats and boatmen. In the opening races between the brand-new Valiant and the refurbished Intrepid, there were kinks aplenty. On the second leg of the first race, for example, Valiant was threatening to take the lead when her genoa jib ripped. In the next race, Valiant was troubled by the wash from the 125-boat spectator fleet, a faulty backstay and a spinnaker sheet that snapped with a sharp bang, causing the sail to flap wildly until the crew could wrestle it down. During a race against Heritage later in the week, Intrepid's spinnaker halyard jammed, and she had to limp along like a wounded bird until a crewman was hoisted aloft in a bosun's chair to free the flapping sail. The breakdowns and the occasionally sloppy crew work made it exceedingly difficult to assess any of the boats' chances. Yet at week's end Valiant appeared to have a slight edge over Intrepid, while Heritage trailed far in their wakes.