Golden Gate YC looks forward to fair and open Class Rule

The Golden Gate Yacht Club said today that having always called for the design rule to be fair it hoped the rule posted by Alinghi yesterday would remove concern about the defender having an entrenched unfair advantage.

“The concern has always been about the defender having several months lead-time ahead of challengers to design and build a new boat, without anyone else knowing what the design rules were,” Tom Ehman, the club’s spokesman, said.

“Alinghi agreed that they would significantly change the original rule to address this problem. We hope this will be reflected in what was published yesterday.

“This will be easy to determine once we compare yesterday’s document with what they started out with and we continue to ask Alinghi to provide this.”

“When our designers can verify that we are all starting from the same point we hope to see all other issues resolved quickly as agreed recently with the challengers.”

The American team has told challengers it is ready to agree to wide-ranging new compromise proposals on remaining protocol issues as covered in meetings last week once it can confirm for itself that the design rule developed by Alinghi is fair for all competitors.