Bleddyn Mon (Bangor, Wales, 32 years old) is the man of two faces. Design and sail at the same time in a unique case in the America’s Cup. An aerospace engineer by training, he is a performance analyst at Ineos Britannia and one of the flight controllers (the well-known trimmers that dominate the foils) aboard the AC75 in the final of the America’s Cup. All in one. This Wednesday they will set sail again on the fourth day of the Match against the intractable Team New Zealand, which has won the four previous duels and only needs three more wins to lift the Hundred Guineas Jug. To reverse the situation, Mon has an unexpected ally: the waves of Barcelona.
Forecasts indicate that the waves on the Barcelona regatta course will have a height of approximately one meter, the highest height recorded in the final round. And in a desperate situation, the sailor looks at the forecasts as an opportunity. “We will have higher waves than other days and these boats behave slightly differently depending on the conditions. We will review the races that we have competed in this way because we had a good performance,” he warns. The results verify their analysis: of the four races held with such high waves in the final of the Louis Vuitton Cup (the competition that the Italian Luna Rossa had to win to challenge the New Zealand Defensor), they won three.
Mon competes in the America’s Cup because as a child he spent his holidays on a beach on the island of Anglesey (Wales) where there was a yacht club. His father had sailed once as a child and encouraged his children to try it. Little Bleddyn liked it and followed in the footsteps of his brothers, who began to compete as the years went by. “We bought a Volkswagen van and we toured the country with the boats on the trailer,” he explains in an interview with the team’s media. “It was a logistical nightmare because my parents had no experience in sailing competitions, but they accepted it,” he laughs.
He entered the Olympic circuit for the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games, but the results did not come and he focused on his university studies. It quickly caught the attention of top companies and He appeared on the BBC earlier for his academic merits than for his sporting results.. He won an award for having designed a ship simulator on land that rocked like at sea and was capable of simulating the wind. The best thing, however, was working for a year in the Red Bull Formula 1 team, although the experience sharpened his love for the sea. “I got a job in the aerodynamics team for a year. I learned a lot, but my thing was sailing,” he continues.
It was not until 2015 when he made the jump in the America’s Cup with Ben Ainslie Racing, the team of the four-time Olympic champion and current boss of Ineos Britannia, ahead of the 2017 edition in Bermuda. He started focused on the design team but little by little he began to navigate more. “We were a new team and we did a lot of developing the design and performance of the boat,” he recalls.
As an analyst and sailor, Mon is the perfect hinge to transfer the onboard needs to the analysts’ data and vice versa, a communication that is not always easy because the athlete and the engineer often speak different languages. This is not the case with Mon, who knows both worlds first-hand and who points out the virtues of Team New Zealand in the America’s Cup in Barcelona. “When the Kiwis get ahead, it’s very difficult to overtake them. “They are very good at controlling the situation and putting their boat in a position that makes it difficult for us to advance,” he says.
This is why he points out the importance of pre-starts. Ineos has detected that the New Zealanders adopt different tactics, unlike the Italian Luna Rossa. “The pre-departures are being more changing. (In the Louis Vuitton Cup) we saw that Luna Rossa had a pattern of what they liked to do; but Team New Zealand and we are changing the initial approaches more. The start will be important,” he says.
In the four regattas held, experts point out that Team New Zealand has hardly made any mistakes. And with a package of new technological add-ons, its performance is excellent in changing winds. But its response in high waves is not so clear. The lack of precedents raises a question because the higher the wave, the more difficult navigation is, increasing the risk that the foils out of the water and the boat loses its footing. In the Round Robin (the preliminary phase) and in the preliminary regatta in August (without competitive impact) there was only one day when the waves exceeded one meter in height and Team New Zealand lost against American Magic (United States). Mon points to the waves. And Ineos glimpses hope.
