[Philip Argy]

The official story from race headquarters:

It was a miracle that they were on the start line at all. Two weeks ago the maxi lost her mast on the delivery trip to Sydney from her homeport of Melbourne. Since then it has been a race against time to fly a new, 44 metre carbon fibre mast from France, bake it back together after it was cut in two to fit onto the plane, put it into the boat and recut the giant sails to suit the new, longer spar. They looked to have somehow got it done by midnight last night. There were still a hundred things to fine tune, but it looked as though they could race.
Ten minutes from the start the fairy tale began to unravel.
“We realised we weren’t able to keep the mast exactly in column (straight in layman’s terms) and we weren’t sure why because we hadn’t got it up to full racing pressure, so we started, and cleared ourselves of the fleet, so we wouldn’t impede any other boat, then sailed back up the harbour to see if we could sort it out,” Wharington explained.
As the fleet pounded its way out to sea Etihad Stadium tacked around the harbour trying to fine tune the rigging. Under the race rules boats have six hours to clear the seaward mark, race officials promising to leave the marks in place until then.
But as Etihad Stadium circled her crew found a second problem, this time the blocks that manage the 15 tonne forces on the masts runners were out of alignment. Her race was over.
“I said all along that all the planets had to line up for us to be race ready. We had transport delays in France, aeroplane delays - everything had to fall into place,” Wharington said dockside.
“I’m enormously disappointed, especially for my team. We have had more than 50 people working on this for the last two weeks, and an enormous input from every single person to get us so close.”
“We’ll have a couple of beers tonight and there’s a little bit of discussion around the camp that we might come out next week for another race that heads north. “