Bruce Knecht - The Proving Ground - The Inside Story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Boat Race

By the time Batt arrived at the CYC, Gage had set up a table and hung weather maps from a nearby wall. During the next three hours, representatives from eighty-six yachts picked up weather packages. Some of the yachtsmen just took them and left. Others asked lots of questions. “You’ll have a nice run this afternoon,” Batt told one of them, “but there’s a front building down south. We’re not sure which way it’s going, but it could develop and become really nasty. We could have a 1993 situation.”

LACHLAN MURDOCH AND Sarah O’Hare, his fiancée, began Saturday at Lachlan’s harborside house, surrounded by lush gardens and palm trees. Although Lachlan was just twenty-seven, for the previous four years he had been the chief executive officer of News Corporation’s sprawling Australian operation, which included almost two-thirds of the nation’s newspapers, more than one hundred in all, as well as magazines and a movie studio. With his press-lord powers and wealth, along with robust good looks and a reputation for racing around Sydney streets on a Ducati motorcycle, Lachlan was a major Australian celebrity. When Vogue ’s Australian edition published a lengthy profile, the headline on the magazine’s cover was: LACHLAN MURDOCH: THE MAN AUSTRALIA WANTS TO SLEEP WITH. Sarah also had a following. A model, she had appeared in splashy magazine advertising for Revlon and Wonderbra and had modeled for many of the world’s most important designers in Paris.

Lachlan had already met most of Sayonara ’s crew during several practice sails. As a guest, he wasn’t required to participate, but he had shown up for all of them, arriving early enough to help lug food and ice down the dock and separate cans of soda from their plastic holders. Lachlan had always recognized that people tended to define him in terms of his father, and he frequently tried to find ways to make the point that he didn’t expect special treatment. Although he knew he would be Sayonara ’s least-experienced sailor, he hoped to let the others know that he wanted to do more than simply stay out of the way.

The Murdochs’ stock was already strong on Sayonara. Rupert sailed with Ellison in the 1995 Hobart, and the media mogul had also shown up for the practice sails. During one of them, he lost the end of a finger after a line he was holding pulled his hand into a block. “I’ll be fine,” he had said as he calmly held what was left of his bleeding digit over the side of the boat so he didn’t bleed on the deck. The missing piece was put on ice and reattached at St. Vincent’s Hospital a few hours later, and when he arrived at a crew dinner that night, he declared, “Right, now I’m ready to go to Hobart.”

During the race itself, Rupert had spent most of the first night seated on “the rail,” the outside edge of the deck, with his legs dangling over the side. When he got up and offered to serve coffee or tea, several crewmen took him up, each specifying his cream and sugar preferences. Rupert shuttled up and down the steps delivering steaming mugs until a Team New Zealand sailor named Kevin Shoebridge cut him short: “Rupert, for fuck’s sake, I said no sugar. Make me another.” Rupert laughed as much as anyone, and in Hobart he won more points when he slapped a credit card on the bar, declaring, “I want to get the last laugh with you guys, so let’s try to put a dent in this.”

While growing up on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, Lachlan worked for company-owned papers during school vacations: first as a reporter at the Express-News in San Antonio, Texas, and later as an editor at The Sun in London. One year after he graduated from Princeton University, he became the publisher of The Australian , the only nationwide general-interest daily paper. Soon after the 1998 Hobart, Lachlan expected to start spending most of his time in New York and to take responsibility for the company’s publishing operations in the United States, including HarperCollins, the New York Post , and TV Guide.

But Lachlan wasn’t his father’s clone, and he didn’t try to be. He was known to burn joss sticks in his spacious offices in Sydney and New York, and the discs sitting near a wall-mounted CD player in Sydney were cutting edge and eclectic. When Lachlan rolled up his sleeves, his left forearm revealed a striking Polynesian-design tattoo. Even when presiding over meetings, Lachlan was relaxed and unguarded, throwing his legs over the arms of couches and punctuating lots of his sentences with question marks the way teenagers do. He spoke softly in an accent that reflected his peripatetic upbringing: there were hints of Australia and England, although the dominant strain was American. Like his father, Lachlan had an informal approach to management. But while Rupert could be gruff and intimidating, Lachlan was almost always welcoming and gentlemanly. Friends used old-fashioned words like “earnest” and “gallant” to describe him.

Lachlan also had a serious appetite for adventure. In that way he was like Ellison, although their specific tastes were somewhat different. Whereas Ellison chased speed, Lachlan liked danger, the sense that he was putting himself on the edge. While at Princeton, where he majored in philosophy, he spent several hours a day climbing sheer rock faces. More recently he had discovered that his motorcycle provided the same thrill but required less time. “There are people who in their makeup need to take risks,” Lachlan told friends. “Every once in a while I just have to do things that require me to make judgments about how far I can go. It’s not that it’s dangerous as much as it’s unprotected, if you know what I mean.”

Lachlan chose his friends without much regard to what they did, although he also spent time with his father’s friends, a Who’s Who of global business titans. In fact, one of Rupert’s friends, Michael Milken, was the reason Lachlan was sailing to Hobart on Sayonara. Lachlan and Rupert were among the guests at the onetime junk bond king’s annual Fourth of July party in 1998. As lunch was being served in the backyard of Milken’s house overlooking California’s Lake Tahoe, Ellison, who was also a guest, asked Rupert if he wanted to sail another Hobart on Sayonara. When Rupert said he couldn’t, Ellison asked Lachlan. “It wouldn’t seem right if we didn’t have a Murdoch on board. Do you want to come?”

Lachlan jumped at the chance. “Absolutely. I’d love to.”

Lachlan had learned to sail from his father, who raced small boats in his twenties and thirties. (Rupert still sailed, but it was mostly on a vast yacht designed to be comfortable rather than fast. “It’s so big, it’s not really a sailboat anymore,” said Lachlan, who bought his own boat in 1995, which he named Karakoram for the mountain range that includes K2.) Lachlan sailed as much as he could. “For someone who has a job that keeps their mind kind of ticking over all the time, it’s a great way to force yourself to think about something other than work.” He had raced his own boat in the 1997 Hobart, and he thought he would learn a lot from crewing on Sayonara.

After leaving his house Saturday morning, Lachlan arrived at a restaurant near the CYC in time for a crew meeting. It was conducted by Chris Dickson, who had replaced Paul Cayard as Sayonara ’s professional skipper a couple of years earlier. In a room where the walls and tables were painted with nautical scenes and old sails hung from the ceiling, Dickson spoke from two pages of typewritten notes, conducting the meeting as if it were a corporate planning session.

“Meals. We have three dinners, and we should figure on a three-day race. If we do it in two and a half, that’s great; but we should plan on three days.