The race is held in head-to-head competition, divided into two parts.
The first part – the Louis Vuitton Cup – determines which of the five challengers will face this year’s defending champions, Emirates Team New Zealand, in the second part, the America’s Cup.
The race lasts about 25 minutes, and this year, it will begin in August and end in October.
Endurance is the main criterion for cyclists, who must be able to consistently generate high power during a race and maintain their form for up to 10 weeks.
“We just want a huge, reliable engine for the three months we’ll be racing,” says van Velthoven.
“Big days are big days and easy days are big days because they still require a lot of strength. It’s relentless.”
Britain’s Ineos Britannia team, led by Sir Ben Ainslie, doesn’t have professional cyclists in its squad like some of its rivals, but it does have the next best thing – an affiliation with the Ineos Grenadiers cycling team, formerly Team Sky and winner of seven Tours de France.
Matt Gottrell is part of the Ineos Britannia crew. This year will be his second America’s Cup, but his first as a cyclist rather than a grinder. A former Olympic gold medal-winning rower who was part of the Great Britain eight at Rio 2016, Gottrell found training a different muscle group a “huge challenge”, even though he already considered himself a recreational cyclist.
“As rowers, we used to have an inverted pyramid (body shape), but now it’s the other way around,” says Gotrel.
As grinders, his team aimed to generate 400 watts of power in 20 minutes. As cyclers they have now “far surpassed that goal.”
For the past two years training has primarily taken place on the road or in the gym rather than on the water. Volume blocks might include long rides of four to six hours three times a week, combined with high-intensity intervals on the stationary bike and weight training.
Gotrell, from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, compares rowing in a race to a cycling time trial, but with the need to repeatedly go faster throughout.
“You need a really good aerobic base where you can sit at as high a power as possible without producing too much lactate, and then you’ll have big spikes and you’ve got to be able to recover from them,” he says.
The relationship with the Ineos cycling team has been a “huge” resource for Gotrel and his fellow cyclists, enabling them to share training and nutrition information at a training camp in Spain.
“I’ve had conversations with (sprinter Elia) Viviani about sprinting technique, and then there’s Filippo Ganna and Dan Bigham who have been great about strategy and fueling things and what they did to pursue the hour record,” says Gotrel.