No sooner has the America’s Cup become a proper sport again than the defenders whisk it back to a potential procession. Not happy, it seems, with the closeness of the pursuit over the past three months in Valencia, Alinghi, who beat Emirates Team New Zealand 5-2 to retain the trophy on Tuesday, have decided to introduce a new class of boat for the next series and to grant themselves the right to compete in the round-robin stages of the Louis Vuitton Cup, changes nakedly designed to improve the chances of the defending team next time.
Experts in the discipline will smile benignly and remember the good old days of legal wrangling, when the America’s Cup was as likely to be won and lost in the nearest high court as on the ocean waves. But the sphinx-like pronouncements of Ernesto Bertarelli, the owner of Alinghi, and Brad Butterworth, the winning skipper, at a press conference last week would have done little to encourage the sense of democracy fostered by the revised format for the 32nd America’s Cup or lift the morale of potential challengers, who must dig deeper into the pockets to fund an entirely new type of boat.
“The great thing about this cup is that it’s winnable,” Mike Sanderson, the team director of Team Origin, the British challengers for the next cup, said in these pages a week ago. After details of the protocol for the next challenge were released on Thursday, the Auld Mug is looking rather less winnable.
Sanderson put a brave face on the announcement last week, welcoming the early response from Alinghi and the news that the event will stay in Europe, probably in Valencia, if the city can fund a further redevelopment of Port America’s Cup.
“The new America’s Cup class gives Team Origin the opportunity to compete on a level playing field with all the other challengers,” said the New Zealander last week. But not the defender. “These bigger boats . . . should create faster sailing and a more exciting spectacle. We firmly believe that the cup will continue to grow in terms of competitors and popularity and are excited about putting together a successful campaign to win the America’s Cup.”
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If the next event can live up to the excitement of the last, it will be doing well. That is not necessarily what Alinghi want. The right of the defending team to create the rules of engagement for the next competition has been enshrined in the Deed of Gift for 130 years and Alinghi have no intention of sacrificing the natural advantage bequeathed them.
The danger for the wider popularity of the event is that the scoreline in the cup match will be 5-0 and the rest of the world will reach for the off button. Plenty of purists would welcome the return of their comfortable old rituals. And in one respect they are right. The America’s Cup should never be judged by the same criteria as other sporting competitions. Justice has no place in its history, nor has close and competitive racing ever been regarded as essential to its future. The very impossibility of winning the cup has been one of the chief attractions for the roll-call of multi-millionaires and eccentrics who have attempted and largely failed to accomplish the feat. But for a shrewd and logical man such as Sir Keith Mills, the leader of London’s successful Olympic bid, whose dream is to bring the cup back to Britain for the first time, this taste of the geopolitics of the America’s Cup must have come as quite a shock.
Bertarelli has given himself until late December to work out the finer points of the new protocol. One piece of good news for Team Origin is that the Acts, the preLouis Vuitton Cup races, will be sailed in the current 24m boats. They recently purchased one of the quickest in SUI 75, Alinghi’s old boat, which, Sanderson reckoned, would have been fast enough to reach the semi-finals of the Louis Vuitton Cup in Valencia. But assembling a crack design team will be one of the priorities for Mills and Sanderson.
No amount of official side-stepping, though, can disguise the hypnotic brilliance of the racing at the 32nd America’s Cup, which reached an almost impossible climax in the closing seconds of the seventh race. Nobody would have anticipated that Team New Zealand would make such a critical sailing error in the third race, although they went on to win it, or so often fail to turn their superiority off the startline into wins.
Equally, nobody would have foreseen the uncertainty of Butterworth, Juan Vila and the Alinghi afterguard in the face of fickle wind conditions. After losing race three, it seemed that the campaign, like BMW-Oracle, might implode. They survived by virtue of superior boat speed and one devastating manoeuvre in the final race. Dean Barker, who otherwise helmed impecc-ably, will still be replaying the moment he was caught on port tack and drawn into a penalty by Alinghi’s attack at the third mark. With 400m of the America’s Cup remaining and their rivals still needing to complete their penalty turn, the destiny of the cup had been decided.
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Yet deep down both crews sensed it could not be that simple. New Zealand broke away to take advantage of a marked left shift, Alinghi bungled a gybe and the balance of power had switched once more. It was like losing 10 match points. But as New Zealand went into their turn, Alinghi recovered just enough momentum to sneak their bow across the line first. The official margin of victory was one second, the narrowest in cup history. Far too close, it seems, for the comfort of Bertarelli, Butterworth and Alinghi.