Coutts set to weigh anchor

by Tim Jeffreys on 21 Jun 2004 Russell Coutts, the most successful skipper in America's Cup history, will neither guide the campaign nor steer the boat when the Swiss Alinghi team defend the 32nd cup in Valencia in 2007.
This is the inescapable conclusion to draw from the lengthy negotiations in London between Alinghi, Coutts and their lawyers.

Both Coutts and the Swiss biotech billionaire, Ernesto Bertarelli, arrived in Newport, Rhode Island, yesterday for the UBS Trophy series against Larry Ellison's BMW Oracle challenger team.

Bertarelli hired the Kiwi away from Team New Zealand, where he had scored two cup victories, to become the architect of a third, Coutts leading Alinghi to a crushing 5-0 defeat of his former team 15 months ago.

‘I have nothing to say,’ a terse Coutts said yesterday. Bertarelli's spokesman, Bernard Schopfer, said: ‘Alinghi comments only on fact, not speculation, and the fact is that Russell will sail with the team tomorrow.’

Where Alinghi was one entity as a challenger for the 2003 cup, with Coutts joint chief executive with Michel Bonnefous, it was split in two after victory.

As the last cup series came to its climax, both Coutts and Bonnefous outlined a vision to reshape the event.

The sub-division saw Coutts heading the sailing team's defence effort and Bonnefous running a new event-organising body, America's Cup Management.

Coutts - the only man to win an Olympic gold medal and be skipper/helmsman of an America's Cup winner - no longer had an influential voice in shaping the first ever cup in Europe.

His disenchantment was evident.

It is widely known that he had advocated the windier Lisbon/Cascais venue over Bonnefous's choice of Valenica, that he wanted to make the boats more advanced and challenging to sail and that he sought a radical overhaul of an event with its roots in 1851.

Ironically, it was similar frustration with the invisible trustees behind Team New Zealand, who reserved ultimate control, that prompted Coutts to accept Bertarelli's offer in May 2000. The two men seemed to have forged a symbiotic relationship.

Now, divorce beckons.