America's Cup - It's just too damn hard to win - The Alternative Facts

by Alan Sefton on 28 Jul 2017 Normally Sail-World NZ doesn't bother commenting on reports in other media, however there are exceptions to every rule and this is one of them.

Alan Sefton a long time and outstanding sailing and sports journalist, who was involved in Team New Zealand and its predecessor New Zealand Challenge covering the period 1987 to 2000 comments on a column that appeared yesterday in the NZ Herald and which has appeared in other online publications around the world. S-W NZ is advised that these comments were sent to the Herald who declined to run an alternative view.

Dylan Cleaver wrote, in the New Zealand Herald on Thursday, 27 July 2017 click here to read.

“It's just too damn hard to win. The odds are so heavily stacked in the defender's favour that it's a roadblock to participation.”

He was, of course, referring to the America’s Cup, and continued with: “For 132 years the damned thing didn't move at all but look at the successful challengers since: Australia II, funded by Alan Bond, the disgraced financier who was then a successful billionaire; Alinghi, funded by Swiss-Italian billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli; Oracle Team USA, who won a Deed of Gift challenge funded by software billionaire Larry Ellison.

“The two exceptions to the rule are Stars and Stripes 87 and two incarnations of Team NZ, who might not have had singular billionaire backers, but were propped up by extremely wealthy operators. (Some tend to forget that the mere existence of Team NZ owes everything to Sir Michael Fay, estimated wealth $920 million.)”
I know Dylan’s piece falls into the category of opinion but, unlike his usual offerings, this one certainly cannot be considered informed or researched.

Let’s analyse his various claims…

“It's just too damn hard to win. The odds are so heavily stacked in the defender's favour that it's a roadblock to participation.”

Not true, In the very early days the defender, the New York Yacht Club (NYCC) most definitely took liberties with what was intended by the donors of the trophy and, in more recent times, there have been isolated examples of abuse (San Diego’s catamaran defender against Mercury Bay Boating Club’s monohull challenger was certainly one of those). But, the great majority of Cup defences have been completely fair and equitable in terms of how the challengers have been treated.

There have, of course been exceptions and one of the most glaring was the AC 35 regatta in Bermuda – one that Dylan recommends as something to be built on. Exploiting an obsequious challenger (of record) and then an equally obsequious challenger group, the defender Oracle Team USA (OTUSA) found ways around just about everything in the Deed of Gift that didn’t suit its purpose, including allowing the defender to race in the challenger eliminations and take a bonus point into the Cup match so that it was already 1-0 up against ETNZ before the first race had even started.

In fairness to OTUSA, however, their independent race management group ran an impeccable event on the water so there could be no complaints in that department. If, however, there was ever a “roadblock to participation”, it was the highly unsavoury machinations off the water and, if you weren’t already a part of the cosy challenger cabal that ran with everything the defender dictated, why would you, as an outsider, even bother thinking about taking part in someone else’s game?

A repeat of AC 35, or anything that remotely resembles it, is then, the last thing the America’s Cup needs.
Dylan then says that “for 132 years the damned thing didn't move at all”, inferring that this was because the NYYC tilted the playing field to perpetuate its tenure of the trophy. Again – not so.

The NYYC was so successful for so long because it knew how the play the “game” better than anyone else and then, in the modern era (post World War II) raised the bar even higher so that the challenger really did not have a chance of winning. Not because the playing field wasn’t level but because the NYYC always knew how to marshal financial resources, get the best designs, assemble the best skippers and crews for highly-competitive defender eliminations, and then turn their finely-tuned defender loose on challengers that were nowhere near as well prepared and often, did not know about the fundamentals of match racing let alone the finer points.

When the challengers belatedly identified the realities of the contest and organised multiple challengers and challenger eliminations that matched the intensity of the defender selection trials, the “game” changed. The odds tipped in favour of the challengers and finally resulted in Australia II’s famous win in Newport (Rhode Island) in 1983. The results of the nine Cup regattas since also tend to contradict Dylan’s proposition. In those nine events, the challenger has won on no less than five occasions while the defender has been successful on four.

Entry numbers have dwindled along the way – not because “it's just too damn hard to win” but because it’s just too damned expensive to compete, and constantly changing the class of boat has not helped.

In 1995, the original Team New Zealand won the Cup in San Diego with a budget of $NZ28 million for a two-boat campaign. By 2000, that budget had spiralled to the best part of $NZ50 million, yet the cost of, for instance, building the campaign’s two boats had increased by just, maybe,10 %.

I don’t know what the budgets were for the 2017 regatta but I would be surprised if the bigger syndicates – and I most definitely would not include ETNZ in that category – got by on less than $US120 million, and the largest expense increase would not have been in equipment but in people.

When, trying to label the event as the domain of the millionaires and billionaires, Dylan says: “Look at the successful challengers…Australia II, funded by Alan Bond, the disgraced financier who was then a successful billionaire; Alinghi, funded by Swiss-Italian billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli; Oracle Team USA, who won a Deed of Gift challenge funded by software billionaire Larry Ellison. The two exceptions to the rule are Stars and Stripes 87 and two incarnations of Team NZ, who might not have had singular billionaire backers, but were propped up by extremely wealthy operators.

(Some tend to forget that the mere existence of Team NZ owes everything to Sir Michael Fay, estimated wealth $920 million.)”

Wrong again. Bond was not a billionaire when Australia II won the Cup. He was a very successful millionaire with sporting ambitions. Nothing wrong with that, I would suggest. No comments on the billionaires Bertarelli and Ellison.

But, when it comes to “two incarnations of Team NZ, who might not have had singular billionaire backers, but were propped up by extremely wealthy operators. (Some tend to forget that the mere existence of Team NZ owes everything to Sir Michael Fay, estimated wealth $920 million.)” – wrong yet again.

The first incarnation of Team New Zealand (1995 and 2000) never did ‘owe’ its everything to “Sir Michael Fay, estimated wealth $920 million” (The identification of Sir Michael’s wealth in this context says, to me, a lot about what’s behind Dylan’s opinion piece and I haven’t yet worked out what it has to do with the America’s Cup).

Team New Zealand (1995 and 2000) was put together by the then Peter Blake and myself, Pete paying the entry fee and me paying the early running costs. We always enjoyed Sir Michael’s generosity in terms of equipment from his campaigns for the Cup (including use as a trial horse of his 1992 challenger NZL20), together with his patronage and unequivocal support. But, that was it. We did, also, have the support of a group of wealthy New Zealanders who wanted to see New Zealand win the Cup for no other reason than it was a worthy sporting objective.

But, our mainstream funding very definitely was generated through hard-earned commercial sponsorships – for the 1995 challenge and for the 2000 defence and event – and that was the task for Sir Peter Blake, myself and Scott Chapman. I would like to think that we were reasonably successful in that we helped bring the Cup to New Zealand and successfully defended it without any hand-outs at all from central or local government.

Let me assure Dylan that there are, in and around Emirates Team New Zealand, people who know a lot more than he does about the America’s Cup and where and how it should go from here. So, he should do everybody a favour and let ETNZ make what should be the right calls. Certainly, from what I have read and heard, their intent is to do just that.

If they get it wrong, then Dylan will be entitled to an opinion. If they get it right though, let’s hope he is as earnest in his deliverances.

Oh – and just because the America’s Cup might be the hardest game in town, does that mean a “lil’ ol’” New Zealand should not aspire to winning it? History says most definitely not!!

Former yachting journalist Alan Sefton, ONZM, was an advisor to Sir Michael Fay through his three campaigns for the America’s Cup. He then, with the late Sir Peter Blake, founded Team New Zealand and was its executive director for the 1995 Cup win in San Diego and the successful 2000 defence in Auckland.