China Team and the America's Cup

by Christopher Clarey, International Herald Tribune on 17 Apr 2007 China's emergence as an economic power has shaken up industry after industry. But the Asian giant is in no shape to shake up the America's Cup, at least not yet.

There is a Chinese challenger this time - a first for the 156-year-old event - but it is a late-starting, one-boat campaign with a secondhand keel and the Cup's smallest budget. It is a team that finished last overall in the pre-Cup regattas and will struggle to win a race when the real thing begins with the round-robin challenger competition on Monday.

But that does not mean the multilingual men who created this project consider it a failure. In their minds, they are simply laying the foundation for something grander. As with so much involving China, the future generates much more excitement than the present.

'There are three tiers of teams in the Cup,' said Wang Chao Yang, the Chinese financier who is head of China Team. 'Now we are in the third tier, the bottom tier. By the next Cup, I would hope we'd be in the second tier and then the next Cup after that, tier one.'

That is the sort of rapid progress that Chinese businessmen have come to expect in this go-go era, and like many a Chinese entrepreneur, Wang is making use of a joint venture to accelerate the process of becoming globally competitive.

With China bereft of America's Cup expertise, Wang found a willing partner in the former French America's Cup syndicate Le Défi, which had already challenged unsuccessfully in 2000 and 2003 and was weary of chasing meager financing at home.

'What interested us was to do something new,' said Xavier de Lesquen, Le Défi's former executive manager, who now has the same role with China Team. 'But the other motivation was for us to go toward a country where if we made the right choices and worked well and developed the right projects with the right people, there was a potential to put together a powerful team.'

Mission unaccomplished for now. The team's budget of €14 million makes it a weakling and essentially more of a marketing exercise than a truly competitive endeavor.

But for the moment, there is symbiosis. De Lesquen and his compatriots are still in the game and with broader horizons. Wang, a former Wall Street banker turned Beijing venture capitalist, is getting the chance to reconnect with something he first experienced off the shores of Manhattan and to venture into a sport that could grow into something big in China.

'With our Chinese-French joint venture we are promoting the international team idea,' Wang said. 'But the impact behind the team is to promote more awareness of sailing in China, especially for the renaissance of China's long-lost sailing tradition.'

China was a seagoing power in the 15th century, before the Ming emperors decided to look inward and inland, making it a crime to build an oceangoing vessel. But China's current leaders feel quite differently and have rebuilt the nation's blue-water navy into a force.

Recreational yachting could be next, considering China's new wealth and lengthy existing coastline. China's first major marina outside of Hong Kong has been completed in grandiose fashion in Qingdao, site of the sailing competition at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

China Team has trained there, but it also owes another debt to the huge new marina. With Cup rules stipulating that a challenger must represent a yacht club, Wang and the French had to scramble in early 2005 when they realized that Qingdao, despite all those new boat slips, did not actually have a yacht club.

'We rushed into Qingdao and asked them to form and register the club ASAP,' Wang said. 'Which they did.'

The America's Cup organizers, new Sinophiles like so many others, would have had it no other way. China Team exists in large part because of Michel Bonnefous, the head of America's Cup Management, who was the first to suggest to Wang that he form a Chinese team and also provided plenty of counsel along the way.

He and Wang discussed the idea in September 2004 at the first of the pre-Cup regattas in Marseille. Wang had gone there as a director of a media company to discuss promoting the Cup in Asia. But as Wang soaked up the sea air and flashed back to his sailing and salad days on the Hudson, as part of a team-building exercise when he worked for Chase Manhattan, he realized that he wanted to become more involved. He inquired about trying to stage a pre-Cup regatta in Qingdao

'Michel told me that in order to win the hosting right, you have to have a team, otherwise it's very difficult to apply,' said Wang, who immediately set course for Valencia and returned to China to assemble financing for a team.

To his surprise, he could not generate much interest from China's new entrepreneurs, many of whom were involved in technology companies.

'I told them, 'Look at what many of you want to be: the future Larry Ellisons of China, and look at what Larry Ellison is doing. It would be a natural, good thing for you guys to be involved in the Cup,' ' Wang recalled.

But Ellison's success with Oracle is clearly more inspirational in China at this stage than his role as head of BMW Oracle Racing, the challenger of record in this America's Cup. Wang ended up having to provide the initial financing himself with his wife, Li Yi Fei, the executive director of MTV China.

Wang then returned to Bonnefous and told him, 'Money is not a problem now; the team is a problem.'

Enter Le Défi, whose leaders had already been considering China as a potential source of sponsorship. They ended up completing their application to challenge for the Cup just two hours before the deadline, in March 2005.

In truth, L'Équipe Chinoise would have been a more appropriate moniker for this enterprise, which, despite the presence of five Chinese and two Singaporean sailors, remains essentially a Gallic team with a Chinese investor.

The skipper, Pierre Mas, is French, as is the majority of the race crew, and despite all that is being made in China at the moment, the only part of the team's race boat made in China was the hull. That is the bare minimum required by the Cup rules.

Communication on board is a problem, particularly in the pre-start, when reaction time is at a premium.

'There are misunderstandings, but that's where I come in,' said Tan Wearn Haw, 28, a navigator from Singapore and the only regular crew member who speaks Mandarin, English and French. 'It's been quite funny sometimes with the French guys who only speak French and the Chinese guys who only speak Chinese, so I'm the one stuck in the middle.'

Tan, a former Olympian in the small-boat 470 class, was recruited in Singapore by a Frenchman working for China Team.

'I thought he was a con man,' said Tan, who only traveled to China for the tryout after soothing his suspicions with a thorough Internet search.

The Chinese sailors were identified through their national sailing federation, which then let the French sailors pick the best of them. None of the Chinese had big-boat experience, and much of China's top sailing talent is tied up in preparing for the 2008 Olympics.

Zhang Wenpei, a 22-year-old trimmer, said he had never heard of the America's Cup until 2005, when he saw a documentary on the event on Chinese television.

'I remember thinking it would be very difficult to watch it in person one day, because it was so far away,' he said through a translator at the team's base in Valencia.

Unlike the bases of its competitors, which are behind solid walls and tinted windows, the China Team base in Valencia has clear glass all around and a bar, El Dragon, on its roof. Even before the official unveiling of the appendages earlier this month, there was no skirt on their boat's keel.

'We've got nothing to hide,' Tan said with a laugh.

That may change in the years and Cups ahead. Wang is already signing up sponsors at home for the next edition, and the team is planning a promotional tour of China aft