Ellison- 'Return to the rules of the last Cup.'
by Chris Cleary, IHT on 6 Dec 2008
Russell Coutts (left) and Larry Ellison (helming) on board USA 17 at the AUDI Medcup in Marseille Ian Roman/Audi MedCup
http://2008.medcup.org/home/
Excerpts from an interview this week with Larry Ellison, owner of the sailing team BMW Oracle Racing.
Ellison, the American software billionaire, is involved in a legal dispute with the defender of the America’s Cup, Alinghi, and its owner, Ernesto Bertarelli. Ellison spoke with Christopher Clarey of The International Herald Tribune.
Q. Your lawsuit is still pending. But what do you make of the collective agreements Alinghi is trying to reach in Switzerland with teams that are entered in the proposed next phase of the competition in 2010? Do you give the process much credence and do you feel they have made progress on some of your points of contention?
A. There are two kinds of teams. Terrible things have happened. Because of our lawsuit, a lot of teams are unable to sell and come up with sponsors because there is no date for the next America’s Cup, and there is all this uncertainty. And I put this all on Ernesto’s doorstep because he created this ridiculous bogus yacht club and because they had these horribly one-sided rules where only Ernesto had a chance to win, and we sued as a response. And now all these teams are up in the air. They can’t get sponsors, and they are a little bit desperate to get this solved, and we’d like to get it solved, too. Some of these teams have no chance to win, so I don’t think it’s so important to them or perhaps it’s not so important to them or they’re not afraid that Ernesto is going to invoke his 'we can change the rules whenever we want to' rule, or 'we can dismiss any competitor whenever we want to' rule. Ernesto is not likely to use that on them. He’s likely to use that on us, so we’re in a bit of a different situation than some of these other teams, and we don’t really trust him.
Q. What would help you trust him?
A. All he has to do is go back and say, Let’s go back to the rules of the last Cup.
Q. Are you at ease with the prospect that if you lose this court case you are out of the America’s Cup?
A. If we lose the case, I think the Cup is in a lot of trouble, because what it means is and their position is: the challenger of record could be anybody. It could be a gas station. It could be Ernesto’s cousin. It basically says the challenger of record could be whoever you want. Their position is, it has to be a yacht club in name only, so you could be the challenger of record. You could create something called myyachtclub.com and you could be the challenger of record. You have no yachts, no members, but you’re an organization and you challenge. You don’t have to have an annual regatta yet. They say having an annual regatta means sometime in the future, any time in the future, so you could become the challenger of record. And suddenly what it means is, anyone can be the challenger of record and since it’s anybody, you could get one-sided rules. I would guess under those circumstances Ernesto would hold the America’s Cup forever because he’d be allowed to have whatever. He could go back to his old protocol. Right?
Q. So you still feel like you’re playing the white knight, fighting for a higher cause, even though you haven’t won the right to defend the Cup on the water and even though you’ve taken some public relations hits?
A. Well, Russell Coutts has won the Cup on the water three times, so there are a lot of guys on our team who have won the Cup. So, in fact, our guys have won the Cup more than Ernesto has won the Cup and, in fact, our guys, one of our guys, made it possible for Ernesto to win the Cup in the first place. And this isn’t my decision alone. It’s my decision taken with Russell and the other guys, and we just feel if the court decides the challenger of record can be anything: a two-day-old organization, a yacht club in name only, no members, no boats, no regattas, no nothing, then what does that leave us with? So I think it’s kind of the end of the America’s Cup as we know it. Ernesto can go back to his own protocol where all the umpires work for him, the jury works for him, and go back to his original idea, and maybe he can even have a rule where he races in a special boat. His boat can have a motor.
Q. The world economy has gone rotten, sponsorship is tough. The Cup was not in a great place before this began because of the legal battle between your team and Alinghi, but now it seems to be in a worse place. How do you feel personally about the fallout from all this?
A. I feel terrible. I’m about to head out to the Canary Islands. My sailing, I’m on the pro match racing circuit on the RC44s. But we haven’t been doing any America’s Cup racing or really driving big boats. I’ve been racing small boats. Everyone has the same RC44, and I’ve been on that circuit this year, and I’m enjoying that. But I’d love to get the America’s Cup out of the court room, to use the cliché, and back on the water. But that’s impossible unless we get a fair set of rules. When I’m racing against Ben Ainslie or Jimmy Spithill or one of these guys in the RC44, I know the rules are the same for both of us. Racing Ernesto, there’s one set of rules for Ernesto, one set of rules for the rest of us.
Q. Despite building this big beast of a trimaran, do you still want to see this resolved and the Cup staged in a conventional manner with multiple challengers in monohulls instead of getting the chance to race the trimaran against Alinghi in a Deed of Gift match?
A. I have mixed feelings about that. I think it would be an awful lot of fun to race the multihull. Scary, but fun. And I think in some ways it would be good for the sport, because it would bring extreme sailing to the public. They’d see the boats just capable of enormous speeds dueling it out, so I think it would be a wonderful television spectacle. On the other hand, I prefer having a conventional Cup with rules that are fair for everybody.
Q. Have you driven the trimaran?
A. Yes. It’s strange. I don’t know how else to describe it. The boat at least to me doesn’t have a lot of feel in the wheel. I’m looking at the hulls and how much they are flying, and I’m looking at all the gauges and all of that, but it doesn’t have a lot of feel. I haven’t driven it that much, and Jimmy Spithill says after a while he has got some feel on it, has a bit of feel in his hands. And I’m used to driving not only by looking at instruments, which I look at very closely, and looking at wind conditions and looking for puffs and all that. But I also expect some feedback from the wheel, which I don’t get from that boat, so I found it very challenging to drive and, of course, I was only driving in 10 knots of breeze. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to drive that thing in 30.
For the full interview http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/sports/othersports/06ellisonQA.html?_r=1!click_here
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