Radical changes touted for future America's Cups - will they get traction this time?
by Richard Gladwell/Sail-World.com 9 Apr 00:03 NZST
As well as determining the winner of the 37th America's Cup, the Match also determined who would be Challenger of Record for the 38th America's Cup - October 12, 2024 - America's Cup - Barcelona © Ian Roman / America's Cup
Loose-lipped UK parties associated with the America's Cup have revealed radical changes being mooted for the way the America's Cup is to be organised for future events.
Recently both Jim Ratcliffe and Ben Ainslie have suggested a potential shift away from the Challenger of Record system towards a governing body model, indicating that such a change could streamline the competition's format and governance.
A single controlling body to run the Challenger Selection Series and America's Cup Match was proposed in 2000 and 2023, and failed to gain traction. But a lot has changed in the Cup over the past two decades.
Come December 2027, seven America's Cup Matches will have been sailed, since 2007, and only three of those were sailed on the Defender's home waters. Many would argue that the intention of the donors was for the holder of the Cup to defend the most prestigious tropy in sailing, on its home waters.
To add to the turmoil, six different classes were used for five successive Matches between 2007-2021.
The contemporary America's Cup is an event built on a foundation of eggshells, and is not what the donors intended.
According to the Deed of Gift, the America's Cup is supposed to be sailed between Clubs, but the reality is that now the trophy is contested between professional teams, with the clubs having only a perfunctory role to play.
The proposed changes are aimed at putting the Cup onto a more professional footing where the venue and event conduct conditions are known well in advance. They want to break free of the hiatus between the current holder and the team they select as a Challenger of Record and try to sort out a Protocol, or rules that will control the next America's Cup cycle. Currently sorting out a venue can take 8-10 months.
The Hiatus Period, which we are in now, of about 8-10 months following the conclusion of a Cup, doesn't do much for the would-be Challengers. They have to wait for the Protocol (conditions, dates and structure of the next Cup) and the publication of the new America's Cup Class rule. It can be a long time-out and hard to explain to existing and future sponsors - just when all are hot to trot off the back of a just concuded Match.
Of course, there is always the suspicion by those outside the inner sanctum, that the Defender and their Challenger of Record, having finished their cosy pillow fight over the rules know the basics of those two key documents, ahead of the public release, and are well advanced with the development process by the time the Protocol and Class Rule are released.
What was intended by the Cup donors to be a race to be first to hand a formal challenge note to the newly annointed Defender, has now devolved into a game of pre-selecting a like-thinking challenger, and shutting down all communication channels until the final race racing completes. Then a formal note of a challenge is handed over and the next Cup cycle begins. In Barcelona the pillows got even softer, with the existing Challenger and Defender agreeing before the start of the Match to be each others Challenger - locking out the other teams.
A bypass
The intention is for the new Challenger, Rules, Class and Venue Selection process to bypass this piece of theatre.
The hope was that this 38th America's Cup cycle would be underway by February 2025, with a Cup being sailed in 2026. Now there won't be any Preliminary Events until 2026, with a Cup not set for July 2027, someplace in Europe.
Had an AC World Series League been in place and functioning, then teams would have known what was happening for 2025, before they even started the Louis Vuitton Cup series in Barcelona in August 2024.
In this start-stop environment, it is challenging for teams to get the backing of sponsors, now used to signing 10yr deals with other sailing events, to invest in a Cup cycle that might only last a couple of years and for which the boat and nature of the event changes each time there is a new holder of the Cup.
The calls for change are not new.
Before the 2000 Cup, Paul Cayard's AmericaOne syndicate proposed overhauling the whole event structure. Cayard told America's Cup Media that he had a clause in his contract with San Franciso's St Francis YC stipulating that "if he brings the Cup home, the club must petition the New York State Supreme Court to alter the Deed of Gift, and empower an independent management authority."
"The Cup needs to get its act together," said Cayard. It's too antiquated, the most significant impact that St Francis [YC] could have on the event is to restructure it."
Cayard was another who believed that an independent commissioner would help resolve issues like event sponsorship and television contracts, claiming those moves would provide professional teams bargaining power as to continuity and audience certainty when they headed into negotiations for sponsorship.
Television contracts were cited as a bug-bear. "The contracts [for the preceding Cup in 1995 in San Diego] weren't finalised until racing nearly began. This time around [2000], a contract still hadn't been negotiated one year before racing," he added.
Before the next Defence [2003] similar calls were made by fellow St Francis YC member Tom Ehman - whose Cup experience goes back to being Jury Secretary in the 1977 Match conducted by the New York Yacht Club.
Ehman echoed many of Cayard's points but went a stage further, wanting the event conducted every two years. He wanted to see the event being held on a rotation system, allowing the nominated venue four years to prepare facilities for the Match. Ehman also wanted the Match and supporting events to be under a commissioner's control - a practice common in the USA. Elsewhere, a world body comprising the various national bodies of the sport calls the shots.
Falling foul of the Commissioner
Neither system is perfect. A supremo is required who can tread the fine line between perceived democracy and benign dictatorship.
Emirates Team New Zealand was the first to fall foul to the 2017 America's Cup Commercial Commissioner - decorated Vietnam combat pilot Brigadier-General Dr Harvery Schiller, who cancelled the contract with Emirates Team New Zealand to hold the Qualifiers for the 2017 America's Cup in Auckland - before the Match moved to the Cup venue of Bermuda for the final challenger selection phases, and Cup itself.
Quite whose drum Schiller was marching to was never revealed. But his petulant action came swiftly after Emirates Team New Zealand indicated some support on social media for Italian team Luna Rossa pushing back on the change of Cup class from the AC62 wingsailed catamaran to the smaller AC50 near one-design.
The incident highlighted the issue of having power contained within a single person and not knowing who was pulling the strings.
There was a second, more formal attempt to reorganise the Cup before the 35th America's Cup in Bermuda.
In January 2017, five of the six teams competing in the 35th America's Cup - Oracle Team USA, Artemis Racing, Groupama Team France, Land Rover BAR, and SoftBank Team Japan—signed a Framework agreement outlining the future structure for the 36th and 37th America's Cup events.
Like Tom Ehman over a decade earlier, the agreement proposed a biennial schedule and a standardised class of foiling catamarans to ensure continuity and cost-effectiveness in the competition.
Emirates Team New Zealand held out against signing this agreement. They believed that decisions regarding the future format of the America's Cup should be determined as was customary by the Defender and the Challenger of Record.
Deed of Gift issues
The problem for those wanting to make changes is how to effect these without changing the Deed of Gift - which requires the approval of the New York Supreme Court.
The solution is simple - revert to the model used until the 1995 America's Cup in San Diego, under a Challenger of Record Committee - where the Challengers ran their selection series the Louis Vuitton Cup and the Defenders ran their own - the America's Cup. Under that system, the challengers received a dividend payment from the profits. The Defender's dividend came from the Cup - and there is no need to make a trip to 60 Center Street in New York to make the arrangement legal.
For the 2000 Cup in Auckland, the two events' TV rights and media centre operations were merged. That was carried into a more formal merger in 2003. The new Defender, Alingi, established an America's Cup Management Committee for the 2007 Challenger Series and America's Cup. The 2007 events ran a big surplus, of which 50% went to the Defender, and the balance was distributed amongst the challengers depending on where they finished.
If the teams want to move beyond that 1995 model to establish an all-encompassing body and alter how an America's Cup is run, then a change to the Deed of Gift is required.
As we saw in previous visitations to the New York Supreme Court in 2007-2010 and 1988, the NYSC Court list covers all manner of domestic disputes over property, pets, etc. Amongst the cacophony of these cases, a punch-up between a couple of professional international sailing teams over the conduct of a 150-year-old sporting trophy is an outlier.
Only if the trust is unworkable, under current circumstances, will the Court agree to alterations. Given that there have been 37 successful America's Cup Matches since 1871, it is hard to argue that the Deed of Gift is unworkable, as written.
Over the last five Cups, there might not be the same number of teams as in 1987 - but the Cup is not unworkable - as was the case in 1956 when changes were made after an almost 30-year hiatus following the J Class era.
Those changes were ordered by the Court in December 1956, after a petition by the holder, New York Yacht, to remove a requirement for Challengers to sail to the Match venue on their "own bottom" and a reduction in load waterline length from 65ft to 44ft. These changes were necessary to accommodate the change from J-class to the 12-metre class for the 1958 America's Cup.
A third petition by the new Cup holder, Royal Perth YC, in 1984 changed the dates on which an America's Cup was permitted to be sailed if the Match was in the Southern Hemisphere.
Despite all the great ideas over the last 40 years on how the Cup could be improved, those are the only changes that have been made to the Deed of Gift, which only covers the conduct of the America's Cup Match.
Change required
The rest of it - Challenger Selection Series, Youth and Womens America's Cup, plus an F1 style preliminary circuit similar to SailGP - but sailed in AC40s and with some events sailed in AC75s - can all be sorted out by private treaty and separate challenger organisation, operating in a different orbit to the Deed of Gift.
That F1 style organisation will allow the teams to set up an America's Cup World Series that can work alongside the Cup. It provides an ongoing competition that doesn't stop and start, at the conclusion of each Cup cycle, and gets turned inside out as every new Cup winner tries its new ideas to re-vamp the event..
In an interview last year, Sir Tim Clark, President of Emirates Airline, put his finger on the continuity issue, and whether Emirates got value from their relationship with Emirates Team New Zealand.
Clark's main point, saying it was his personal view, with the Cup, was that the event didn't happen often enough.
Last year, the airline signed a naming rights deal with the British SailGP team - which rebadged itself as Emirates GBR and gives its sponsor exposure in 14 events per year every year.
While America's Cup protagonists are quick to point out that their event pulls a greater audience than SailGP, in a Cup year, those only come around every three or four years - and a typical Cup program has no sailing in Year 1, Test Sailing in Year 2 with prototypes of one sort or another followed by a raceboat launch and buildup in Year 3.
The America's Cup continues to hold its own in the top echelon of sporting events that take place every three of four years. In 2023, the Rugby World Cup had 1.33billion viewing hours. The Football World Cup pulled 1.5billion viewers for the Final. The America's Cup attracted 954 million viewers over the 2024 event (up slightly from 941 million in 2021). F1 attracted 1.5billion viewers across 24 events in the 2024 season. SailGP is reported to have 193 million TV viewers across 212 territories in 2024.
The Olympic TV viewership powerhouse returned a TV viewership of 5 billion for Paris2024.
SailGP has more YouTube followers, with 430,000, compared to the number of America's Cup followers, reported as 295,000.
Of course in several international sports - Rugby, Cricket and Rugby League, we have seen several breakouts from within the sport, all of which have resulted in significant change within the sport as the rebel professional teams/players are folded back into the mainstream sport.
The frustration for America's Cup is that they have all the elements - Youth, Womens and Open monthly regattas in AC40s, plus another two or three AC75 events - to make a better year-on-year circuit than SailGP. And of course the ACWS is capped off with an America's Cup Match every two or three years.
But as in mountaineering, seeing the summit and a possible climbing route is one thing, but being able to climb it is another - and that is the quandary facing today's America's Cup teams.