Court jesters getting beyond a joke

OPINION: SOME TIME in the next few days, the maritime trade show that is the America's Cup will temporarily set aside its traditional hysteria, disengage itself from the dock of reality and sail once more into sporting folklore.

Or not.

Really, if there's one thing we have learned over the past two and a bit decades of New Zealand involvement in yachting's richest contest, it is this: don't get your hopes up. This, the 33rd chapter of a competition stretching back nearly 160 years, is surely testing even its own inclination towards the absurd.

Ernesto Bertarelli and Larry Ellison are not the first billionaires to turn what had once been a charming and significant sporting event into a "mine is bigger than yours" demonstration of nautical distemper.

They are simply the contemporary heirs to a competition which seems now only obliquely, even accidentally, to be about sailing. What began as a challenge trophy for "friendly competition between foreign countries", is no longer even really contested on the water.

Let me put it this way. The 33rd America's Cup, to take place in the waters off the Spanish Mediterranean port city of Valencia, is a best of three, winner-take-all series. The action starts tomorrow night.

What that means is that perhaps within the space of two races, just a few hours of on-the-water scrambling, nothing more, the sailors will have done everything that was asked of them.

There will be a presentation ceremony, someone will hand over an impressive silver cup to someone else, and through the smiles they will try to convince themselves that it was all worth it, when really, the fight has just begun.

We already know this about the 33rd America's Cup. It will not end with champagne-soaked sailors on a Spanish dock, in the chill of a Mediterranean mid-winter. It will end where it began, in the Cup's most important port of call, the New York State Supreme Court.

There, the most significant personality will not be Ernesto Bertarelli or Larry Ellison, but Justice Shirley Kornreich, who will decide on the legality of Alinghi's sails.

BMW Oracle, led by Russell Coutts, claims they breach a condition set out in the fourth paragraph of the original Deed of Gift, which states all yachts must be: "propelled by sails only and constructed in the country to which the Challenging Club belongs".

Alinghi's sails are manufactured by North Sails in the United States which, last time we looked, was still not a part of Switzerland.

Having said that, every winner in the history of the America's Cup was also using American sails.

Australia II in 1983? American sails. Team New Zealand in 1995? American sails. Alinghi in 2003? That's right, Russell, you remember, American sails.

I guess it's only important to point it out though, now that you're sailing for Actual Americans.

Justice Kornreich, another Actual American, has promised she'll have a think about it over the next few weeks and get back to us. No worries, judge. You take your time. Bundle up. We know how cold it gets in Manhattan this time of year.

Try not to read anything into the fact that the judge and the sails were born in the same place. Just last year she allowed Alinghi to put an engine on its yacht so it could get those heavy American sails up the mast.

Yes, you read that right. An engine. And to think that in the good old days, watching the grinders go at it during a tacking duel was truly one of the most awesome spectacles in sport.

I was at the 2007 America's Cup in Valencia and no one will ever be able to convince me that Bertarelli is anything but a bully with a bank balance.

Oddly, after too many years batting for the wrong team, Coutts is coming around to my way of thinking.

Working for a tech-savvy person such as Larry Ellison has obviously been a positive influence on Russ, because recently he tweeted: "Crazy idiot Ernie is at it again. I am tired of the cheating and silly cartoons. We are going to put on a clinic come Feb 8."

That would be a stunning idea if only we could have the confidence that it would make any difference, when the only demonstration that matters will once again come in a New York court room.

eric.young@star-times.co.nz

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