Conner: 1 Boat Must Do : America’s Cup: Finances prohibit construction of a second boat.

Acknowledging a difficult economic climate for sports sponsorship, Dennis Conner on Thursday said he would mount his America’s Cup defense with only one boat.

The announcement, made at Team Dennis Conner’s compound after the Cadillac Cup, an informal boat race between Stars & Stripes and the 12-meter Heart of America, ended speculation that Conner would unearth the proper funds to build a second boat in time for the defense trials, which start Jan. 14.

No money. No boat. No dice. Conner was almost apologetic in his explanation.

“I’m often asked,” Conner said, “ ‘What is the status of your second boat, when will it start and when will it finish?’ Naturally, we’d love to have a second boat, but as things have unfolded, financially, they preclude us from building (another) boat.

“I’ll say it one more time. At this point, there will not be another boat, as much as we’d like it.”

The cost of a new International America’s Cup Class boat, which debuted here in May at the World Championships, is between $3 million and $5 million. Maintenance runs costs even higher. But Conner nixed the suggestion that a less-expensive class of boat be used to contest the America’s Cup.

“America’s Cup has never been affordable,” he said. “If it was easy, anyone could do it. It’s always been for the big guy. If it was easy, (America-3’s) Bill Koch wouldn’t be out here, either would (Italy’s) Raul Gardini. They wouldn’t care. But these people are winners, they like the corporate battle. It was never meant to be easy.”

Replacing it would be unfathomable, Conner said.

“There’s only one America’s Cup, and we should try to use the same format,” he said. “It’s been going on 140 years and the tradition’s here. Right or wrong, it’s seen as the pinnacle of the sport. Nothing’s going to replace it. This is where the best sailors are, this is where the media is, this is where the money is. And those three are not replaceable.”

Not everyone agrees.

America-3 Vice President David Rosow said Conner’s inability to fund a second boat is a reflection of a yachting event that’s out of control.

“I think it reflects the cost of these ridiculous America’s Cup yachts these days,” Rosow said. “It’s very sad. These yachts are outrageously expensive. Here you have a a great sailor whose been identified with the America’s Cup for a generation and he can’t raise enough money to build a second boat. Someone has to address that.”

Rosow said if it weren’t for the commitment of Bill Koch, America-3’s skipper and philanthropist, the syndicate would be in the same boat as Conner.

“Bill gave us $25 million and we’re having to raise about $15 million,” he said. “If not for Bill we’d probably be building our first boat. We need boats that won’t need 16 people to maintain them and keep them sailing. We need an America’s Cup with 20 challengers and 10 defenders.”

Conner first introduced the multi-boat challenge to the America’s Cup in 1980, and he has won with it three times and lost once. A multi-boat program allows for better crew training and technology testing, but Conner said he could compensate.

“We’ve got our heads up,” he said. “With only one boat, we were forced to work on other areas that we wouldn’t if we were out there racing. It’s difficult to know how this will all work out because we haven’t been out there sailing against each other in two-boat testing, but we’ve been working on other areas that we think have made our program stronger.”

Bill Trenkle, currently Stars & Stripes crew chief, has been with Conner 11 years and is a veteran of four America’s Cups.

“We’ve been doing a lot of racing in other classes to stay sharp,” he said. “There’s no boat-to-boat testing, so we’ve developed certain techniques that have allowed us to analyze ourselves by computer.”

And all the research Team Dennis Conner did on the assumption that a second boat would become a reality won’t be lost.

“We were ready to go from a design standpoint,” Trenkle said. “A lot of the work we designed of the second boat we were able to apply to this. That work is not going to waste.”

Besides, Trenkle said, crew members knew a one-boat defense was a possibility.

“We knew there was a chance that we wouldn’t have a two-boat program, so we concentrated on having an experienced crew. It certainly hasn’t had a devastating effect.”

Jerry La Dow, executive director of Team Dennis Conner, said time also became a problem.

“We’ve been trying very hard to make it happen,” La Dow said. “We’ve felt we had a couple of very good (sponsor) prospects that haven’t come around in a timely fashion. If we had put together one or two of those, we would have built it, but getting in done in a minimum time frame of four months. . . . It doesn’t take Houdini to figure out the time has come. We had hoped to make an announcement that we’d have a second boat, but it didn’t work out that way. We didn’t shut the door till now. It was time to put a halt to the speculation.”