Italians Move Closer to Eliminating Kiwis : Sailing: New Zealand changes skippers but loses third in a row. America 3stops Conner’s winning streak.

From 4-1 ahead to 3-4 behind, bedeviled by its bowsprit and its skipper benched, New Zealand will be sailing for survival in the America’s Cup today.

Il Moro di Venezia’s 20-second victory Wednesday put the Italians in position to knock the Kiwis back Down Under in the best-of-nine challenger finals, well shy of Sir Michael Fay’s obsession to take the Cup away from Dennis Conner, who is having his own problems again.

For the first time in this week’s soft wind and calm seas, Bill Koch’s America 3 was able to beat Conner’s Stars & Stripes, by 1 minute 8 seconds, to scuttle Conner’s winning streak at three and lead the best-of-13 defender trials, 5-4.

New Zealand thought it was sitting pretty with a 4-1 lead last Saturday, until the jury annulled the victory--without awarding it to Il Moro--because of an eight-second sail-rigging infraction.

That put the Kiwis back to 3-1 and, with Il Moro skipper Paul Cayard bashing them relentlessly on the bowsprit issue, they haven’t been able to beat Il Moro since.

They were desperate enough Wednesday to replace skipper Rod Davis with understudy Russell Coutts, one of Davis’ original rivals for the job and the only native foreigner now skippering a boat here. Davis was raised in Coronado and holds dual citizenship.

Cayard, an American temporarily from Venice, and Davis are old pals, but friendship has nothing to do with this.

“They’re changing skippers,” Cayard said. “We’re starting to see the pressure of the fact that an eight-year, $100-million program for Michael Fay could be near its end.”

Coutts, 30, is the world’s top-ranked match-racing skipper and an aggressive helmsman but was considered less experienced than Davis, who is in his sixth America’s Cup.

Coutts, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist in the Finn class, was preparing to fly home to raise money for another Olympic campaign Tuesday night when syndicate manager Peter Blake told him to stick around. Although the daily crew list showed the usual 16, it was Coutts and his backup boat tactician, Brad Butterworth, who showed up to face Il Moro.

Davis and his tactician, David Barnes, watched from the team tender.

Davis took the team player approach, saying, “I’ve thrown for nine innings now and it’s going into extra innings, and we’re bringing in a relief pitcher. We have enough depth of talent that we can go a lot of different dimensions that no other team can do. To leave that depth in the back room just to keep the same continuity all the way through doesn’t make sense.”

Blake said it hadn’t been decided who would sail today. If Coutts has an edge over Davis, it’s in the pre-start sparring, while Davis is more accustomed to steering the tricky tandem-keeled boat.

With an even start Wednesday, New Zealand led briefly, but once Il Moro powered ahead, Cayard covered well and never offered an opportunity to pass.

America 3 helmsman Buddy Melges said he didn’t think New Zealand’s skipper switch was such a big deal.

“We’re used to it,” he said.

As usual, Dave Dellenbaugh steered for the start, which was even, then Melges took over and handed off to Koch for the three reaching legs. The race also was even tighter than the challengers’ most of the way, until the wind built to 9 knots and America 3 powered away on the last windward leg.

Meanwhile, the lead switched three times on crossings and roundings and perhaps three or four other times when the boats were separated on various legs, including the last one.

Unlike other recent races, America 3’s crew work was solid. Its most impressive moment was when Melges tacked under Stars & Stripes on the layline to the second windward mark, then sailed out from underneath into the lead as Conner spoke in admiration.

“That’s a rocket ship,” Conner said, “some fast boat. Man, does that look nice.”

When it became evident that America 3 would win, Koch was ebullient.

“We did it in (Conner’s) conditions,” the owner chortled from the boat. “In spite of the damn race committee, we did it.”

Koch referred to America 3’s ongoing dispute about conditions in which races should be started, but Koch said he finally did what he could overnight to adapt to light wind.

“We did tweak our boat and our sails considerably yesterday and last night,” he said. “All that pain and agony. All that turmoil.

“One of my crew members came up to me and said, ‘Bill, we’re tough enough to survive the down period and come back and win.’ I said, ‘You’re right, we’ve weeded out the weenies.’ ”

Near the end of the race, Koch picked out subtle wind changes fror Melges--”Here’s a puff . . . it’s light relative now”--and behaved as if it was all worth the $65 million or so he has spent to get this far.

Conner said, “The bad news for us is we lost today’s race, but Bill has done a terrific job and that’s a heck of a boat. The more I see it the more I’m convinced the Cup is gonna stay here in America.”