Rising Tensions Come With Delay

Paul Cayard and Patrizio Bertelli are destined to meet soon, and already they don’t like each other.

The clash of Cayard’s AmericaOne team from his hometown of San Francisco and Bertelli’s Prada from Milan in the challenger finals for the America’s Cup reportedly has split Italian allegiances.

Strong winds accompanied by heavy rain Tuesday blew out the start of the best-of-nine series but the real storm developed on shore.

The late Raul Gardini hired Cayard to run his Il Moro di Venezia campaign at San Diego in 1992. Country hopping is common for sailors, but Cayard’s charisma and willingness to learn the language and move his family to Venice for three years won the hearts of the Italians.

They haven’t forgotten. There’s no denying he remains more popular and better known in Italy than Francesco de Angelis, the nice, quiet, tall guy who drives Prada’s Luna Rossa, and maybe that bothers Bertelli, the 53-year-old boss of the high-fashion empire as well as the sailing syndicate.

“This guy is trying to get the Italian public against me,” Cayard was quoted in the New Zealand Herald this week. “He’s saying stuff that isn’t true.”

According to an Italian journalist, Bertelli called Cayard a loser for failing to win the America’s Cup in ’92 with Gardini’s billions of lire behind him.

Bertelli, it is said, doesn’t even like references to Il Moro, which had an American skipper and was, in his view, not a true Italian challenger.

Bertelli’s representatives deny any plot to undermine Cayard’s popularity. Indeed, it may all be the purposeful product of Cayard’s imagination to put his opponents off balance.

In San Diego sailor Peter Isler’s new book, “At the Helm: Business Lessons for Navigating Rough Waters,” the challenges of competitive sailing are related to success in business. Chuck Robinson, a former deputy secretary of state and Nike board member, states his creed of “self-induced crisis” to create tension, because “it’s in the state of tension that you solve problems and you move forward.”

Is Cayard inducing a crisis? In ‘92, he made such a fuss over New Zealand’s bowsprit that the Kiwis unraveled from a 3-1 lead in the challenger finals into a 5-3 loss to Il Moro.

Peter Gilmour, the veteran Australian campaigner who led the Nippon Challenge here, caused a stir among the challengers last month when he went test sailing against the enemy, Team New Zealand.

“That’s why I did it,” he said. “It looked like [the challengers] were just going to keep cruising along. We had to get some blood flowing.”

But Cayard does sound sincere when he talks about his Italian experience.

“In my career, I have formed very important relationships that I hold near and dear with the Italians,” he said. “Francesco and I have won a couple of world championships and an Admiral’s Cup together, and there are a lot of guys on Prada with whom I’ve sailed.

“There’s good hype and good stories to be made around that, [but] the relationships I have with those people are going to survive, no matter what happens here this week.”

Cayard still has friends in Italy and his best friend there may be Diego della Valle, head of the JP Tod’s shoe company that lost a competitive buyout battle to Prada last year.

Bertelli is a shrewd businessman. In the boardroom, he is like Cayard at the helm: He doesn’t blink.

Bertelli last year earned $120 million in one day in a stock windfall. That’s more than twice what the America’s Cup campaign is costing him.

Over 22 years, Bertelli and his wife, the former Miuccia Prada, built her grandfather’s original company from a small exclusive handbag and luggage shop into an international brand.

The America’s Cup won’t hurt Prada’s upscale profile, but that’s not why Bertelli is doing it. Argentine yacht designer German Frers talked him into it. Miuccia has poured as many lire, or more, into the Prada Foundation, which supports the arts and exhibitions.

This feud, artificial or otherwise, will blow over, but there is sure to be another.

“We’re just getting into it,” Cayard said. “Just getting warmed up. There’ll be more tension down the road.”