OneWorld Can Keep Racing
OneWorld lost but dodged a death penalty. Team Dennis Conner won, but its hopes for this America’s Cup died with the Arbitration Panel’s decision Sunday night that the Seattle team broke the rules, if not seriously enough to be disqualified.
That was the ironic and extraordinary outcome of a submission to the panel by the New York Yacht Club and Yacht Club Punta Ala, representing Team Dennis Conner and Italy’s Prada team, respectively, that the team owned by billionaires Craig McCaw and Paul Allen had stolen design information from Team New Zealand.
The panel of five international sailor-jurists penalized OneWorld one point for all subsequent series it may sail, including the America’s Cup Match against defender Team New Zealand in February. That means OneWorld would have to win five of seven races in the current Louis Vuitton Cup challenger semifinals and six of nine in the challenger finals and America’s Cup Match to survive.
Their opponents still would need to win the usual four of seven or five of nine.
Team Dennis Conner, which was Conner’s ninth America’s Cup, was eliminated by OneWorld in the quarterfinals repechage round, 4-0, but had hoped to advance if OneWorld was disqualified. The team still has a protest pending with the event’s International Jury, but the jury was not expected to exceed the arbitration panel’s ruling.
The semifinals were scheduled to start Sunday, with OneWorld meeting Prada and Switzerland’s Alinghi meeting San Francisco’s Oracle BMW, but high winds postponed the racing until today.
Despite a stack of affidavits and two days of hearings, the decision turned on OneWorld’s own admission of a seemingly insignificant infraction. Ian Mitchell said that when he defected from Team New Zealand to join OneWorld after the 2000 defense, he brought along design information on a disk and an obsolete computer that sat forgotten in his garage until the issue arose in 2001.
OneWorld accepted the penalty bitterly, not only complaining about its severity but blasting Sean Reeves, the New Zealand lawyer who led the defections to Seattle.
“We respectfully submit that the America’s Cup Arbitration Panel has respectfully leveled an extremely harsh judgment against OneWorld in response to the team’s own voluntary disclosure,” a statement said.
“The worst that should be said of us, beyond the fact that we hired a man who turned out to be crooked and gave bad advice, is that we have a designer who told us of an old backup disk and a seven-year-old computer in his garage that he never used and OneWorld never knew he had.
“We have decided to proceed through the racing and hold our heads high, knowing in our hearts that we assembled, with the exception of Reeves, a fantastic team of good, talented people who came together to win with a higher purpose.”
