OneWorld’s Fine Is Puzzling to Connor

The steaks were burning and Dennis Conner, no longer the skipper but still the chef, was cooking.

“I remember when you broke the rules, you got thrown out,” he said at an impromptu news conference that took him away from a final team barbecue for the ninth America’s Cup effort of his sometimes stormy sailing career. “Where did all of a sudden you get fined for breaking the rules?”

His reference was to Seattle’s OneWorld, which was fined $65,000 -- about the price of a headsail -- but escaped disqualification, although the America’s Cup Arbitration Panel found it guilty of possessing design secrets appropriated from Team New Zealand.

The departure of Conner’s team was a disappointment to him because, with two boats and adequate sponsorship, he seemed to have his strongest team since he’d brought the Cup back from Australia in 1987.

It also leaves the competition without an all-American team. Nationalism may be passe in the America’s Cup, but all 16 Stars & Stripes crew members were U.S. citizens. OneWorld usually sails with only two Americans on board, tactician and double Olympic medalist Charlie McKee of Seattle and navigator Kevin Hall of Ventura.

The other U.S. entry, San Francisco’s Oracle BMW, sails with six or seven, among them helmsman Peter Holmberg of the U.S. Virgin Islands.

OneWorld, which swept Team DC, 4-0, in the quarterfinal repechage round, has been allowed to continue into the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger semifinals against Italy’s Prada, which had joined Conner in the submission to the panel.

Prada was delighted to start the series with a significant edge. The panel ruled that OneWorld must forfeit one win in each subsequent series it may sail, which means that all the Italians need to do is break even this week.

It’s scheduled as a best-of-seven series, but if OneWorld wins four races and Prada three, it will actually be a 3-3 tie, forcing an eighth race to determine a winner.

Even if OneWorld prevails against Prada, the same rule will apply in a knockout repechage series against the loser between Switzerland’s Alinghi and Oracle BMW.

Team Dennis Conner also had protested OneWorld to the International Jury, which deals in racing issues concerning “fair sailing” -- e.g., using an illegal boat built with someone else’s design information. The day after the panel’s decision, Team DC sought to withdraw that protest.

“We’ve had our day in court,” he said.