A Cup in a Sea of Hype

The America’s Cup draws yawns from sports fans who watch NASCAR for the wrecks, the NHL for the fights and the NFL for the officiating. Sailors last rocked the media boat in 2000 when America made history by failing to qualify for the series. The biggest upset was a decade ago when Australia dashed the New York Yacht Club’s string of 24 straight victories and spirited the Cup down under.

Now the world of oceangoing sailing is poised to make waves by turning the America’s Cup over to Switzerland, which, the last time we checked, was still landlocked. That unlikely ascendancy invites speculation about what could follow: say, Greenland dominating beach volleyball or Holland hosting mountaineering finals.

Cup organizers hope to abandon the decidedly old-school concept of a racing series that pits the cream of the defending nation’s sailors against the best sailors that a challenging nation can muster. The exercise in national pride was dictated by the long-ago penned requirement that the Cup be a “competition between foreign countries.”

But racing syndicates spend freely to assemble the best crews that money can buy, regardless of nationality. And there’s plenty of money to sprinkle on the waters. Most of it ends up in New Zealand, which grabbed the Cup in 1996 but now finds itself far behind in a best-of-nine series against the Societe Nautique de Geneve.

Not by chance, the crew aboard Switzerland’s Alinghi includes New Zealanders Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth. Oracle BMW Racing, the boat that Alinghi beat to advance to the America’s Cup, sailed with a heavy Kiwi contingent. In fact, the most successful boats this racing season availed themselves of New Zealand’s rent-a-crews.

But the wily official New Zealand team, thus far shut out on the water, seems to have something up its sleeve. New Zealand replaced hometown hero Hamish Pepper with Bertrand Pace -- the first Frenchman ever to race in an America’s Cup race. A cagey bit of strategy? Or part of a French conspiracy to embarrass the world’s only superpower by guaranteeing a Swiss victory and sending the oldest trophy in international sports competition back to Europe for the first time in 152 years?

Oh, for the days when a spinnaker was a spinnaker, not a billboard, and clanking halyards, not courtroom haggling, signaled the start of another America’s Cup season.