KEY POINTS:
VALENCIA, Spain - America's Cup winners Alinghi not only run their sailing team like a business, they have also made big changes to the world's longest-running sports event, commercialising it as never before.
For some, including long-standing sponsor Louis Vuitton, the Swiss syndicate may have taken things too
far.
After winning the "Auld Mug" for a second time on Tuesday, Alinghi now have carte blanche to keep changing the Cup under the rule that the winners organise the next one as they want.
Their president, billionaire businessman Ernesto Bertarelli, has said he wants to get the 156-year-old America's Cup to the point where it can fund itself. Others say that money is getting in the way of the tradition and romance of the competition.
"The America's Cup is quickly changing and maybe it's becoming too commercial," said Bruno Trouble, who sailed two French challenges in 1977 and 1980 and has since been the link between the Cup and Louis Vuitton, its main sponsor.
While the America's Cup has traditionally been a battle between rich men bankrolling boats for the sake of national and personal pride, Alinghi has made it a much more sponsor-friendly event, with a focus on media exposure and corporate hospitality.
From Alinghi's main sponsor Swiss bank UBS, Germany's BMW and Allianz, both sponsors of BMW Oracle, to Spanish utilities Endesa and Iberdrola, companies have poured millions into the event to keep it afloat.
This partly reflected the fact the 32nd America's Cup was in Europe for the first time since 1851. Offering a huge sports market and a better time zone for mass media, the location helped the organisers raise a budget of 250 million euros, 10 times more than they had in Auckland in 2003.
Some of that money went to the media programme, some to innovations to help new teams come into the America's Cup, for example by setting up a centralised weather buoy system so smaller syndicates did not have to buy their own weather monitoring boats.
One of Alinghi's biggest innovations was to merge the organisation of the challenger play-offs and the America's Cup match itself into one body, America's Cup Management (ACM).
Having the whole competition under one roof meant ACM could set up the almost unanimously praised system under which Alinghi and the challengers raced regattas around Europe between Cup matches.
"There was some resistance initially but we worked out it was doable and there were benefits," said Anthony Romano, team manager at Italian syndicate Luna Rossa.
New teams like China Team and Shosholoza said that without the warm-up regattas, they would not have been in shape for Valencia. Alinghi and Team New Zealand said this America's Cup was so close because they had been racing together for years.
Despite the positives, critics say Alinghi and ACM have made unilateral decisions that go against the spirit of the Cup.
For one, Alinghi scrapped a rule that crew members mostly be from their team's country, making the Cup more like a professional sport where syndicates chase dream teams rather than the "friendly competition between foreign countries" as it is in its statutes.
Many teams also said ACM would need to improve its dialogue with challengers.
"The next step would be to make the organisation more open to competitors," said Xavier De Lesquen, China Team's manager.
"It's difficult when you want to make a lot of innovations. You need time and sometimes effort to listen to others' ideas but think about the way Formula One has had to open up to the car builders. It's a natural evolution," he said.
Bertarelli is due to announce the first details of the next Cup on Thursday.
- REUTERS