Naples has been named the venue for the next America’s Cup, with a skimpy list of challengers.
The protocol may soften nationality rules, allowing teams to strengthen their ranks.
Five challengers from Barcelona may return: Italy, Switzerland, France, Britain, and the US.
Now Naples has been named as the venue for the next America’s Cup, the natural question arises: who will compete there?
The list of challengers looks a bit, well, thin if you believe all the media. Big hitters Alinghi are supposedly opting out of the 38th Cupand the British are in the midst of a messy divorce between sailing team and sponsor, arguing about assets – you know, like who keeps the Korean chest and who gets the wine fridge.
That leaves only the Italians, the Americans and the French – yet the mood emanating from New Zealand’s elite sailing circles has a definite whiff of gung-ho about it.
The reason for that is likely the yet-to-be-released protocol, the document which sets the Cup rules for the design of the boats, the course and racing, make-up of the crew, cost and materials restrictions and the overall format of the Cup itself.
The likely tone of that protocol can perhaps be seen in Emirates Team NZ’s selection of their core yachting team this week and which includes a Brit – jack-of-all trades sailor Chris Draper. Add him to the Australian-born skipper, Nathan Outteridge (though he has a Kiwi wife, Kiwi kids and lives in New Zealand), and you get the feeling the Cup’s strict nationality rules might be softened this time round, allowing teams to bolster their ranks.
It’s too late for Alinghi, though, isn’t it? After all, they pulled out last month saying they’d been unable to agree on the future of the event with ETNZ. However, maybe it’s too late for Alinghi Red Bull Racing – there is a distinction. As ETNZ boss Grant Dalton pointed out after the Alinghi snub, the Swiss team performed pretty awfully at the last regatta – they capsized and engineering boo-boos led to two broken masts; they were lucky not to be the first team out of the regatta ahead of the French.
As New Zealand is seeing with Liam Lawson in F1, Red Bull are not particularly patient people. In professional sport they have a reputation for being, well, bullish – intensely protective of the brand, so much so that doing poorly in the America’s Cup would be an affront. They are the kind of marketing company who insist that F1 drivers Lawson and Max Verstappen turn up, as they did the other day, for a TV interview, both brandishing cans of Red Bull, logo visible. So natural. Yeah, just chugging on my Red Bull here, man.
Alinghi boss Ernesto Bertarelli. Photo / Red Bull Content Pool
So, maybe Alinghi boss Ernesto Bertarelli will need to find a new sponsor for the next regatta and maybe they are waiting to see if the protocol makes that easier or not. Certainly scuttlebutt from sailing circles here suggests the challengers, as a group, feel Team NZ are so far ahead in the foiling monohulls, they may not be possible to catch unless a few things change. What those few things are is not known – but the nationality rule seems a good bet and it may thus be too early to count Alinghi out completely.
The picture is a bit fuzzier regarding the Brits – Sir Ben Ainslie’s Athena Racing is still Challenger of Record after the messy split with Ineos and its billionaire owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe. In a complex dispute which may need legal action to solve completely, Ratcliffe offered a settlement which was withdrawn after Ainslie “failed to bring the agreement to a timely close”. Ratcliffe then departed, ending the (admittedly unlikely) possibility of having two British teams in the next regatta. Now it is understood the dispute centres on who owns what – the boat, the data, the intellectual property.
From the outside, it looks like Ainslie has a team but no money yet. However, Ainslie’s fundraising skills are not far behind Dalton’s and, in a large economy and sailing stronghold like Britain, it seems highly unlikely he won’t be able to find a sponsor to fund the 173-year-old British dream of reclaiming the Cup.
Ben Ainslie is the Challenger of Record. Photo / Photosport
So while matters are still clouded, it would be no major surprise to see the five challengers from Barcelona back again: Italy, Switzerland, France, Britain and the US (American Magic, apparently full steam ahead at their base in Pensacola). Naples will be a fillip too – not only a colourful city and great site for this regatta but also another European base, meaning teams don’t have to spend as much to get there (compared with New Zealand) and sponsors feel more comfortable with mass audiences. The atmosphere will also be zinging – the Italians will be out in force at this one.
The vision of the Cup becoming a sustainable, globe-trotting sport and technology circus, much like F1, is taking shape now. However, the announcement of Naples was not without its irony, delivered by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Our mob? The Government said no thanks very much to funding a New Zealand home defence. You’d have to say it was the right decision. Now they’ve capsized the equity pay hopes of thousands upon thousands of New Zealand women, how would it have gone down to see loads of blokes sailing happily round the Waitematā, earning comparative fortunes?
You can just imagine the bile. Just as it is true that the country may not be able to afford the America’s Cup right now (and that we do not have bundles of billionaire bankrollers), the biggest irony may be that the Cup has simply outgrown the country that currently dominates it.
Paul Lewis writes about rugby, cricket, league, football, yachting, golf, the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games.
