Blakey from Bayswater

Peter Blake is determined that the Kiwi team he leads will hold to the America's Cup. CARROLL DU CHATEAU finds out why he's the man for the job.

Peter Blake is a conundrum. The New Zealand Sportsman of the Year who doesn't live here. A boy from Bayswater who is welcome in the homes and on the yachts of Europe's richest playboy families. A symbol of local patriotism who is such a global citizen he leapfrogged the French, even Cousteau's own family, to become leader of Jacques Cousteau's legendary Cousteau Society.

The leader of our upcoming America's Cup challenge who won't even be on the boat.

Don't worry about that, says Blake over the slightly echoing line from England, his role in America's Cup 2000 is even more important than if he were on the water. Why? Because Blake is determined that, for the first time in the cup's 144-year-old history, a non-American defender will hold on to the Auld Mug for a second stretch.

As he points out, Australia, the only other country to win it in the first place, lost it straight back to the Americans.

Which is why Blake's voice lights up at the thought of the challenge ahead. Even though he won't be aboard, back and arms straining over the grinder this time, the sheer enormity of the task is what Blake seems to need.

"That delicious little feeling of not knowing [whether we can pull it off] - that makes me get up in the morning."

Getting to this moment has been a long haul. Fifteen years selling his dream for New Zealand yachting through the boardrooms of the country. Five times round the world in the Whitbread until that final, glorious win on Steinlager 2. An attempt at the America's Cup with Sir Michael Fay watching his every move, followed by the fabulous outright win on Black Magic.

From the start his timing was impeccable. Even before he secured the cup for New Zealand, Blake and his mates talked the starchy New York-based America's Yacht Cup Committee into moving the timing of the next challenge back a year.

Buying time, explains yacht Tom Schnackenberg, and a tactic that ensured the cup coincided with the millennium. Auckland receives four months of yachting fame just as the clocks tick over into the next 1000 years.

There's been controversy. No defender series. No public idea how Team New Zealand picks the men who will battle to keep the cup.

But the extra year has let a record 16 yachting syndicates slap their $185,000-$370,000 entry deposits on the table, making this the largest America's Cup ever.

Blake says excitedly, "New Zealand will be on the world stage. We'll be in the spotlight."

Today, although "we don't talk about our budget," Blake concedes it will be more than last time [$15 million] but not a great deal more. And a lot less than the others." In America's Cup terms he isn't talking about a lot of money. For $15 million Team New Zealand will design and build two boats, wave test their models in Britain - and pay personnel.

The trick, says Blake, is not to blow it. "This should be an opportunity for New Zealand to show off what we can do. One way or another it'll make a big difference for New Zealand - let's make it the right kind of difference."

How exactly? "By being good hosts," he says. "By not slapping high Government taxes on visiting vessels, or making them leave after 12 months."

And, on a more down-home level, "saying things like, 'Can I take your washing home?'"

That way, assures Blake in his authoritative voice, "New Zealand will be better off, not by tens of millions, but by hundreds of millions of dollars."

So what makes a boy from Bayswater Beach who grew up sailing a P Class from the bottom of the garden decide to have a go at the hallowed trophy of the super-stuffy New York Yacht Club?

A lean and rangy 193cm, with a problem haircut, a shyness that is often mistaken for arrogance and the genius to fish a clean pair of red socks out of his pocket at precisely the right moment, Blake has the rare ability to stand back, plot a course, then set men's hearts on fire.

Like an ad man making a pitch, he's a guy who can sell a dream. Not just to the yachties who crewed with him, but to tycoons like Doug Myers.

As long-time navigator Mike Quilter says, "He doesn't have fantastic sailing skills, or fantastic technical skills, Blakey has fantastic people skills. Blakey's a giant among men. He reminds me of Colin Meads… most of all he provides leadership. If you've got a strong, charismatic leader it binds the whole thing together."

Blake's mother Joyce, who still lives in Bayswater where Peter and his brother Tony once cooked up a bath tubful of molten lead to build the keel of one of their early boats - they split the bath, ruined the garden - remembers how focused Peter was from the start.

His father was a Navy man, his mother sailed too. Family life centred round the sea. Dad built that first P Class for the kids to muck around in.

Later, when the boys started building their own Junior Offshore Group yachts in the backyard shed, the neighbours imposed a 9 pm curfew on Peter's sanding machine. Without it, they'd probably have gone on building until midnight.

Says his mother: "Peter didn't get hassled, seemed to be able to cope with things."

Although he was diverted from the sea long enough to become a mechanical engineer after he left school, by 1983 Blake was putting together his first big sponsorship deal with Sir Tom Clark, and taking the helm of Ceramco. It was a stunning - if hairy - performance on the big, radical boat. Broken mast on the first leg. Ten trophies including the Southern Ocean trophy. The New Zealand Yachtsman of the Year award. Ultimately, Blake lost the race, and those who knew him knew he'd be back.

Blake's next boat, Lion New Zealand, was built like a battleship. Steady but slow, she came second. Then in 1987 Blake got it right.

Myers confirmed that Lion Corp would pour in $6 million over six years to build three yachts and he set off for a fifth time on the beautiful, red-hulled Steinlager 2. It was a tough race, slogged out against fellow New Zealander Grant Dalton on Fisher and Paykel. Blake won every leg, and after 33,000 nautical miles, the race itself by 36 minutes.

Then, after 17 years of round-the-world campaigns punctuated by his marriage to English-born Pippa, and the births of Sarah-Jane, now 14 (who spent much of her early life strapped into a car-seat in the cockpit of Ceramco) and James, 11, Blake moved on to the next challenge - the America's Cup.

The lessons of the Whitbread campaigns paid off. Although Michael Fay approached Blake halfway through his 1992 summer of discontent and the campaign didn't win, Blake learned.

By 1995 he had the formula. After three years of working with people like Schnackenberg, negotiating the fiendish America's Cup politics, eyeballing Dennis Conner, inspiring and energising his team, Black Magic sailed to victory winning the cup outright without conceding one match. Says Schnackenberg, "That showed us two things about Peter. He never stops learning. And he never gives up."

Quilter agrees: "Blakey's miles ahead of his time. He was the first guy to go out and find sponsorship and crank up the whole thing. From his first boat Ceramco, then Lion, then Steinlager - he's led the whole thing from the beginning. He got the sponsorship deals together and built those big, radical boats. That's why New Zealand is so good at offshore yachting - basically from that big push. There's no Peter Blake in Australia…"

Blake succeeded by convincing hardheaded businessmen to feel what he felt.

"I spent most of my life endeavouring to convince sponsors it's a good deal … convincing someone to take an emotional position," he says.

Myers, now a good friend, who has poured well over $25 million into Blake and his boats over the past 15 years, considers it money well spent: "The reason we went in was because at the time we [New Zealand] were struggling to define ourselves. We wanted to help give the community confidence to go forward internationally and we wanted the company linked in the community mind with winners."

And Blake delivered. "Peter's been a great ambassador for New Zealand in a very nice, modest, competitive way."

Myers described Blake as having the mix of personality traits for both a sports winner and the other half of it, the sponsorship deals: "Peter thinks laterally. You've got to be stroppy, you've got to be tough with very strong views. You've also got to be capable of deviousness in order to outmanoeuvre the competition."

Blake may not have been so sure in his early days.

"You fly around the world taking your proposals into companies. There is no income. Zero. And you and your family live in a state of wondering if there will be enough to get through the year."

He's done better than that, making the National Business Review's 1998 Rich List, with an estimated minimum wealth of $4 million and a "bright financial future."

For the next 16 months Blake is taking leave from his job with the Cousteau Society to focus on the cup.

By Christmas he and Pippa will be installed in Bayswater near his mother (his father died this year). James will move to Kings prep while Sarah-Jane will commute from her English boarding school.

And Blake will pour on the pressure again to keep an ornate cup that has come to symbolise the fortitude of nations.

It won't be smooth sailing. Blake knows this. But he has his mind on the real problem that could prevent New Zealand from making yachting history.

It's as simple as attitude, he says. "We've got to assume we're the underdogs. We've got to assume they'll be better than us. If we don't we've probably lost."