By JULIE MIDDLETON
Team New Zealand skipper Dean Barker, still dressed in his racing gear, is bathed in the bright lights of a press conference an hour and a half after his team's loss to Swiss challengers Alinghi.
But you can tell his mind is miles away. His whole body speaks
of fatigue, of a mighty effort to suppress the sting of defeat.
Sitting down to face about 70 journalists and their unforgiving cameras, Barker swallows quickly, once, twice, has a sip of water and warily eyes the crowd. He knows what they are thinking: day one was bad. Day two, disaster.
As he listens to Alinghi's Jochen Schuemann explain victory, Barker's eyes roam into the shadows. He might look questioners in the eye as they seek explanations of the day, but the answers are prefaced with an intake of breath that comes out as a disappointed sigh.
Barker wears the face of a man who is deeply disappointed but determined not to show it. But there is an outward giveaway: he licks his lower lip quickly, then purses his lips enough that his dimples crease.
It's not a grimace, nothing near a smile; it's an expression that says: I am trying to be professional about this but I want to get out of here and deal with our defeat in private.
The few smiles are brief, duty paste-ons, one of them a response to a question from an American journalist which makes her colleagues groan audibly.
How is his confidence, she asks? "We believe we can beat these guys," he says. But he doesn't look entirely convinced.
nzherald.co.nz/americascup
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