By SUZANNE McFADDEN
Late for work, Luc Gellusseau flies down the slope from Ponsonby to the Viaduct on his scooter, a tomato-red blur. When we say scooter, we're not talking one of those flashy motorised numbers on which you see Patrizio Bertelli and Bruno Trouble whizzing around the waterfront.
It's a
kid's scooter, the foot-powered version, polished chrome with a dash of fluorescent yellow.
Don't think for a second the French syndicate Le Defi Areva are so frugal with their francs that Gellusseau cannot afford a superior form of transport. The middle-aged speed freak has only himself to blame. He has been restricted to riding this scooter since losing his driver's licence for speeding on French roads before he came to Auckland for the Louis Vuitton Cup.
Gellusseau, forever the jester, hangs his head in shame when I question him about this indiscretion. But you can tell he's not the least bit embarrassed about his scooter - you get the feeling he enjoys that downhill rush to the Viaduct Basin every morning, the breeze whipping through what hair he still owns.
Despite the loss of locks, there is a boyish vitality about 49-year-old Gellusseau. When he's not sailing, he spins rally cars, jumps horses over high fences and windsurfs like an adolescent.
Yet it is Gellusseau's experience and wise old head that Le Defi Areva have turned to this week as they fight to stay in Louis Vuitton Cup contention. After three races and three straight losses, the Le Defi afterguard were given a shake-up last weekend when helmsman Phillipe Presti was taken off the boat. Next Gellusseau, a veteran of four America's Cup campaigns, was brought on board as tactician, alongside skipper Luc Pillot, who took over the driver's wheel.
Now Gellusseau, the jester, juggles three roles in the syndicate - as sailor, as technical director overseeing the maintenance of the French boats, and as one of the triumvirate who leads the French challenge.
The crew change almost immediately paid off. Le Defi was just pipped on the finish line by the GBR Challenge last Sunday.
"The afterguard was originally picked for its experience in matchracing," Gellusseau says. "But after analysing the composition of the trio and the conditions on the Hauraki Gulf, we decided we needed to make more of the team's experience in handling the big boats of the America's Cup."
Gellusseau, looking towards the heavens and his "lucky star", believes Le Defi's fortunes are about to change.
The star has been there all his life, he says, right through his illustrious sailing career and protecting him in brushes with death. He has survived four car smashes - one so serious that for two months afterwards he had no control over his head. After that accident, 24 years ago, Gellusseau believes he was given "a second life".
It was 4am on a clear French night. Gellusseau was driving home from a windsurfing regatta when he smacked straight into a wall of white. On the road ahead, a truck had flipped and spilled its load of 500kg rolls of paper. One of the huge rolls was waiting for him at the bottom of a valley.
"Maybe I was going a little too fast. But the only thing I remember was suddenly everything was white," Gellusseau recalls. "The metal of the car crushed all around me."
He was trapped in the wreckage for three hours, and spent two months in hospital with broken ribs, a busted knee and a neck injury which took months to heal. "It was that lucky star of mine that kept me alive," he smiles.
Any reasonable man would have realised he had been given a second chance and maybe eased off the accelerator a little. So what did Gellusseau immediately do? He took up rally driving. "I realised life was too short," he laughs. "It is my second passion, after my wife of course."
Gellusseau's wife, Martine, whom he met soon after his horrifying accident, has always approved of his rallying capers - in fact she is his navigator. "If I could, I would be doing this instead of sailing," Gellusseau says, "but it's too expensive.
"It's a dream I have - I would prefer to be a professional race-car driver. Of course, you always dream it's greener on the other side of the fence."
T ALL and elegant, and a naturally gifted athlete, Gellusseau has tried just about any sport you care to mention. He's competed in showjumping, on his horse called Eole, after the Greek god of the wind. He's played soccer, basketball, golf, hockey and been involved in roller-skating, archery and swimming.
But it was the sea he was drawn to. "My family always went to the coast in summer. When I was 7, I found a little boat on the beach. The boy who owned it was two years older than me. I watched him sailing it and when he came back to shore, I asked for a turn. I loved it. It was incredible."
Ten years later, Gellusseau's family moved to La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast. He ended up back in a boat after a chance encounter, the first of many he says shaped his sailing career.
"I went to the local yacht club and met a rich man there who had just bought a brand new 470 [an Olympic class two-handed dinghy]. He was asking around, 'I have a boat, who would like to helm it for me?' I put my hand up and said, 'I'm free'.
"After two years together, we won the French championship. From there, I never stopped. I was always lucky."
Over 30 years, Gellusseau has won 66 national or international titles, among them eight world championships and the Admiral's Cup, with the professional Corum team he has run for 12 years. He is unwilling to single out one victory as his greatest achievement.
"I have won races on a lot of different boats - from 470s to big J-class boats," he says. "I do not have one special victory. The fact that I won many races on many different boats is the highlight for me."
The one prize that has eluded him, but has captivated him for 16 years, is the America's Cup. Gellusseau's first taste of America's Cup competition was with Marc Pajot's French Kiss in Fremantle in 1986.
His speciality was sails, and he later devised a system where a camera up the mast captured the shape of the sails, used by the lavish Italian Il Moro di Venezia campaign in the 1992 America's Cup.
Gellusseau had a vision of seeing a strong French contender back in the Cup. In 1997 he and another top French yachtsman, Pierre Mas, met with Xavier de Lesquen, a young naval officer who was a member of the French council of state. Together they reintroduced France to the America's Cup in 1999.
Gellusseau was tactician and technical director of the Le Defi syndicate - remembered for the white cheesecutter hat he wore in the stern of the bright orange boat.
Now he's back in the boat (same funny hat, only red) and battling to keep the latest generation of Le Defi from being sent home at the end of the month as the first eliminated team. Even before the regatta began, Gellusseau realised Le Defi Areva were on the back foot, in what he called "the second division".
"We had to be realistic - a lot of guys had been working on their campaigns a lot longer than us, and they had their money a lot longer than we'd had ours.But if we were nothing but realistic, we would have stayed home."
Gellusseau, Mas and de Lesquen, again the leaders of the French challenge, have found it tough going. Their skipper from '99, Bertrand Pace, left to work with Team New Zealand, and their new sponsor, nuclear energy company Areva, signed up late in the piece.
"Every three months we'd say, 'I don't think we can continue,"' Gellusseau says. "We would spend just a little money at a time. We had to make a choice between spending money on design study or renting a base in Auckland. We chose the study."
Le Defi Areva's budget this time is $50 million, about a quarter of what teams such as Oracle BMW Racing and Alinghi are spending.
"What's incredible is that we have a budget similar to what the Japanese had in the last Cup, and they were a very good team. But this time there was an explosion [in the budgets] along the street!" says Gellusseau.
"I don't care that we don't have a billionaire ... Money is not everything. In the America's Cup, money comes with a lot of politics. And you can waste a lot of money, too."
Former French Cup helmsman Bruno Trouble is concerned about his friend.
"He's a very funny guy and a very smart man. But this America's Cup is making him old," he says. "The French should have had an advantage returning from last time, but they started their research late and started sailing here too late. He's holding the team together, but it's tough."
Gellusseau has confidence in his team, who midway through the week had not yet won a race, sharing bottom ranking with Italy's Mascalzone Latino. If they can just survive the cut to the quarter-finals, he says, they could upset some of the big-dollar challengers.
"The big deal for us is to be in the top eight boats. I think we could beat a lot of syndicates in matchplay [the best of seven sail-offs in the quarter-finals]. We could adapt our boat to compete against theirs," he says.
"We had less time, less money and less study than the others, so we had to take a risk. We chose to go a little radical with a very wide boat, a boat that's good in medium-to-heavy airs. We have a good boat and the team is using it better and better as we go along. We are developing and evolving."
Gellusseau is alone in Auckland, sharing a house in Herne Bay with other members of the team. His wife Martine, whom he married last year after 23 years together, is back at home in La Rochelle where his 14-year-old son Antoine is at school. They have two other children, daughters Stephanie (23) and Marion (17).
"The America's Cup is not so good for families. I leave for the base at 6.30am and come home at 10pm," Gellusseau says.
The family will come to New Zealand at the end of the month, and again at Christmas, if Le Defi Areva are still racing.
"For sure our target is to win the America's Cup. If not now, then in a future edition," says Gellusseau. "We must stay in the Cup though, because it's a very big problem to go away for a while, then have to come back. We must follow the story."
So is that lucky star still shining over Gellusseau? "Of course," he beams, "it never, ever leaves me."
Luc Gellusseau, Le Defi Areva (France)
Team role: Technical director
Crew role: Tactician
Date of birth: August 9, 1953
Family: Wife Martine, daughters Stephanie (23), Marion (17), son Antoine (14)
America's Cup career:
1986-87 French Kiss, sail director
1992 Il Moro di Venezia (Italy), sails system
2000 Le Defi, technical director, tactician
Le Defi Areva team profile
nzherald.co.nz/americascup
By SUZANNE McFADDEN
Late for work, Luc Gellusseau flies down the slope from Ponsonby to the Viaduct on his scooter, a tomato-red blur. When we say scooter, we're not talking one of those flashy motorised numbers on which you see Patrizio Bertelli and Bruno Trouble whizzing around the waterfront.
It's a
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