Mike Hosking: Money got Team NZ to the line; ingenuity got them to victory

Emirates Team New Zealand win race nine to win the America's Cup. Helmsman Peter Burling and trimmer Blair Tuke spray Grant Dalton in celebration. Photo / photosport.co.nz

Opinion

If one of life's lessons is "it's not how you get knocked down, it's how you get back up again", then just what better example do you want than what's happened this morning.

This surely is our greatest America's Cup victory, if not one of the greatest Amercia's Cup victories of all, and it came out of one of sport's greatest defeats.

You could hear it in Grant Dalton's voice on the show on Friday: "This is not San Francisco".

I can't tell you how many people picked up on that - they'd never heard such confidence.

The Amercia's Cup has once again woven its magic - that remarkable event, in a sport so few of us truly get, and yet are thoroughly immersed in.

The event that reflects our sailing heritage, and yet mesmerises most of us non-sailors not unlike the Olympics, for us non-rowers and non-shot putters. It's not about the sport it's about the medals.

It's about a small nation doing things bigger nation's can only dream of and are in awe of us as a result.

Sport is the only thing ... the only thing in a disparate, segregated world that still truly unites us.

And this event is made more special by the fact it's global. Yachting, like golf and basketball and football, is everywhere.

To really take on the world and win is what marks this as special, and the money can't be ignored. This is a glamour event. This is F1. This is billionaires at work.

But here's the brilliance; with the victory, the re-enforcement that money gets you to the line, but ingenuity and cleverness and skills and risk and dedication and hard yakka does the rest.

Emirates Team New Zealand helmsman Peter Burling, left, and teammate Glenn Ashby hold the Americas Cup aloft as they celebrate with teammates after defeating Oracle Team USA. Photo / AP

If we ever dreamed of what the knowledge economy looked like, look at us at the Amercia's Cup. That is brain power on water. It is the tangible floating example of how a series of decisions all come together. Of how it's never one thing, it's hundreds if not thousands.

The bikes, the training in Auckland, the hiring of crew, the daggerboards, the foils. All the pieces, the culmination of all of that pieced together.

If ever there was doubt about this campaign, and there was some, as there always has been, it's always carried a bit of baggage the Amercia's Cup - but surely we can once and for all put that to bed in Bermuda.

This has been a campaign of consistency perseverance determination and courage.

Hell, it's put the Lions tour in a rugby nation into a very distant second place. This has been fantastic. Knighthoods all round.