Team NZ eyes the opposition

By Suzanne McFadden

Out the corner of an eye, Team New Zealand watch the challengers. They have their trained observers in rubber duckies out on the water. They look up from preparing their boats for sea to watch the foreign yachts being towed past their base in the heart of the village. They will analyse videos with hi-tech computers.

They will make fleeting glances across the Hauraki Gulf, watching the contest for the Louis Vuitton Cup unfurl like the fern frond on the hulls of their new black boats.

But the New Zealanders must stick to their own agenda if they plan to hold on to the America's Cup.

Their paramount task in the next four months is to make one of their two new black boats the fastest on the water when the cup match begins next February.

Already they are the favourites to win the match. If you took a blank sheet of paper, and wrote "Team New Zealand: for and against", it would be a lopsided list.

Under "for" you could write the following:

- Easily the fastest boats in 1995.

- Home water advantage.

- Five years' intense preparation.

- Fully funded programme.

- Three-times world champion skipper Russell Coutts.

- Expert team of designers led by Tom Schnackenberg.

- Experienced crew.

Against them is one glaring fact – they have no defender series.

On paper, the odds are strongly in favour of a successful Team New Zealand defence. Their main disadvantage is, however, self-inflicted.

The challenger will have had around 60 races to Team New Zealand's zero when they face-off at the cup match startline on February 19.

Five years ago, the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron decided not to stage a defender series. It meant the New Zealanders would have no official warm-up to the match.

So Team New Zealand will have their own in-house races between the new generation of Black Magics, NZL57 and NZL60, on their own little patch of the gulf.

A curious spectator fleet will no doubt gather around the Kiwi boats to try to determine which is the faster. There is no substitute, however, for the pressure of the real thing.

And the Kiwis won't really know just how fast their chosen boat is until race one of the America's Cup 2000.

The new Black Magics are machines of war. They won't be winning any beauty contests.

The first boat out of the shed, NZL57, has a strange bow, a long stern, steep sides and a stealth-bomber black paint job rubbed down until her bottom is as smooth as a baby's.

"She is a model of everything we know is fast," said tactician Brad Butterworth at her christening. "Right now, she's our best shot."

The New Zealand boats are the result of four years of designing, trialling and tank-testing. The defenders got a distinct head-start over their challenger opponents.

Soon after bringing home the Auld Mug from San Diego, Team New Zealand had their family of five sponsors signed up, and work drawing up the new generation boats began. They retained almost all of their crew from 1995, and have Russell Coutts back at the helm.

Coutts, a three-time world matchracing champion, has been off the world circuit for the last two years, pouring all his time and effort into the defence campaign.

There is a scent of confidence about the New Zealanders as they talk about the future – and the next defence.

With Sir Peter Blake off to assume the duties of the late Jacques Cousteau as soon as this regatta is over, Coutts, tactician Butterworth and designer Schnackenberg have been handed the right to defend the cup on behalf of Team New Zealand if they retain it. That will probably be in early 2004.

A bunch of promising young crewmen – the likes of Dean Barker, Hamish Pepper, James Dagg and Cameron Appleton – have been taken into the TNZ fold this time, looking ahead to the next effort.

If Team New Zealand lose the Auld Mug in February or March next year, it's hard to see New Zealand launching another challenge- for some time to come.

That's why they are hellbent on holding on to it.