Yachting: Swiss announce sponsors for Cup bid

GENEVA - The Swiss challenge for the 2003 America's Cup, baptised "Alinghi", has received backing from sponsors including UBS AG, Switzerland's largest bank.

The team skippered by ex-Team New Zealand helmsman Russell Coutts and financed by Swiss biotech executive Ernesto Bertarelli made the announcement this morning.

Bertarelli, Coutts and fellow Kiwi, tactician Brad Butterworth, revealed the boat's name and its red and grey colours at the Societe Nautique de Geneve, its home port, some 500 days before the prestige event.

The craft, formerly a catamaran registered as "Be Happy" by Swiss Marc Pajot in his America's Cup bid, has been overhauled and will be baptised at a ceremony on tonight.

It is being used for practice while two Alinghis are being constructed at a Swiss shipyard for sailing's prestige event.

"Alinghi is an imaginary name which has brought me luck," Bertarelli, a yachtsman who won the largest regatta on Lake Geneva, the Bol d'Or, in 1997 and 2000, told a news conference.

In a statement, the Swiss challenge said that UBS, among the world's largest banks, and the California-based Infonet Services Corp, were its "main sponsors".

Swiss watchmaker Audemars Piguet is another sponsor, it added.

Bertarelli, a 35-year-old billionaire who is chief executive officer of the Geneva-based Serono - the world's leading biotechnology company - and double America's Cup winner Coutts said last September in launching the bid that they hoped to bring the trophy to Europe for the first time.

Bertarelli said at the time that he was underwriting a 75 million Swiss franc ($NZ101.87 million) budget.

The team of 85, representing 13 nationalities, will train in the Mediterranean off France's southern eastern coast at Sete.

Coutts, who won the prestigious event five years ago for New Zealand with a 5-0 win off San Diego, caused a furore at home when he defected from Team New Zealand in May 2000 along with several other key team members who had successfully defended the Cup two months earlier.

Butterworth joined Coutts, a Olympic champion in the Finn class, as winning tactician in both bids.

Two challenges have been received for 2003 from the United States, two from Italy, and one each from Switzerland, Germany, Britain, Sweden and France.

It took the Australian syndicates seven attempts and the New Zealand-based challenges four to wrest the oldest prize in international sport away from the grasp of American yacht clubs.

- REUTERS

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