America's Cup Lite?

From San Francisco Peter Rusch says the general feeling is surprise about how good the racing is at the Moët Cup

It seemed too easy in the days leading up to Moët Cup to draw the immediate conclusion that the on-the-water action would be like the ‘Bud Lite’ beer that is so ubiquitous in America - watered down, weak, and not wholly satisfying.

That impression certainly wasn’t quashed in the days leading up to the event when Alinghi announced that Cup legend Russell Coutts wouldn’t sail. And it certainly didn’t help at the opening press conference on Sunday evening when his replacement, Alinghi skipper Jochen Schuemann, let slip that, “the Alinghi team is resting now, the team is not sailing at all, and we have no sports programme for the Alinghi team…We met here on the first of September, and have one boat here…We’ve not prepared for this event to win it."

Oops.

But much of the action on the first day made one think that perhaps Schuemann was exaggerating, and the close racing on display reminded everyone that although they may not have trained a lot for this event, Alinghi is still a pretty sharp sailing team, and Oracle BMW has continued to move forward.

In fact, it was actually pretty exciting racing, and in many ways lived up to the promise made by the organisers to the point that sailors, media and race fans alike were gushing through the post-race press conference, congratulating one another for the racing.

The Moët Cup offers lots of short course racing, and the spectacle of two giant America’s Cup Class boats short tacking up the San Francisco Bay shoreline, just metres off the parking lot of the Golden Gate Yacht Club, has to be seen to be believed.
Two separate series, with 12 races in total are to be completed in six days. There is the Pro-Driver series, with Alinghi skipper Jochen Schuemann and Oracle BMW skipper Chris Dickson in charge, and the Owner-Driver series with money men Ernesto Bertarelli (Alinghi) and Larry Ellison (Oracle BMW Racing) at the helm.

A full description of the racing is available elsewhere, but suffice to say, when it was all done, everyone was buzzing about how exciting it had all been. Yes, it is true that the results on the water probably don’t matter all that much, however, good, exciting America’s Cup Class racing is rare at any time, let alone four full years before the next event, so it’s nice to see what’s being offered this week.

The feeling dockside is that what is important is the effort the Cup holder Alinghi and it’s Challenger of Record, Oracle BMW Racing, are making to build interest in the America’s Cup just six months after it moved back to Europe for the first time in 152-years.

And apart from Schuemann’s unexpected burst of honesty on Sunday night, all the players are reading from the same script as they position this event as the first in a series designed to raise awareness, increase exposure, and ramp up the value to sponsors of competing in the America’s Cup.

"It is an expensive game and you do need commercial sponsors to do this and do this well," Larry Ellison said ahead of the racing. "What Ernesto has done by coming to San Francisco, and with the regattas that we’re going to have next year, is to make this a much more attractive event to spectators and therefore a much more attractive event to sponsors which should promote lots of other competitive teams coming and competing in the America's Cup."

And there’s the key. Getting more teams is perhaps one of the trickier tasks ahead for the newly formed AC Management - the company charged by Alinghi with running the next America’s Cup.

With a daunting cost of entry approaching US$80-million to float a competitive team, and the obvious head start that both Alinghi and Oracle BMW Racing have, just where are the 'up to 20 competitive challengers' that Russell Coutts first spoke about after the Cup win in Auckland, going to come from?

Both Ellison and Bertarelli seem to agree that the key is making it both less expensive and more attractive to sponsors, but that’s something that is easier said than done.

"My intention is to make the game affordable and make the game as open as possible," Bertarelli said. "As far as I’m concerned I would like to see as many challengers as possible, so anything I can do to help them in the Protocol (I will). There are already a lot of features which should help people join the fun."

For his part, Ellison doesn’t appear to be concerned about the idea that Alinghi and Oracle BMW Racing may be too successful for their own good. "OneWorld, Prada, Team New Zealand, they were all pretty strong teams that could come back and compete right away," he says. "Those were three extremely strong teams that could compete. I don’t think we’ll be alone. We’ll probably be the two favourite teams, but other guys could come out there. Team New Zealand is out hiring sailors and designers, and Prada’s active again. But the fact that we’re out here racing gives us a head start."

Fresh off his first America's Cup Class win on Monday evening, Ellison was even more enthusiastic commenting that there was more excitement here in one afternoon, than in six months of the Louis Vuitton Cup in Auckland.

While that may be a bit of an exaggeration, it’s hard not to like what happened on Monday. It was fun to watch, the public was engaged, and there was some good, close racing.

Of course, in the end, nobody is going to fall on their sword if they fail to capture the Moët Cup, but at the end of an exciting day of racing, and with a fireworks spectacular promised to keep the excitement going into the night, that’s not really the point. Is it?