Coutts joins BMW Oracle Racing

We speak to the three time America's Cup winner and Larry Ellison about court and the 33rd America's Cup

Confirming speculation that has dated back from moments after Chris Dickson's departure from the team in June, three time America's Cup winner Russell Coutts was today announced as skipper and CEO of BMW Oracle Racing, heading Larry Ellison's third challenge to win the America's Cup.

As Larry Ellison commented: "Why Russell? He was the only three time winner of the America’s Cup available! He is the pre-eminant sailor, he is an extraordinary sailor, he’s an engineer, he’s a terrific leader, his results speak for themselves, he’s had 14 sailboat races in the America’s Cup and has won them all. I’ve sailed against Russell for a very long time. He’s done very well against me! I thought it would be fun to have him on my side this time."

The Coutts announcement held at the BMW Oracle Racing base in Valencia was no ordinary one. Under normal circumstances news of Coutts' appointment would have been massive considering he is the most successful America's Cup skipper on record, having won all 14 of the Cup races he has steered, but then being forced to sit out the last Cup following a fall-out with Ernesto Bertarelli. However at the press conference, where Coutts and team boss Larry Ellison were in the spotlight, it was substantially overshadowed by the team, via the Golden Gate Yacht Club in San Francisco, being in the early stages of litigation with Alinghi's club, the Societe Nautique de Geneve over what they consider to be an unfair Protocol for the 33rd America's Cup, for reasons we discussed at length yesterday.

Other than Coutts being appointed CEO and skipper, little in the way of hard fact is forthcoming at this stage. Coutts says that he didn't decide to return to the AC finally until he'd watched the incredible racing in the 32nd America's Cup. Coutts was in Valencia for races two and three, his first time in Port America's Cup: "To be honest I arrived in Valencia and I didn’t expect to see the event developed as much as it had done," he admits. "So it was a big surprise and a pleasant one to see the event and the quality of the racing and how close the racing was - for me it was great to watch, but I was also thinking ‘wouldn’t it be great to be out on the water again’. That was one of the key motivators to saying I’ll come back and do this again."



So why BMW Oracle Racing? Many were expecting Coutts to set up his own team, with any number of possible backers from Sweden or Dubai for example. However Coutts is not one to make life hard for himself, the decision to go with Ellison was a 'path of least resistance' and certainly won't be hurting the Coutts family pension plan too much. "Towards the end of the last Cup I was talking to several different teams and people coming into the game and the thing that attracted me to this team was that the infrastructure is all in place and it is good and they have some good systems and I guess they have done many of the things you have to do in a team like this," says Coutts. "Then the second thing was that I was given a leadership role that at my stage of AC sailing I really insist on, to be able to shape the team the way I would want to. Those were the two things that really gave me an interest, but I had quite a few discussions with Larry Ellison before I made a decision and I realised that he was much more receptive to my way of doing things, because we had a similar philosophy. So that was a good starting point for us. So he gave me a position and gave me the terms that allow me to come in and put together the operation I would like to."

So Coutts has been given carte blanche to set up BMW Oracle Racing v3 the way he wants. This last time around the US team was generally considered to be strong in every area - prior to the LV Cup we had her down as being the most likely challenger to get to race Alinghi, with a boat that was at least as quick at NZL 92. However as many predicted Dickson in the end proved too flakey to run the show and the team went into melt down.

Interestingly Dickson was heavily criticised for being both CEO of the team and skipper/helm, and Coutts' dual roles look set to be similar. The key differences are that Coutts is much more even tempered and also he is sacrificing some of the managerial side of the CEO role. As he says: "I want to get out there on the water again and so Larry has given me the flexibility to hire the structure to allow me to do that. So there will a structure to run the daily operations on shore allowing me to have a greater role in the sailng and development of the boats which is what I enjoy most and I think probably what I’m best at."

Coutts won't be drawn on which areas of the team he feels were strong and which were weak, however clearly there are several extremely good building blocks he has to work with. It should not be forgotten that, certainly in the cases of the last two Cup campaigns he was involved with, it was he who put these building blocks together and the structure and much of the personnel currently in place at Alinghi are there thanks to him. Coutts admits he will be applying the same formula of making a few very key appointments early on, to get the main building blocks in the right place from the outset and then creating an open, easy going work environment with free information flow that will hopefully inspire the best from those who work there.

"It is nice to make decisions and move forwards as quickly as you can, but it is also nice to make the right decisions," says Coutts. "I have got to do it the way I’ve done it in the past. A lot of thought has to go in about how to do it and obviously assembling the correct personnel is top of the list right now and use that personnel to create a game plan."

And so with the present Alinghi v BMW Oracle Racing contest going on on land the chances of Brad Butterworth and Coutts' former Team New Zealand cronies slipping quietly back to their old skipper seems very unlikely to happen. Butterworth has been repeatedly asked whether he is still committed to Alinghi and he has repeated answered in the affirmative, although now the conversations with Coutts on the golf course must be all the more animated.

"They, from I have been told, are committed to Alinghi which is great for them," says Coutts of his old former Team New Zealand chums. "We’ll obviously remain life long friends. It is the right move for them and we all know what a great team those guys are."

So if Coutts cannot get the Butterworth-Fleury-Daubney-Phipps band back together, will he look for another? James Spithill for example has his similar troupe that have gone from Young Australia to OneWorld to Luna Rossa. "This is a real team event," Coutts says, again answering in finest grey. "This is all about developing the right team of people and getting them working together in the right way using what I describe as the ‘right systems’. For sure I’ll be putting a lot of emphasis and a lot of work into that over the next three months. I’ve usually found it a pretty fun thing to do as the challenger trying to figure out which personnel to have and give everyone enough freedom to get the best out of people but have a structure that achieves certain key deadlines. That will be an interesting puzzle trying to put all that together again."

We suspect that Coutts has had his hit list for personnel drawn up for some weeks now. One imagines that Alinghi will have various contracts sewn up with their key people to prevent them being poached.

Obviously Coutts while he has not been playing America's Cup has been busy with the Artemis TP 52, his own RC 44s and the World Sailing League. Quite how all these will fit in to Coutts' life now that he has what many people assume is more than a full time job with a Cup team, remains to be seen. Coutts says that he will be racing the TP for the rest of the season and that everything is progressing well with the World Sailing League where they have been making good steps forward recently with the design of the new 70ft catamaran. One imagines that Coutts will have to pass on the responsibilities for many of these areas for the next couple of years while he refocusses on trying to win the America's Cup for the fourth time...



Ellison and Coutts on the protocol

While Coutts' return to the Cup is fantastic news, it does not join the team at the easiest time with BMW Oracle Racing (the Golden Gate Yacht Club) just about to start proceedings in the New York Supreme Court against Alinghi (Societe Nautique de Geneve).

While there was little new to report coming out of yesterday's event, it was interesting to hear Larry Ellison discussing it with such passion:

"The problem is with the protocol is that Alinghi can do whatever they want. The Protocol is so one sided that if Alinghi wants to throw BMW Oracle out of the racing it can, or Prada - at any time, for any reason. It can change the rules of the racing unilaterally at any time. On the design rules - 'let’s get on with designing our boat?' Well only Alinghi knows what the design rule is. For the rest of us it is a secret. So they haven’t told us what the design rule is, they haven’t told us where or when the event is going to be. Officials - Alinghi says this time we’ll pick all the officials and we’ll manage them all. We won’t give mutual consent - they’ll be working for and managed by Alinghi. No sports run officials like that. Can you imagine Chelsea hiring the officials for the Manchester United game, but then also wanting the ability to change the rules at any time? It is the most bizarre Protocol we have ever seen. Why anyone would agree to it is very surprising. No legitimate yacht club would agree to it. But CNEV (Club Náutico Español de Vela) is not a legitimate yacht club, it is a entity created a few days before they challenged. It was around for a few days, they have this challenger where they’d say ‘Alinghi, we are the challenger of record, but you can do whatever you want and we have no power at all’. It is not a legitimate yacht club, it is not recognised by the Spanish Federation of Yacht Clubs, it is not a YC as defined by the Deed of Gift, because they never held an annual regatta on the arm of the sea. We think it is an illegal challenge. We think it is a one sided and biased Protocol that gives no challenger any chance of winning and we’d like to solve this problem by negotiations but our efforts to negotiate have been rebuffed. So we’ve had no choice but to go to court. We still hope we can settle this negotiation, but if that is impossible then we have no choice than to resort to court.

"There has never been a Protocol like this in the history of the America’s Cup. Everything is supposed to be agreed upon between the challenger or the challengers and the defender and this is not the case with this Cup. We had a great Protocol for the last Cup. We had a great Protocol when we raced in New Zealand. This is a huge step backwards."

Ellison says he had a chance to "to talk to Ernesto on the phone and we were unable to come to an agreement on the Protocol. We just think it is very hard for us to be competitive. It is very difficult for us to make the investment with our sponsors to go into a race where Alinghi can suddenly decide for any reason that they just dismiss us, send us away with no reason. There are many other problems. I don’t think any team has any chance of winning other than Alinghi. Why would we race under this Protocol?"

Coutts cited the example of the option, his old team have allowed themselves this time, of racing in whatever the successor to the Louis Vuitton Cup turns out to be: "There are quite a few other aspects, such as the ability of Alinghi to race in the Challenger selection series and their results don’t count as far as there’s no risk to them in losing a race. For example they in theory could pick and choose who they race against and who they race hard against and who they don’t race hard against. So that is a strange situation when you compare it to most other sports and the America’s Cup event itself. So there are many things about the Protocol and really I think all of us that witnessed the event last time would like to preserve what a great event that was and go to a similar platform to where that left off from and race under rules that are much clearer to all competitors and provide a very very close match which is what I think most people want to see who are watching the sport."

One of the few new developments that was earlier in the day there was a meeting of the challengers. As a result of this meeting Ellison says that en masse they are embarking on the creation of their own design rule to present to Alinghi.

So the America's Cup is going to court and if the Golden Gate YC (BMW Oracle Racing) win then it is possible that the New York Supreme Court will rule that Alinghi must accept their challenge - of racing in Valencia in 2008, effectively under the fall-back Deed of Gift rules for the America's Cup in sloops of up to 90ft long (and up to 90ft wide, therefore catamarans or trimarans become a possibility). Coutts licks his lips at the prospect of getting Groupama III and sticking a mizzen on her (two masted boats can be longer than 90ft).

At the press conference Ellison confirmed that if this came to pass and they did have some bizarre dust up in large multihulls next year it would be held in Valencia and other teams would be able to come and play, there would be a selection series. So maybe there is some value in the defunct ORMA 60 fleet after all... Ellison added, for the benefit of the local journalists present that 'if' he won this event next year, then the following America's Cup would be defended in Valencia in 2009.

So the future of the America's Cup may be down to whether Bertarelli's lawyers have sharper teeth and are more wily than Ellison's. Bear in mind that the case will, if it ever gets that far, be held in the New York Supreme Court, Ellison has more money (if this matters, when you are talking the difference of several billion), is American and is no stranger to litigation.

Ellison clearly thinks they have a strong case: "We would never had brought this case unless we thought we had a very very strong one and we got that from our attorneys in New York."

We posed the question to Coutts that as a ex-Alinghi man and someone who should understand the way the Swiss team ticks, why he thought Alinghi had written such a one-sided Protocol? "To be honest with you it is difficult for me to answer that question. The real answer is that I don’t know. I know that Alinghi won the last two Cups by sailing better and designing better and certainly that is what we’ll be trying to achieve at BMW Oracle."

He added: "It would be interesting to hear the rationale for making all these changes to the protocol from the other side. I certainly haven’t heard a good explanation yet."

Ellison had more to say about this: "My view - and I am just guessing - is that the only sensible speculation is that they got a little scared. That spinnaker didn’t blow up for Team New Zealand. That is one race gone the other way. That penalty didn’t occur that's another race and suddenly New Zealand is winning 4-3 rather than losing 5-2 and there are one or two more races to go... So I think it was a very close call. But this is all guess work. So I think Alinghi got a little bit scared. They expected to win 5-0. It didn’t happen, so I think they are trying to stack the deck and rig the competition with this Protocol. Again, please, read it, you won’t believe what you’re reading! It is a little like a basketball game - where they say “we get a basket on our side that is orange and 10ft high and you don’t get one”, or “we can change the rules at any time”, or 'if things aren't going so well we can just dismiss the other team during the match'. You have to admit that it is kind of unusual. I have to go back to Russell’s statement - I just don’t understand it... I don’t know why Alinghi did what they did."

The fact of the matter is rightly or wrongly, one of the unique features of the America's Cup is that the defender gets to write the rules (even though this is not the case looking back to the ancient history of the Cup, if this matters, where the challenger would pitch up and call the shots). If the challengers don't like these rules, they don't have to play. At present for example there is no talk of splinter groups going off to create their own circuit, as traditionally happens when tiffs such as this occur within major sports.

So will Ellison and Coutts/BMW Oracle Racing and the Golden Gate Yacht Club win on land? The problem they face, as we wrote yesteday is that while their litigation is going on, on the other side of the fence the challengers they are supposedly aligned with are merrily signing on the dotted line, all the while further justifying Alinghi's protocol. First Team Shosholoza, then TeamOrigin and there is a rumour down here that Team New Zealand is not far behind. The challengers will never have any power until they are united and it seems Alinghi are banking on this never happening.

Even Ellison yesterday did not help his own cause when asked that if it came to the crunch and he lost the case, would he race under Alinghi's conditions: "The answer is yes - if Alinghi does not ban us from challenging. Under the new protocol we could challenge and they can just say ‘no, you can’t race’. You have to keep in mind they have the right to reject any challenger at any time."

We feel certain ACM will find a nice base for them, somewhere off towards the commercial port, beyond China Team...