Levelling the playing field (again)

Sir Keith Mills and Grant Simmer speak out about the lack of challenger contribution in this 34th America's Cup cycle

Ironic, given the heated legal wrangling preceding the 33rd America’s Cup, but a storm is brewing up among the potential challengers for the 34th America’s Cup over what they consider to be BMW Oracle Racing’s monopolistic approach to the next event. Sound familiar? Once again we are hearing talk of ‘unlevel playing fields’ and ‘unfair advantages’, but rather than these emanating from the BMW Oracle Racing camp as they were just a few months ago, this time these accusations are being levelled against the American team.

Maybe this bickering is just ‘business as usual’ at this stage of the America’s Cup cycle, in an event where the outdated rules allow the defender the right to determine the degree of slant of the playing field in their favour. But weren’t we being promised a new era of egalitarianism, where the Defender ceded some of their rights to an independent body, democratising the process and generally making it more acceptable in the 21st century?

For while no one would question the sentiment behind Russell Coutts’ desire to revolutionise the America’s Cup – and frankly there are few other people who you would rather have undertaking this - the direction in which the event is heading seems to be solely the vision of Coutts, Larry Ellison and the BMW Oracle Racing team. At present the challengers can add their input, but seem to have no power to impose their will on the event. As Sir Keith Mills succinctly puts it: “What we are concerned about - but frankly no decision has been made yet - is that BMW Oracle has set about putting together a Protocol and a Class Rule through consultation, but consultation is not much use if you don’t listen.”

The main issue it seems is the invisibility of the Challenger of Record, the Club Nautico di Roma and their team Mascalzone Latino. Since the press conference in Rome on 6 May, Mascalzone Latino Team Principle Vincenzo Onorato has been decidedly below the radar and there has been little sense that the Challenger of Record has been performing their function of keeping the Defender in check via the ‘mutual consent’ process we heard so much about prior to the 33rd America’s Cup. In fact there are startling similarities between the 'silent partner' role the Club Nautico di Roma appears to be playing at present in the design of the 34th America’s Cup to that of the CNEV in the build-up with Alinghi to the 33nd.

As Sir Keith Mills puts it: “We have tried to contact them [Mascalzone Latino] on a number of occasions and had no response. They are not interested in talking to anyone.”

TeamOrigin has written to Onorato and proposed a group of challengers take on the responsibility of Challenger of Record as a group, like the Challenger Commissions that have been formed prior to all the America’s Cups since 1995. “We’re asking for that so that it is the challengers acting as a group together. We won’t always agree, but they never have in the past and you get strong and weak challengers and that is part of it, but as a group we go and say to the defender ‘we want to do this’,” says TeamOrigin CEO Grant Simmer.

Simmer continues: “Maybe when we know more about the event, that is going to happen. We are hopeful. We are asking for that and other challengers are as well, but ultimately it is Vincenzo’s decision whether he wants to do that. Certainly it is easier for them if they want to get a lot of stuff done quickly to do it with one party. Maybe they want to define the event together in a much smaller group and then any changes in the future will be agreed as a group of challengers. We’d be happy with that.”

The reason for these machinations happening now is that some significant issues are emerging. The main one is over the choice of boat. Along with their draft Protocol document that was recently distributed to the teams for comment, BMW Oracle Racing has proposed two possible boats to use – a 22 by 15.5m (72x 51ft) catamaran with a solid wing rig (think 33rd AC - BMW Oracle Racing rig with an Alinghi platform scaled down) or a 22m canting keel monohull (think Volvo Open 70-TP52 hybrid).

According to Sir Keith Mills none of the major potential challengers likes the idea of racing the 34th America’s Cup in a multihull. This seems to be for a range of reasons from a simple phobia of multihulls, as seems to be the case with Prada/Luna Rossa’s Patricio Bertelli to the Emirates Team New Zealand and TeamOrigin view that holding the 34th America’s Cup in a solid wingsail multihull would give BMW Oracle Racing an unfair advantage: following their R&D program for the 33rd America’s Cup they effectively have a two year head start on the other teams.

As Sir Keith Mills puts it: “We would prefer a monohull and all the challengers we work with closely - the six or seven major other teams – all prefer a monohull. In May when they got all the designers together, 90% of the designers wanted a non-canting keel monohull.” [Emirates Team New Zealand skipper Dean Barker is of a similar view - see here]

So a deal breaker? “If we thought the playing field wasn’t level it would be a deal breaker for everyone, not just our team. No one is going to spend tens of millions on competing in a competition where they don’t have a chance of winning. BMW Oracle needs to understand that. We are really supportive of them making the whole thing much more commercial and bringing television in, but major venues, major sponsors and major broadcasters are only going to be interested if there are enough really exciting viable teams to race against. An America’s Cup with two teams is not going to be very exciting, particularly if one of them is certain to win. It is just not a very exciting competition and it is not commercially viable.”

And commercial viability in the sports sponsorship market is something Sir Keith should know about, his team having already raised £650 million for the London 2012 Olympic Games from UK companies for UK rights alone.

Grant Simmer’s gave his assessment of the solid-wingsail multihull option: “Personally I have never been involved in building and developing a wing. It would be a technically interesting and challenging project. The one pager they put out on the multihull rule - its beam was defined and weight was defined and symmetric hull shapes. There would be a little bit of appendage development but the hull and the platform - there wouldn’t be a great deal to do there to get it right. The gain would be in the wing development. That would be interesting. If they [BMW Oracle Racing] wanted to give themselves the biggest advantage possible they would name a solid sail multihull as the class. The people that they have kept and have been hiring would also be pretty valuable in that area.

“It would be a great challenge, but they start with a huge head start...”

However from a TeamOrigin team perspective Simmer adds: “I actually think that more traditional match racing in monohulls is a pretty good spectacle and certainly TeamOrigin’s strengths are in that field. To change direction and get into multihulls is not something we want to do – I’m not saying we can’t do it, but it is not our preference.”

Then there is the venue, as Sir Keith Mills explains: “One of the thoughts is that because San Francisco will need some work in terms of the shore side, then perhaps there will be qualifying competitions in Europe and elsewhere and then the show will move to San Francisco in the last year or so. So we hope the rules are the same for the Defender as the Challengers. If the Defender is able to go and practice in their final boats in San Francisco and the rest of us aren’t allowed to do that – that is clearly not a level playing field. We have fed back to Oracle in a letter signed by several of the other Challengers a very detailed comment on their Protocol to make sure that the playing field is level, but we haven’t had a response yet.”

Another issue is over the small time window between the venue announcement and the final entry deadline.

As Grant Simmer explains: “You have find out what the event is, figure out what your team is and then go into the market place and try and sell that and raise the money to be a competitor. And if we found out everything about the event by October – it doesn’t give people enough time to go and raise money by January – that is not going to happen. And the commitment to enter is a lot of money [performance bond of US$ 3 million plus an entry fee of US$ 1.5 million, payable upon entry] and we have to be careful we don’t force people away into other parts of the sport or sponsors into other sports, because we are competing against other sports for the sponsor dollar. So there is an anomaly in the time frame and I hope they understand that and extend the entry period and next year there isn’t such a harsh requirement, not six or eight events as they were talking about. Because that is another 4 million we have to spend to compete next year for no reason really.”

In fact the period Simmer talks about could be as little as one month, for BMW Oracle Racing have said they are unlikely to make the venue announcement before December with the final entry deadline specified as being 31 January 2011.

The deliberating has also not helped progress with the Louis Vuitton Trophy and the events that were supposed to be held in 2011. As TeamOrigin’s Marcus Hutchinson, who is the British AC campaign’s representative on the WSTA, which runs the LV events, says: “The tragedy is that they have effectively shut the LV Trophy system down. Teams are unable to commit to things next year. Rather than be realistic and say we will give WSTA the mandate to run our events for us next year, because we already have events planned and negotiations are down the track with sponsors and venues – but we’ve had to stop it.”

However it is not all gripes. Both Sir Keith Mills and Grant Simmer are right behind the work BMW Oracle Racing has been putting in recently on investigating how to make the 34th America’s Cup work in the best possible way on television. The television side of the trials are set to continue in Cowes next week for the 1851 Cup when there will be two cameramen on each boat, plus gyro-stabilised cameras, key crewmembers mic-ed up, the output all melded together with the tracking.

“I think it is great that they are pushing that,” says Simmer. “Our sport has to have a better TV product, so if they have the funding to get that right, we’ll all benefit for that.”

Simmer also agrees that the sport needs more characters. During today’s press conference comparisons were made between the 1851 Cup skippers Spithill and Ainslie and tennis’ Federer and Nadal.

Personally there is nothing we would like to see more than an America’s Cup sailed in a group of solid wing sail multihulls [a big Little America’s Cup!], racing around some radical new courses with the most captivating TV coverage our sport can serve up. However the rest of the America’s Cup community, with the exception of Ernesto Bertarelli and Alinghi [how ironic is that?], don’t seem ready for this.

As Sir Keith Mills puts it: “The defender always has an advantage because they know before anyone else what the rules are going to be, but if the playing field isn’t level enough for challengers like TeamOrigin and others – and I talk to all the challengers all the time - then they will be pretty lonely.”

Perhaps a compromise, given that the perception is that BMW Oracle Racing would have too much of an advantage if the chosen boat was a solid wing sail multihull, would be to opt for a multihull with a more conventional wingmast arrangement, a 72ft ORMA 60, a boat in fact very similar to the MOD70, with the longer term aim of going down the solid wingsail route for the 35th?