Team New Zealand Gets Last Shot at America’s Cup as Costs Surge

Americas Cup News
"(The America's Cup) is just ridiculously out of control, expensive. In its way, it's the last shot for this team. Maybe it'll manifest itself in another way because the brand is so strong, but as a put-together
sponsorship package with the dollars adding up to create the sum, it won't happen like that again. We're unified as a team, we're culturally strong. We can't fight them on a money platform so we have to fight them on a culture platform." 
~ Emirates Team New Zealand managing director Grant Dalton
Link to full article in Bloomberg

America's Cup, but not its pastime

Americas Cup News

America's Cup, but not its pastime
By Scott Ostler
How many Americans will it take to sail the American boat in the America's Cup in America next summer?          
One!

When Oracle Team USA sets sail to defend its America's Cup title on San Francisco Bay, the 11-man crew will include one American - tactician John Kostecki.

We own the America's Cup, we Americans. In theory, then, we rule the waves, we are the big dogs o' the sea. However, while we hire well, apparently Americans can't sail their way out of a wet paper bag. Our America's Cup team is skippered by an Australian, Jimmy Spithill, and on the 24-man Team USA roster there is Kostecki and one other American, Tom Slingsby, tactician on the back-up boat. (Slingsby has dual citizenship, U.S. and Australia.) Most of "our" sailors are from Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands. Also Britain, Antigua, Canada, Italy and France.

Apparently the secret to being a world-class sailor is speaking with a cool accent. Of the four other boats in the big race, there will be one American skipper, Terry Hutchinson of Artemis, and one other American sailor, Kevin Hall, also of Artemis.

Americans have approximately the same impact in big-league yachting as Eskimos have in the NBA. American sailors can't carry the Netherlands' jock. Whatever happened to Ted Turner and Dennis Conner, blue-blooded Americans who skippered American crews to glory in the America's Cup? Turner won in 1977 and Conner in '74, '80, '87 and '88.

Understand, this is not a criticism of an American-owned boat being sailed to American glory by a team that is (except for Kostecki) not American. As Jerry Seinfeld said, we root for laundry. That is to say, in sports we cheer for whoever is wearing our team's uniform. None of the current San Francisco Giants are native San Franciscans, yet we adopt them into our family. And so we will adopt and love Jimmy Spithill and his cool-accented, not-American sailors.

And yet ... America is a wealthy country, with oceans and lakes and wind. How come we can't sail? Would it help if our kids learned to affect cool Australian accents?

I found a man with an interesting opinion. Zach Berkowitz is a world-champion sailor, former TV weatherman, and the creator of the website Cupnetwork.com. Zach is a homeboy, grew up sailing the waters off SFO with Kostecki. He knows the game. So what's wrong?

"There's no more street ball," Berkowitz said. He explained that when he was a kid, sailing was an adventure undertaken for adventure's sake, far away from parents and coaches. But sailing went the way of baseball and basketball and soccer. It evolved (devolved?) into a sport where the kiddies are coached and parented to a fare-thee-well.

"The problem is over-coaching," Berkowitz said. "When I was a kid, we'd sail from the San Francisco Yacht Club to Richmond, get back at midnight. Our parents might get worried and call the Coast Guard, but we'd be back doing it the next week.

"We'd get a rush putting the big spinnaker up and seeing how fast we could go before we'd crash. We'd push and push and push, to get that extra rush."

Now, for kids who enjoy pushing, and adventure, there are sexier options than sailing. What we do now with li'l sailors, Berkowitz said, is, "We keep 'em in smaller, slower boats. ... They don't sail on their own. They lack the creative elements."

Australia and New Zealand are pumping out the top sailors.   "The mentality in Australia and New Zealand is to push, to learn to understand speed and what happens," Berkowitz said. "They put (kids) in high-performance boats when they're growing up, pushing the fun level."

As Berkowitz sees it, the new school of American sailing is a betrayal of the very spirit of America, and the Bay Area. "No one takes any risks," Berkowitz said. "Part of Silicon Valley and California is taking risks, going outside the box. Today (in youth sailing) it's not about risks, it's about moving down the path we have determined."

How sad is that? America, with the Bay Area complicit, has rendered itself irrelevant in big-time sailing by abandoning our roots and heritage. We have wimped out.

Surely there are other reasons for the dearth of U.S. sailors on America's Cup boats. The sport has become much more athletic over the years, and the most athletic American kids gravitate to the most popular sports. It's hard to imagine that Buster Posey, Michael Vick and LeBron James, had they opted for Little League sailing, could not have developed into world-class sailors.

Still, our country used to produce sailors who pushed envelopes, damn the torpedoes. Turner, who skippered Courageous to the '77 Cup win, was such an out-of-control sailor as a child that he was nicknamed the Capsize Kid. Look where that approach got him, in life and in the America's Cup.

American sailing has a fever and there's only one prescription: more swashbuckle. Either that or we must teach our young sailors to speak Australian, mate.

Scott Ostler is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Twitter: @scottostler