Gordon McLauchlan: Secrets of Cup disaster well kept

The debacle of the America's Cup did not take place only on the water, it occurred in design shops, in management offices and boardrooms, in newsrooms and the minister's office. And it stretches right back to the handling of the departure of Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth.

I'm trying to think of anyone who emerges from this whole affair with credit.

Can't.

And now the Government is prepared to come up with $33.75 million to support a challenge in Europe on a $1 for $2 subsidy basis if Team New Zealand can deliver a convincing campaign plan and get the required sponsorship.

What worries me is the kind of appraisal the Government will make of this whole exercise. The Team New Zealand report released by director Peter Menzies this week said: "The most critical weakness was that no one individual had a total overview of where the team was at and final responsibility for and authority over decision-making."

So the question arises of the Government's scrupulousness in caring for the money it invests in private projects. In fact, who did the minister, Trevor Mallard, speak to at Team New Zealand? To whom did he give the responsibility of minding the money? Does he seem fazed that the Government gave these huge sums to an organisation with no CEO?

No.

Reports suggest that Team NZ was so late with its preparation and its boats were so inadequate in the conditions that it could easily have had nothing to line up against Alinghi.

Yet the Government has expressed no chagrin at the long-running calamity of the campaign, nor any doubt that many of the same people can manage the much greater task of conducting an offshore challenge.

A problem for me is that Mallard is susceptible to the sort of uncool, I'm-a-fan mentality that impairs the ability of people to make sensible appraisals.

Remember the Rugby World Cup, when he behaved like an unquestioning schoolboy in cahoots with a rugby administration later found to be lacking in judgment? I've not trusted his insight into anything since.

A large question also hangs over the journalists and commentators who reported on the America's Cup and who never uncovered the campaign tribulations responsible for the disastrous defeat.

The Team New Zealand report says a key factor in Team New Zealand's loss was the failure of the team's training boat NZL81, which suffered "crippling hull and deck structural damage" in December before its testing programme was even complete.

As a result, the team's belief in the race boat, NZL82, was undermined. The boat, therefore, was never pushed during trials in case it failed. The boat builder, Mick Cookson, says he twice warned the syndicate of flaws in the structure of their boats months before the sail-off, but was ignored.

Yet we are now asked to believe that despite this chain of events, no journalists doing their job of probing, questioning and listening discovered anything except that the race boat was designed for lighter weather than occurred. If they did know, why didn't they alert us to an impending disaster?

By "us" I mean the public who contributed tens of millions of dollars in taxes and rates to the campaign. Even now it seems to me the media is of a mind to forgive too readily. I've spoken to a number of people about this report and I detect a measure of public anger that we weren't told the full story earlier.

Because of the ballyhoo at the time, it took many of them a long time to realise what a mismanaged disaster this America's Cup challenge really was.

Imagine for a moment a Government social welfare agency or, say, the ACC incompetently wasting millions of dollars and drawing no strident media attention. The hounds would have been mercilessly on the trail.

As the cup series continued and Team New Zealand and its boat were clearly outclassed, the best we got from most journalists and commentators was naive speculation on the meaning of Dean Barker's body language - presumably before they rushed back to cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.

Or, if they did know about the imbroglio under their noses, did they decide the news was too ugly for us to bear? Or did they harbour some childish idea that such a disclosure would be unpatriotic?

I can believe that of media people who joined the absurd "Loyal" campaign. If boat builder Cookson is to be believed, aggressive investigative reporting might have turned up the story early enough to have saved the America's Cup.

The danger of specialists becoming subsumed within the organisation or industry they are reporting on is well-known among seasoned professionals.

But some journalists who don't have the right independent temperament for the business tend to become super-fans and apologists for the sport, or art, or business they cover. They are too easily deflected from bad news.

In my experience, when dozens of people know a secret high on the Pssst! Pssst! Listen-to-this scale, it's not too hard to prise open the truth. In fact, I now know someone who was aware of what happened, and talked about it.

Further reading: nzherald.co.nz/americascup