America's Cup: New crews, old dream

By SUZANNE McFADDEN

He who hesitates could lose the America's Cup. The most valuable commodity Team New Zealand lost in the great defection of last winter was not sailors, designers, knowledge or pride.

"It wasn't any individual or any information," says chief executive Ross Blackman. "It was momentum."

Lost momentum equated to time - time that should have been spent fundraising and simply getting on with the job of defending the cup was spent fighting to keep team members on board and rebuilding.

Since then it has been all hands on deck to make up for lost time, working into the night, on weekends and public holidays - even sailing in the chill of winter - to catch up.

There are no clock-watchers at the Team NZ base, where Syndicate Row is humming back into life again.

The sailors meet at the gym before dawn, then have breakfast at the base. Olympic rowing champion Rob Waddell, the new grinder , is in charge of making sure there is enough toast and cereal to go around.

They stay out on the black boats as long as the winds are kind, and that can be until the sun sets.

Even this Monday morning, with half of the team on their way to England for the America's Cup 150th jubilee in Cowes, those left at home will toil on behind the big, black walls of team headquarters.

It is exactly the halfway point between winning the last America's Cup and the next defence in February 2003. The team members' return from Cowes will herald the start of the countdown to the cup.

Financially, Team NZ have secured a little over 70 per cent of the money they need to cover the defence and running the event.

New skipper Dean Barker says his sailing crew are a lot further ahead in ability than he expected.

But whether they are on top of their game, and America's Cup champions or not, there is no room for cockiness.

The team are constantly reminded that when they lost a decent chunk of their senior guys during the 2000 winter of discontent, they lost people who had experienced the heartache of losing the cup.

Two-thirds of the sailing crew this time don't know what it's like to be part of a losing cup campaign.

The understanding in this game is that a nation must try to win yachting's holy grail for at least a decade before they rightfully have a chance of taking it.

"We are very aware of it and it's something we talk about," Blackman says.

"We could have dredged through the 92 camp and pulled out some old campaigners who know losing. But we can't sit in cotton wool and not take risks.

"We still have plenty of people here who were there in the old days. They remind the new guys how tough it was."

The sailors were given a timely kick in the seat of their wet-weather trousers last month.

At the Swedish Match Cup in Sweden, Barker and back-up helmsman Bertrand Pace failed to make the semifinals, up against rival cup skippers. To make the pain more acute, the matchracing regatta was won by Barker's old boss, Russell Coutts.

The next week, Barker made up a little ground, finishing runner-up in an event in Italy. But the disappointment of Sweden still sticks.

"It was a good wake-up call, I guess," says Barker. "But we don't want to have too many regattas now where we are learning lessons.

"We just went badly. I guess our focus is firmly on the cup now, and the matchracing circuit is a bit of a compromise. You rush off and do the events to sharpen up your skills, but you don't have as much time to put in the preparation.

"It's a tough call, but we'll still do some events next year."

Nevertheless, Team NZ sailors have had a reasonably successful Northern Hemisphere summer - they helped one of their sponsors, Hasso Plattner, win the Round Gotlund race on Morning Glory and finished second in the marathon Tour de France a la Voile.

Next week they will line up at Cowes on Morning Glory, and old Kiwi cup boats KZ7 and NZL32 in the cup jubilee. But don't take the results there too seriously - some of the rival boats are generations apart.

Cowes will give Team NZ a chance to sail against other America's Cup crews. It's unlikely to happen again in the next 18 months - the challengers are writing a rule stopping anyone pairing up with the defender before the match.

Sailing on the Hauraki Gulf in the last year's black boats begins again in October, when many of the challengers will have set up base in Auckland.

It will be about a year before anyone gets to see Team NZ's first battleship for 2003. The new black boats are taking shape - at least in the mind's eye of the designers.

"We've reached the critical phase - we're narrowing down our choices," says Mike Drummond, a principal designer and navigator.

The design team have made four trips to England in the past year, testing models at the Wolfson Unit at the University of Southampton.

Construction of the first boat will start early next year.

Designers are secretive - there's not much they will reveal at this stage.

Drummond admits, though, that they are quietly happy with what they had learned after a year's training in the old boats, with a few tweaks.

"But if we don't improve enough on NZL60, then we've failed," he says.

It is not getting any easier to make the next generation of international America's Cup class boats that bit faster.

"The design space is being narrowed down. Everyone has tended towards the heavy displacement, long-length end of the rule. So the differences we are looking for in testing are getting much smaller," Drummond says.

And the challengers are slowly making up ground on the New Zealanders. In 1995, the average margin between Team New Zealand and Stars 'n' Stripes was 2 min 15s. In 2000, Prada had cut that down to about 1m 40s.

Those who departed Team NZ - designers and some key sailors - obviously took invaluable knowledge with them.

"But I think they're in the same boat as we are. They've got a bunch of new people, too," Drummond says.

"When they start arriving here next month it will be hard for us not to watch them because it will be so in-our-face. But as soon as you start looking over your shoulder, it gives them the opportunity to catch up."

A 10-boat race looks likely when the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger series begins, probably in the first week of October next year.

Those syndicates have already paid their entry fees and there are no rumours of any latecomers.

The Viaduct Basin has no vacancies, anyway, and the huge sheds are mushrooming again. The largest is next door to Team NZ, where the Swiss Alinghi challenge - the new home of Coutts and Brad Butterworth - have taken over two base sites and built a monstrous building nicknamed "the Dream Box".

The belongings of the British Challenge and Italy's Prada are already on ships sailing to New Zealand, and Oracle, OneWorld and Alinghi will be here in the spring.

The challengers have yet to decide exactly when their preliminary racing will begin. There is talk of the challenger final ending a month before the cup match, to give the challenging team time to prepare.

Team NZ do not want the regatta to lose momentum if the break is too long.

Planning for the match is running smoothly, says Team NZ executive director Tony Thomas.

"It's easier this time because we're not reinventing the wheel."

Two of the event's "family of five" sponsors are in place and to be named next week, and there is a lot of interest for the other three spots.

"Funnily enough, a lot of Italian companies are wanting to get involved. The cup has obviously taken hold over there," Thomas says.

Negotiations are underway for the lucrative media rights. Last time more than 1800 hours of television coverage was broadcast in 98 countries.

"It looks like there will be greater exposure next time, with challengers from England, Sweden and Germany coming into the loop," says Thomas.

The ideal Christmas present for Team NZ this year would be a big box full of money to run the cup.

And Blackman is confident that all the funding will be there, under the Christmas tree.

"It's not just to win a yacht race - it's also to run the event and manage the harbour," he says.

"We're doing pretty good so far. We're a little more than 70 per cent funded now.

"It's absolutely brilliant that we got the Family of Five back. It indicated to the general market that we fulfilled our promise to our loyal sponsors.

"We couldn't have given a better signal to potential sponsors - the people who know you the longest, love you the most."

Signing German software giant SAP was "the icing on the cake".

Securing the money has lifted the syndicate's spirits. They speak of a new camaraderie; a much friendlier atmosphere.

"The monstrous shake-up we had was probably timely," says Blackman. "It made everyone really review their own lives. Everyone who is here really, really, really wants to be here.

"They made a conscious choice to keep working for their country. And it came at a personal loss - most of them would've earned a lot more money with another syndicate.

"I think there is an unquestioned commitment by everyone to show that our team is stronger en masse than any individual."

Even the youngest face at Team NZ has noticed a change in the air down on Halsey St.

Andrew Fenwick, the 19-year-old in charge of the new chase-boat fleet, helped out in the sail loft during the 2000 campaign.

"There's definitely a different feel this time - it's a lot more friendly," he says.

Fenwick was still a seventh-former at Westlake Boys High when he got a part-time job at Team NZ. His teachers gave him six weeks off the start of the school year.

When he left school, with a bursary, Fenwick ended up back on Team NZ's doorstep. Without the mass defections, there may not have been a job for him.

"I didn't know what I wanted to do in life - I looked at everything from law to business. So I came back here."

Working around the race yachts and running the chase-boats has already sowed a seed.

"I'm quite interested in engineering and design. These boats are just one big maths equation," he says.

Fenwick, who has sailed through the dinghy classes since he was a tot, might make yachting his future.

After all, the head of the chase-boats last year, Cameron Appleton, is now a back-up helmsman to Barker.

Feature: America's Cup