America's Cup niggle-o-meter: Burling cops a few digs

The match-up between long-time Olympic rivals Peter Burling and Nathan Outteridge in the Louis Vuitton challenger final was never going to register much on the niggle meter, because, annoyingly, they both seem to respect one another.

There were a few signs of tension there though, when, for the second day in a row, Burling copped a few digs at his poor starts.

When the topic of pre-starts was brought up, Burling, who for the most part wears a look of bemused detachment during the press conferences, got slightly animated. For Burling that is.

Outteridge suggested Team NZ were running scared of Artemis during the pre-starts.
"It looked like Team NZ were really just trying to avoid us as much as they could ... they didn't leave much interaction," the Australian helmsman said.

"I guess you know when you're confident in the starts you're happy to take them on."

Outteridge's claims were met with a few scoffs and a shake of the head from Burling, who needed no invitation to get his own thoughts on record for once.

"For ourselves it wasn't so much about the start to be honest, our main goal was to get to the bottom mark in good shape and chip away from there. I think today it was pretty clear that Artemis' configuration was really quick on that reach, and we gave ourselves a pretty good opportunity in both the first and third start.

"Like I've said all along, today was about us trying to generate opportunities upwind where we were really fast, and we were really pleased with how we could do that."

That's as close to a cat-fight as you will get between these two, folks.