Twenty five years ago those famous words by commentator PJ Montgomery rang out around our homes - 'The America's Cup is New Zealand's Cup'. In 2015, the Herald's Dana Johannsen and Alex Robertson talked to key members of Team New Zealand's crew which brought the cup home in 1995.
An oral history of Team New Zealand's 1995 America's Cup win
NZ Herald
45 mins to read
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But when Australia became the first nation to successfully challenge for the America's Cup in 1983, there was sudden belief we could do it as well. After all, tell any Kiwi Australia has done something and we'll immediately set about trying to outdo them. And thus came the KZ7 challenge in Fremantle.
Today marks the 25 years since that remarkable day when New Zealand clinched the America's Cup for the first time, spawning Peter Montgomery's famous line "the America's Cup is now New Zealand's Cup". Much has happened over the past two and a half decades since - the successful defence in 2000, the break-up of the syndicate following the defection of Coutts, Brad Butterworth and the core of the sailing team, the subsequent rebuild and the heartbreak of Valencia and San Francisco before New Zealand got their hands back on the Auld Mug in Bermuda in 2017.
In 1995 Team New Zealand were the toast of the sailing universe.
In this oral history, the crew and those close to the campaign relive their memories of that time.
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I - Building the team
Russell Coutts (skipper/helmsman): The success in 1995 really goes back to the tone Peter Blake set right from the start. His philosophy was simple - the winning of it would be designing a better boat, building a better boat and then sailing it better. And that was the focus all the way along.
Peter Montgomery (veteran yachting commentator): It actually took a lot of arm-twisting for Peter Blake to be involved because he really was quite disillusioned after 1992. I have a recording of Blake saying "if that's the America's Cup you can stick it". He'd been brought in too late and that structure hadn't been set up the way he did campaigns and it wasn't a particularly enjoyable experience for him.
Suzanne McFadden (NZ Herald yachting reporter 1993-2001): Alan Sefton, who had been Blake's right-hand man through his Whitbread campaigns, convinced him to put 1992 behind him and enter the next America's Cup. Blake had to pay the $US75,000 entry fee out of his personal savings - actually, he had to ring [his wife] Pippa from somewhere in the Atlantic and get her to visit the bank manager. And then Blake had to put together a team from scratch - sailors, designers, sponsors - which was a pretty big ask, but there was this real confidence that he was the man to do the job.
Tom Schnackenberg (designer/navigator): I was part of a small group trying to get the thing going. I was doing it on a best intentions basis because I had an offer from an Australian team. One of the first things we did was a meeting at the squadron with 25 or so yachties - the only people missing were the potential helmsmen: Russell [Coutts], Chris Dickson and Rod Davis. We decided Russell would be the best person.
Coutts: A lot of the early time we spent just trying to figure out what had gone wrong and what had gone right in the past and what were the winning factors in the previous campaign. So we probably spent two or three months just talking to people and thinking about that before we made too many moves.
Montgomery: It wasn't just the big names like Coutts and Butterworth that were key - to perform well they needed very good crew. The whole Citizen Match Racing series that was run through the RNZYS through the 80s and 90s spawned so many good sailors, who became very skilled in the art of match racing.
Joe Allen (bowman): All of those guys we'd beaten the hell out of each other in our teenage years. We'd all crossed swords with one another at some point in time. My association with Russell was pretty frosty to be honest, and I was quite surprised and humbled to be asked to sail with him. Looking back it just shows he knew who he needed to get the Cup won and he put a lot of ill-feeling aside. His crew selection at that point in time was unbelievable. I remember thinking "shit they're going to have to be good to beat us".
Jeremy Scantlebury (grinder/boat captain): We certainly had the best match-racing skipper at the time, and we had a very, very smart afterguard with Brad Butterworth, Murray Jones, Richard Dodson. If you matched everyone up against any of the opposition, we were superior right throughout the boat.
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Montgomery: On the strength of [the experience in the team], Coutts was in a meeting with the designers and he said "you give us a boat that is equal, and we'll win".
Coutts: We actually got more than what I think any of us ever envisaged - the boat turned out to be absolutely fantastic.
1995 Team New Zealand crew
Russell Coutts - skipper/helmsman
Brad Butterworth - afterguard
Tom Schnackenberg - afterguard
Murray Jones - afterguard
Rick Dodson - afterguard
Warwick Fleury - mainsheet trimmer
Peter Blake - mainsheet traveller
Simon Daubney - trimmer
Robbie Naismith - trimmer
Ross Halcrow - trimmer
Andrew Taylor - grinder
Craig Monk - grinder
Matthew Mason - pit
Jeremy Scantlebury - mast
Joe Allen - midbow
Dean Phipps - bow
II - Building a rocket ship
The unveiling of NZL 32's keel at the Team New Zealand compound at San Diego. Photo / David White
Montgomery: One thing Blake insisted on was to set up a sailor-driven campaign, working closely with the designers, the sail makers and spar makers. While that sounds simple, in a sport where the designers are often viewed as the gods, it wasn't the standard approach. So much of the innovation and ideas came from the sailing team. The sailors actually have a few clues, but they'd never been asked. This time they were involved and that empowered them.
Coutts: The designers still had an enormous impact on the final result, but it was just a more collaborative process where they had to present their ideas and so forth and we really debated the ideas such as the mast design.
Craig Monk (grinder): We built a full-size mock-up in an office in Shortland St. That's the whole deck layout and all the crew got involved and that was pretty much how we set up the boat. At the time it was quite innovative. It was quite good to have the guys standing around saying we want that winch there and in the match racing we want the trimmers closer together, the helmsman further up the boat.
Murray Jones (tactician): It was a very constructive decision-making process. We'd make decisions and everyone would leave the meeting completely happy with the decision and we'd move on to the next thing. There was no second-guessing, we'd move on and focus 100 per cent on the next thing on the agenda.
Allen: We were a little bit late launching. We waited at least 10-12 days because we got smashed by a really bad front of heavy weather that whole time. That was September of 94. It had to go on a ship in November or just before Christmas or something like that.
Coutts: We were one of the last teams to launch, but we were pretty confident with the design decisions we had made.
Monk: When we launched 32 we had [NZL-20 from the 1992 campaign] there immediately to line up with. The old saying, if it's fast out of the box, or fast from brand new, then it's going to be a great boat. And that first day, there were lots of smiles and the boat proved to be very fast from day one.
We had an issue at that point because we had to disguise the boat. We had to do an anti-PR campaign that the boat was actually slow. We didn't want to put the spotlight on ourselves.
Montgomery: Oh they were buggers. They started spreading rumours that the boat was disappointing. I know that was Coutts, maybe Butterworth was involved as well. But as we all know Coutts has been a past master at getting people off the scent.
McFadden: Scuttlebutt around the waterfront had it that NZL-32 was a bit of a dog and even NZL-20 could beat it, so myself and a few others wrote stories that it seemed there may be problems with the boat.
Allen: We had some very devious and clever people and we'd manipulate those situations to our benefit.
Coutts: It wasn't a case of spreading those rumours - it was just a case of letting them run.
Montgomery: Of course Peter Blake was furious because he was getting calls from sponsors saying "what's going on, the team are telling people the boat is a bit of a dog?".
McFadden: It was an early indication that Coutts and Butterworth were very good at playing the America's Cup game on and off the water.
III - The Build-up
Crowds outside Team New Zealand's compound awaiting the lifting of the skirts to unveil the keel. Photo / David White
Montgomery: Coutts set a very high standard, as he does having won an Olympic gold medal. He got off the boat twice in late 1994 to shake the crew up. There was too much laughing and joking and things had got a bit loose. Coutts was very critical of what happened in 1992. When the boat was off the dock at 9, well that could mean 9.30 or 10, rather than being precise and working to a proper schedule.
Schnackenberg: Nowadays the sailors are all top athletes and they're right at the top of their game and they spend hours and hours a day at the gym. We didn't do that. We had a gym programme that was pretty relaxed and people relied on self-discipline. Russell made a speech to the crew and said everybody knows what they need and know how much training they need. I'm not going to tell you. He said, the grinders have to stay fit and strong, the navigators have to get on and off the boat without having a heart attack and everything in between.
Montgomery: The first word in Team New Zealand is team, and it really was. The whole management style, and the way the sailors were empowered. Everyone had their own responsibilities off the boat. And I think that was very important, there were no hidden agendas - they respected each other's space and responsibility.
Monk: I worked in the sail loft and with the winch maintenance. So there was always huge amount of work to do. We were never leaving the dock. We were working 'til ten at night. Everyone had those duties and there was so much work to do. It was good fun doing it really.
Coutts: It was a necessity driven by budget as well. That campaign we only had the fifth biggest budget in the competition. The budget was $27 million, which is a lot of money back then. But it was a lot less than all the big teams we were racing against. We didn't have the luxury. I think we had 52 people in the team to run two America's Cup boats. For example when we went out training in the two boats we sailed them short-handed. We sailed them with 11 crew on each boat. We just didn't have the money to have two full crews fulltime. The same with the shore operations, we didn't have a big shore team.
Jones: We spent all our pre-Louis Vuitton time just speed testing 32 against 38, which we launched over in San Diego, and just trying out different sails and all sorts of stuff. We spent no time at all really learning how to race or gybe or tack. It was a low priority, so we used the Louis Vuitton Cup for that practice really.
Monk: Russell and Brad were good at pushing us to our limits. We probably did more sailing than anyone else back then. That was our work ethic: if we sail more we're going to learn more and we'd be doing six hour days in San Diego - we'd come in and it would be night time, towing at night. We only had one day off a week, or one afternoon, and that was to do the washing and get ready for the next day.
Allen: It could have been a drag but it wasn't. We all got on so well and had so much fun - you'd get on the boat and you wouldn't want to get off at the end of the day because we'd had such a great time.
Monk: Food was at a premium. It was a standing joke on board.
Team New Zealand's grinder Craig Monk outside the New Zealand compound in San Diego holding his packed lunch. Photo / David White
Allen: We used to buy our own lunch. We had a $19.98c food allowance per day.
Monk: Each individual sailor had to look after their own requirements. And I know that Russell always came on board with no food so you could actually sell him a sandwich or two.
Schnackenberg: He was always thinking about winning the America's Cup rather than thinking about making his lunch so he was scrambling around. I remember one day [Coutts] paid Murray Jones $3 for a peanut butter sandwich out on the water because he was starving.
Allen: You could get him every day. You'd come home and you'd have enough money to buy a couple of beers at the pub.
Coutts: We had a lot of fun, it was a really good team. That was the other overriding thing, the chemistry amongst the team was fantastic. People got on and worked hard and had a lot of fun.
Allen: We had plenty of bullies, we had comedians, we had thugs, we had devious people, clever people, bludgers .... every type of person was on that boat. But it just worked.
IV - The racing begins
Team New Zealand and OneAustralia jostle for position. Photo / David White
Monk: We had been solely focused on boat speed not crew work. We never went out and practiced drops and hoists or anything like that. So [the opening race of the Louis Vuitton challenger series] was really the first day of the team coming together and that was the start of our crew work training at the start of the Louis Vuitton. It's amazing how a fast boat makes your crew work look pretty slick.
Coutts: The Australian team were favoured to win it, the yachting press hadn't really been paying much attention to Team New Zealand. Then in one of the early races, there were two Australian syndicates racing against one another. I think we started 10 minutes behind them in the match behind and we caught both of those boats up, passed the losing boat and rounded the last turning mark right behind the leading boat, we were actually bow to stern. Joey Allen walked up to the front of the boat, and yelled out to Rod Davis who was driving the Australian boat - "would you get that thing out of our way - we're racing". It was a pretty arrogant thing to say but it was pretty funny at the time.
Allen: The boat was an absolute rocket ship. You can afford to be a bit cheeky when you're on a rocket ship like that.
Schnackenberg: After we raced the Australians for the first time they told the press that we had a breakthrough boat. That's what they said - the opposition. And that was the first time they raced us.
Montgomery: It was quite clear early on this team had the whole package, but they really tried to play it down. The mood in the team was really quite suppressed. There was no celebrating allowed on board - it was just a nod and a well done after each race and on to the next day.
Scantlebury: We'd come unstuck in the past where we'd done really well at the start and fallen over at the end. KZ-7 was an example, 1992 we got into a legal issue with the bowsprit in NZL-20. So we were very conscious not to get too ahead of ourselves.
Part of the spectator fleet during the Louis Vuitton cup. Photo / David White
Jones: The guys really liked to play it down and show no emotion and that sort of thing. That was a big deal in the team. It would be frowned upon big time [if we celebrated].
Allen: Matthew Mason he was a huge bully. And he said "guys we're not going to do any high-fives, it's an American thing" so he just took it on himself to ban high-fives from the boat.
Jones: Joey [Allen] and I used to do [a sneaky high-five] every race. I used to go up on the foredeck and pull the spinnaker down and feed it down the hatch and Joey was down below pulling it in. Once we got the thing safely on board I'd always stick my hand down and he'd give me a high-five. Until one day Matty saw us and I knew it wasn't going to be good.
Allen: As soon as we went across the finish line, he just turned on us and said "right that's bullshit". He's a bloody big thug. And he grabbed Murray and tried to throw him over the side. I went and attacked him and all three of us fell off the yacht. And Blake is just standing there going "my god, the guys are fighting".
Jones: I actually went in twice. I got thrown in another time when we went out testing. David Barnes [one of the Kiwi sailors aboard One Australia], who is a very good friend of mine, used to follow us around in the chase boat watching us, or spying on us I guess, day after day. One day there wasn't much wind about and we were just sitting around, so I got in a chase boat to go and have a chat to him. And then when I went to go back to the boat I said 'oh can I have your cap?' so I went back onto the boat wearing the One Australia cap. I lasted less than a minute.
Allen: We had a lot of fun but there was a lot of pressure in that no-mistakes mentality. Trying to produce no-mistakes sailing day after day was pretty draining.
Monk: The races seemed very long, sometimes up to three hours long. We did three laps - six legs of like three miles, I think they were. It was a two hour tow just to get to the start, so we'd leave the dock at maybe 9 o'clock in the morning - this is just for one race - and we'd get back at six o'clock at night. For one three-hour race it was a nine-hour ordeal.
Schnackenberg: After the first round robin we had raced every single challenger and beat them all. We started thinking this is pretty good. We beat them all by good margins. Not lucky wind or close races, we tended to get in front pull away a little bit.
Monk: We celebrated (after the first round robin) with a pizza with the whole team and a couple of Steinlagers. I don't think we even had the next day off. There was about a week, or maybe ten days until the next round robins and we saw those days as important as the racing, to keep developing the boat. It wasn't feet up - we were back the next day two boat sailing, testing, whatever we knew we needed to test to make the boat go faster. It went on like that after all the four round robins. We never stopped sailing.
Coutts: I thought as long as we kept improving it would be very, very difficult for the others to catch up.
V - The man up the mast
Team New Zealand with Murray Jones up the mast looking for wind. Photo / David White
The only point Team NZ lost during the Louis Vuitton round robin was in the jury room.
McFadden: As smoothly as everything was going, there was still a sense, from outside the camp anyway, that the wheels could fall off for Team NZ. And not necessarily because of something within their control - as we know the America's Cup is famous for its protest-room shenanigans. So when the man up the mast debacle occurred and they lost that point, just a little bit of a shudder went through everyone and we were thinking "Oh here we go again; are they going to pull out all the stops to make sure Team NZ don't get to the end of this thing?".
Montgomery: Murray Jones became known through the campaign as the man up the mast. On very light calm days they put him up the mast. One, because he was the lightest, and two because he was a very good "heads-up man" and spotting those patches of wind.
Jones: I was really stupid. It was actually my idea originally. We did a regatta in Wellington prior to the Cup and unusually there was no wind, so I made the suggestion that it might be quite good if I go up the mast and look for the breeze from up there. And I never came down for about three America's Cups.
McFadden:: Coutts joked that Jones talked too much, so the crew banished him to the top of the mast. But it wasn't a laughing matter when OneAustralia protested - they successfully contested that when Jones was up the mast and the boat heeled over, he was outside the vertical lines of the hull. And he wasn't up there doing a specific task, which was also illegal.
Jones: It didn't bother us too much it was just annoying because the rule was about increasing stability. But when you're up the mast you are beyond the sheerline, but you're on the leeward side, so you're decreasing stability, not increasing it. But anyway, what we learnt was the intent of the rule does not make any difference.
Scantlebury: We just ignored it and tried to go about our knitting really.
Coutts: Nobody gave a hoot. We sort of said "well that's not going to win or lose it, who cares?", whereas previously we would have really focused on something like that. And that goes back to the tone Peter Blake set right from the start. When we were getting the thing off the ground I can vividly remember him standing up and saying "look up until now we've been engaged in conflict with other teams, protests, rules disputes, but we're not going to do that this time. We're going to win this by building a better boat and sailing better than anyone else". He said: "forget about that other stuff that goes on in the America's Cup - we're not going to focus on that at all. We're not going to be a legal driven challenge any more".
Jones: After that I just didn't go so high - I only went to the second spreader.
VI - The competition is sunk
One Australia crew abandon ship during a race against Team New Zealand. Photo / YouTube
By far the most enduring image of the 1995 regatta is that of One Australia breaking up and sinking during their round robin three match with Team New Zealand. It was the first time in 144 years of competition an America's Cup contender lost a match race by shipwreck.
Montgomery: They had just rounded the bottom mark and Team New Zealand were leading by about 100-130 metres, but One Australia were giving them the ginger. They were in a boat race. Then suddenly - it is something that is seared on my memory as much as the pleasant things - the boat crashes down heavily off a wave, the boat stops, the rigging goes slack and the boat just bends like a banana. There was a huge crack in the hull and it was taking on water big time.
Jones: Someone said "there's something wrong with their forestay", because we saw the luff of the genoa go slack. We thought it might have been a broken runner or whatever.
Everyone was looking under the boom and lost focus on their jobs. The next thing it is folding up and disappearing.
"Big Fella, are we going to sink?" - One Australia helmsman Rod Davis to his tactician Iain Murray.
"Yes. We are going to sink." - Murray's reply.
Montgomery: The guys started throwing off their shoes and jumping into the churning seas. All of a sudden we went from a commentary boat to a rescue boat. We plucked about four or five guys out of the water.
Jones: The speed that it went down was really scary. That was the worst bit sitting there thinking there might not have been guys that got off the boat because they got caught up in ropes or someone was down below.
Montgomery: It got very hairy there for a while. The time between that first crack and the boat sinking to the bottom of the Pacific was two minutes. Of course there was a real danger that someone could have got sucked into the vortex as the yacht went down if they hadn't managed to get clear.
Allen: I found it bloody terrifying. I thought we would be going to a funeral. We were absolutely convinced that there would have been people down below and they would be dead. And I remember the feeling of relief when we heard everyone was okay...and then the Aussie bashing started.
Coutts: We retired from the race and it was a good job too because we got ashore and checked what we call the tip-cups, which are a rigging element on the mast, and a couple of them had actually yielded, so we could have easily lost the mast that day.
Scantlebury: I think we went through that next night and pored over the boat, just double checking that everything was still in one piece and there hadn't been any damage.
Montgomery: After that, no one would actually say it in Team NZ, they weren't brash enough and they were sensitive to the fact it was such a disaster for One Australia, but they realised once the Australians were gone they were really in a pretty good spot.
VII - The new Black Magic
Black Magic prepares to round the second weather mark on her way to beating OneAustralia by 4mins: 55secs in Race 1 of the Louis Vuitton Cup final. Photo / David White
Montgomery: Team NZ used NZL-38 through round robin 1,2,3 and it kept on winning, absolutely blitzing the opposition. And then, come the semifinals, lo and behold they brought out NZL-32. People had assumed because of the sail numbers 38 was an evolution of 32, so when they brought back 32, everyone thought "what's going on here then?".
Coutts: Very early on it had quickly became evident 32 was the better boat. It was the more extreme boat for the time - it was longer and narrower than 38. There was the thinking because the design tools were pretty unsophisticated compared to what they are today, there was a bit of uncertainty as to whether we had gone too far with some of the design concepts, so we wanted to hedge our bets a little bit and go back a bit so NZL-38 was a little bit wider and shorter with a little bit more sail. So that was pitched more towards where we thought the opposition might be - and that turned out to be right, that's exactly where the opposition were.
Scantlebury: We had learnt from previous America's Cups not to show your cards too early. So we started out racing with NZL-38, but any time in between round robins we were working up NZL-32 and trying to get that as fast as possible. It was a nice luxury to have. We could still have probably won the America's Cup in NZL-38.
VIII - Louis Vuitton Cup final and the red socks
Team NZ supporters wearing red socks on the water in San Diego. Photo / NZ Herald
Remarkably, after returning to the water in their pace boat AUS-31, One Australia managed to advance to the final of the Louis Vuitton Cup, where they met Team New Zealand.
Coutts: The Australians at the end made a bunch of changes and improved their boat dramatically, and they made them over a three-week period. And they really challenged us at the end, if they had have been where they were at the end say a month earlier, it would have been a really close race. They [sinking of their race yacht] forced them to make some adjustments on the fly right at the end not knowing if they would work or not.
McFadden: On the morning of race three of the challenger finals, Alan Sefton took me on a tour of Team New Zealand's compound as the boat was about to dock out. He was explaining how superstitious these guys were - Coutts always had to be the last guy onto the boat and Blake always wore these red socks. I thought that's a bit weird...red socks with boat shoes? Right.
So I wrote about these goofy good luck charms in the Herald the next day. And then that day, race four, was the day Blake was off the boat because he had tendonitis in his elbows. It turned out to be the only race they lost on the water. The legend of the red socks grew from that day on.
Montgomery: The better Team NZ did the more money they needed. To keep the whole team on and everything running operationally cost money. I think they had budgeted to the end of April, but they had to keep going to the end of May. It really became a problem, it was a good problem, but it was a problem.
McFadden: TVNZ, one of the Family of Five sponsors, was trying to think of an idea for a campaign to help Team NZ raise money. So somebody at the table suggested "why don't we start selling red socks?". Next thing you know they are rolling off the production line and everybody in New Zealand had a pair. They raised I believe $100,000, which got Team NZ some much-needed new sails. But it also of course got the nation behind the boat. It was a two-pronged campaign and it really worked.
The reason for Team NZ's only loss on the water really was to do with Black Magic - the boat, rather than the supernatural powers of Blake's red socks.
Schnackenberg: We lost the start seriously and then just followed them around the racecourse. We got quite close but we didn't pass them.
Peter Blake waves after victory over OneAustralia in the second race of the Louis Vuitton Cup finals. Photo / David White
Coutts: My starts throughout that campaign weren't particularly great - that was a lot to do with how the boat was designed by the way.
Jones: We had quite a small rudder and the boat was quite hard to turn so we weren't too ambitious in the prestart because we didn't want to get into too much trouble there. Often in the Louis Vuitton Cup final against the Australians we would come off the line second best and we had to work pretty hard to get past them.
Schnackenberg: Through our testing period we went smaller and smaller on our rudder and we seemed to be getting faster and faster. We knew it would be difficult but if we could start clean, we were confident we'd be okay over the course of the race to get by if we were slightly behind. If we were even, well that would be even better.
McFadden: That loss probably did make a few people nervous, but the way they came out the next race and pinged One Australia from the start then you just knew they were in control. One Australia didn't get close again through the series.
Final run to the finish of Team New Zealand's race against OneAustralia. Race 4 of the Louis Vuitton cup final. Photo / David White
Monk: It was good to get [the LV series] behind us and be in the final. We did celebrate that. We probably upgraded from the beer to the champagne for that one, but we didn't get too carried away.
Jones: I think there was a sense of achievement, but winning the Louis Vuitton Cup was an intermediate goal. The America's Cup was the only thing that we went there for.
Louis Vuitton Challenger Series
Challengers:
Team New Zealand (Royal NZ Yacht Squadron)
One Australia (Southern Cross Yacht Club)
Nippon Challenge (Nippon Yacht Club)
Tag Heuer Challenge (Tutukaka South Pacific Yacht Club)
Spanish Challenge (Monte Real Club de Yates de Bayona)
Sydney 95 (Cruising Yacht Club of Australia)
France America 95 (Yacht Club de Sète)
Round robin
Four round robin series (RR1-RR4) were held. During RR1 a team scored 1 point per win, during RR2 a team scored 2 points per win, during RR3 a team scored 4 points per win and during RR4 a team scored 5 points per win.
Final standings
Team New Zealand - 23 wins -1 defeat - 70 points
One Australia - 17-7 - 53 points
Tag Heuer Challenge - 17-7 - 49 points
Nippon Challenge - 11-13 - 28 points
France America '95 - 8-14 - 25 points
Spanish Challenge - 3-11 - 14 points
Sydney 95 - 5-19 - 13 points
*One Australia's boat AUS-35 sunk when racing Team New Zealand during RR4 and they were left with only AUS-31.
Semifinals
Team New Zealand - 9-2
One Australia - 7-4
Tag Heuer Challenge - 6-5
Nippon Challenge - 0-11
LV Final
Team New Zealand bt One Australia 5-1
IX - Defenders in disarray
While Team NZ were battling their way through the challenger selection series, the defender was locked in a battle of their own. Three US teams were vying for the right to defend the Cup: Dennis Conner's Stars and Stripes; John Marshall's Young America, and an all-women's crew, skippered by New Zealand's Lesley Egnot and funded by US billionaire Bill Koch.
Tom Whidden (Stars and Stripes tactician):
We had our hands full just trying to be the defender.
Tom Schnackenberg (designer/navigator):
Dennis Conner was lucky to get into the final. He'd brokered his position. They had lost to the women's crew in the semifinal but somehow before they went out and race the principals of Young America and the women's team, which was America3, they would continue on in a three-boat final. The women very nearly won that final as well.
Joe Allen (bowman): I remember the terrifying moment when we thought we were going to race the girls, which we really didn't want to do. There was only one guy we wanted to race, and that was Dennis Conner.
Murray Jones (tactician): If you're going to win the America's Cup, you want to do it against Dennis Conner, who was Mr America's Cup at that time.
Whidden: It came down to the last day when we had to beat the women's team. We were behind by four and a half minutes so things weren't looking too good for us. Luckily the wind died a little bit and they went off in one direction and we went off in the other and picked up a very favourable wind shift.
Peter Montgomery (veteran yachting commentator): Conner and his advisors Tom Whidden and Paul Cayard [helmsman] all concluded that this boat NZL-32 is much quicker and being very well sailed, so they did a deal with Young America and chartered their boat.
Russell Coutts (skipper/helmsman): In a way it didn't matter. In the previous campaigns the team lawyer would have been out there arguing about the process, everyone would have been getting worked up. We just said "well, they'll choose their boat and come and race us".
Whidden:
It was a waste of time [changing boats]. I'm not sure it was any faster and the Team NZ boat was so impressive.
Schnackenberg: They hadn't sailed it before. And I remember watching a race, they would get to the mark and we were in a lift to weather and Dennis wasn't sure whether the wind was to the right or the left. They had sailed the boat so short of time they hadn't even calibrated the instruments.
Coutts: Paul Cayard in those days was one of the best sailors in the world and they were a good team. It was pretty obvious Dennis was past his best at that time. He wasn't that engaged quite frankly. But they had a good sailing team without him.
X - The moment of truth
Dennis Conner looking very pensive during the America's Cup finals. Photo / David White
Peter Montgomery (veteran yachting commentator): One of the big attractions that has been wonderful about the America's Cup in the past, but is soon to be lost, is just the uncertainty. The defender and challenger have never raced. There's nothing like the first leg of the first race of an America's Cup match when the two square off for the first time.
Craig Monk (grinder): As we were heading out on the race course for that first race all I can remember is the noise - there were helicopters, maybe three or four, buzzing around. The boat was loaded-up with cameras, people with mics and things like that. All of a sudden the stakes were up quite high.
Coutts: In any America's Cup final there's a lot of tension.
Allen: I was absolutely shitting myself.
Monk: It felt something different other than a yacht race.
Allen: The sense of occasion was there for sure, I just remember thinking "my god this is the first time New Zealand has been in an America's Cup". I didn't take it too lightly.
Whidden:We won the start quite dramatically. It was at the windward end of the committee boat and they were sort of behind us and probably right in our bad air. And they sheeted in and sailed up a little higher and then let the sails out a little bit and went faster and right on by us, so we knew we were in big trouble at that point.
Peter Montgomery (veteran yachting commentator): Team NZ had hit the elevator, meaning they were just lifting off and comfortably doing it. When they got to mark one, race one it was pretty obvious the America's Cup was going to be theirs.
Jones:That first 30 seconds of race one was pretty exciting to line up and just be looking under the boom and see how we're going and the relative speed. It became pretty clear pretty quickly that their boat was nothing special.
Allen: The only thing we could do to lose it was f*** the boat up.
XI - Bringing it home
Young American prepare to round a mark in the America's Cup final series. Photo / David White
Jones: From then on we just had to sail well. We had the tool to do it, now it was up to the sailors on board to do the job for the rest of the team - the designers, the boatbuilders and everyone else who had put in a massive effort for a couple of years.
Coutts: We actually went into a pretty conservative mode fairly early on in that series, because it was ours to lose. The defenders were more off the pace than what we thought they would have been. We had advantages probably everywhere.
Monk: The way that Russell liked to sail, he did like to stay close to the competition so that he could control them that way. And we did get nervous if we got too far out in front because that's where complacency can come in. He always liked a closer race than normal.
Allen: Russell did a very good job of keeping every day the same. We couldn't get ahead of ourselves because he was very, very good at not making one day any different to any other day. So that really helps with your preparation. We just went through our same routines, our same processes - it was pretty robotic in a lot of ways.
Schnackenberg: We felt that we had things going for us but we also knew that this was the America's Cup and you can always make a mess of it, so confidence wasn't good enough.
Monk: We talked a lot about Stars and Stripes and Dennis Conner. If anyone was going to come back he was the guy to do it. We were definitely never complacent and Peter Blake banged that into us every night.
Suzanne McFadden (NZ Herald yachting reporter 1993-2001): Team New Zealand's dominance was astounding. They won the second race by more than four minutes - it was the worst defeat of a defender in more than a century. I think there was only one race where Stars & Stripes were ahead at the first cross, but Black Magic just pounded them after that. By the fourth race you knew the boat, the crew were simply superior - Team New Zealand could not be beaten on the water.
"I've never been in a race where I felt so little control of the outcome. I've been in some uphill battles before, but I don't feel like I'm even in a yacht race. It's like I'm just delivering a boat around the course." - Paul Cayard, race 4 post match press conference May 12, 1995.
McFadden: That final day, you just had a sense something special was about to happen. It was a beautiful day, the sky was clear, the water was calm - everything was perfect.
Monk: We never went out on the race course saying today was the day we're going to win the America's Cup. It was just another race that we had to win and then whatever happens after that happens. We had to stay focused and win it and then we'll deal with things after that.
Jeremy Scantlebury (grinder): It was just a straight-forward yacht race - and that's the way we like it.
XII - The America's Cup is now New Zealand's Cup
Peter Blake holds the America's Cup aloft after Team New Zealand won the final in San Diego. Photo / David White
"That's it" - Brad Butterworth on on-board mic as Team New Zealand crossed the finish line in the final race.
Allen: It was a feeling of relief. You put incredible pressure on yourself to do a job to the best of your ability and then the feeling that we could drop our shoulders and relax finally.
Monk: I remember crossing the line and that's when the guys finally celebrated. There was definitely elation, but it's really hard to describe the feeling.
Schnackenberg: win 5-0 against the best sailing team and the best yacht that the Americans could put together was really something. We had a huge sense of satisfaction.
Peter Montgomery (veteran yachting commentator): I was able to get aboard quickly and the very first person I went to was Peter Blake and he said something along the lines of "well little old New Zealand has just won the America's Cup and I think that's pretty damn good". And that was classic low key Blake.
Monk: Within about three minutes the boat had the whole team on board. Immediately the chase boat came alongside and everyone piled on board NZL32. So for the two hour tow in it was really cool to have the whole team. There was only standing room. It was a shocker - really dangerous with alcohol and everything.
McFadden: They never showed anything that betrayed their emotion - that was part of the rules really. You don't celebrate until this thing was won. And then they went mad of course. Absolutely beserk.
Allen: We finished and you're very dehydrated and we went straight into drinking champagne and we were just smashed.
Montgomery:
By the time we got in to the San Diego yacht club there were clearly a couple of guys who had had too much to drink too quickly and were light-headed.
"I really can't tell you much of anything because I'm not fit to speak." - a very jolly Peter Blake addresses the media at the post-race press conference.
XIII - The party
Team New Zealand skipper Russell Coutts is thrown from the wharf at San Diego. Photo / David White
McFadden: They came down past us and then docked at the San Diego Yacht Club and it was just mental. There was champagne spraying and people throwing rose petals for about 10 minutes. It didn't stop.They must have spent about an hour there on the dock, just soaking it up - literally. There were guys that were crying, guys like Andrew Taylor who had sailed in every New Zealand attempt to win the America's Cup.
"Over all these years I never felt like giving up the fight for this Cup. This is the greatest moment of my life, it is great to be bringing the Cup back to a nation that will really appreciate it. It will be the best plane trip I've ever had." - Andrew Taylor, quoted in NZ Herald, May 15 1995.
Allen: One of the moments I'll never forget is we came in and it was damn-near dark and there was a Maori cultural group had come down from LA and they did a haka on what was like a jetty, or a marina finger. But there were so many of them it was almost underwater. So you've got this group of guys doing a haka and it looked like they were standing on top of the water. The water was splashing up as they did it. It was incredible - I'll never forget it, I can still hear it.
Coutts: After we got the America's Cup quite a few of us went across San Diego Harbour in this small dinghy [to get to the Team NZ base]. If we sunk the dinghy or lost the Cup overboard, it wouldn't have been good. We were all handing it around, which of course you're not meant to do.
Schnackenberg: It was just euphoric. You're in a bit of a blur - first of all you win it, which was just fantastic, then suddenly you're talking a million miles an hour to everybody, phone calls to New Zealand. People were pouring in wanting to do interviews. It was full-on non-stop talking and partying for quite a while.
Coutts: It was a huge celebration at the base, I can tell you that. A lot of people involved, even with sponsors and things had been trying to win the Cup for 10 years so it was a big party.
Schnackenberg: Tickets were as scarce as hen's teeth. If you didn't have a pass you had trouble getting in, it didn't matter who you were.
Allen: I'll be honest, I was so drunk I don't remember much of it. It was just mayhem. But I remember having a shower afterwards and thinking what the f*** have we done? It was the first time I had a quiet moment to myself and that's when it really sunk in.
McFadden: Then Louis Vuitton came to the team and said we would like to take you to the New York Yacht Club with the Cup, and then on to Washington to meet the President of the United States as well, although in the end I think President Clinton had a more pressing engagement with Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe.
Peter Blake, Russell Coutts and Simon Daubney toast their win in the America's Cup.
Coutts: I think Murray Jones missed the flight, in fact I know he did.
Jones: It was a hard week. I woke up and looked at my watch and it was about departure time then. I went to the airport anyway and managed to get to San Diego to New York without a ticket. I just told them I missed my flight and they stuck me on another plane.
XIV - The homecoming
Team New Zealand and Peter Blake take part in the welcome home parade down Queen St. Photo / Glenn Jeffrey
Coutts: Air New Zealand put on a special flight for us back from LA and that was pretty cool boarding that plane with the America's Cup.
Monk: I had my birthday, which is the end of May on the plane on the way home. I actually missed it; I jumped on the plane on the 22nd and my birthday's the 23rd of May and we landed on the 24th. So I missed my birthday.
McFadden: When we arrived they had made arches of water that the plane taxied through as it landed - it was just beautiful. There was a brief ceremony, with Blake and Coutts carrying the Auld Mug onto New Zealand soil for the first time, before the team all hopped into buses and went into the City for the tickertape parade.
Montgomery: I'll never forget it, ever. We were driving along Customs Street and turned right into Queen St to see all these people. You had to see it to believe it. There were conservative estimates of 350,000 and I'd believe it. The crowd was 15-20 people deep on either side of the road for block after block after block. It was just mind-boggling.
Jones: I remember going on the back of the trucks down Queen St quite vividly. All the way through you're very focused and you feel like you're just doing it for yourself. You know, it was my own ambition to win the America's Cup. Then once we'd achieved that all of a sudden it sort of occurred to you that there was a lot of people who were appreciating this win.
Schnackenberg: The parade was a bit of a blur. We were going slowly through the streets, slow enough that people could crowd the cars. People were crowding all the windows and the balconies - that was a huge day.
Scantlebury: Nothing really in life gears you up for that. It was an unbelievable experience.
Coutts: We were all blown away. We had no idea it had received that sort of attention.
Sailors from Team New Zealand are cheered on by an enthusiastic crowd on Queen Street. Photo / Ross White
Monk: Because we hadn't been in New Zealand we didn't know how big a deal it was back home because we'd been [in San Diego] for five months. We didn't have the internet, I remember reading faxes on the wall, but we didn't have a lot of contact with the outside world. We didn't realise how it had gripped the nation until we got home to the parades.
Schnackenberg: Then we repeated that in Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, where the crowds were maybe bigger in proportion. In Dunedin it seemed like the whole town was out.
Montgomery: We were about to go down Colombo Street in Christchurch and we were in the park and there were these two lovely gracious distinguished women wearing tweed suits and pearls, clearly over-60s, and they were running for all they were worth after these grotty yachties. I thought my god, I've seen it all now. But that was the impact this win had on people.
Coutts: Flying out of Christchurch I think it was we flew across this paddock and this farmer had built this giant red sock. That was pretty amazing that this farmer had gone to the trouble of doing it so when we flew over. We were pretty high up in the air, so it must have been huge.
Allen: We did the ticker-tape parades all around the country and then we flew back from Dunedin, which I think was the last one. And I landed at the airport, said goodbye to everyone and hopped into a cab, and it was just silence. And that's when it hit me that it was over. I'll never forget closing the door, sitting in this smelly cab and thinking, well that's over, it's done. It was history.
The New Zealand Herald front page: Thursday May 25 1995
