Angus Phillips: Controversy is key and Team NZ are providing plenty

With the Louis Vuitton Cup running out and the America's Cup still a month away, time is on our hands and controversies are drying up like puddles in the desert.

Conflict is the beating heart of the Cup. What's a newshound to do?

Blackheart has finally pulled in its horns. Rivals who threatened to protest the legality of Team New Zealand's hula hull have failed to front up and now Alinghi is well on the way to sinking Oracle.

Prognosticators in the press corps summed up the final two stages of this Cup with characteristic cynicism: A whitewash (Alinghi over Oracle) followed by a blackwash (Team New Zealand over Alinghi).

We ran into the commodore of the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, Bill Endean, down at the docks watching the boats go out this week. What does he think of the home team's chances?

"Well, we do have a longer boat," he said with a confident smile, "and what racing sailor wouldn't like to have a longer boat?"

Even the widespread public vitriol towards Russell Coutts abated as Kiwi prospects improved. When the Alinghi boats left Viaduct Harbour to go racing on Wednesday, more than a few folks clapped and one woman gently cheered, "Go, Russell!" She said it twice in a lilting Kiwi accent, and not a negative word was heard in response.

Meanwhile, Alinghi have gone quiet about any intentions to upgrade their yacht before the showdown with TNZ, assuming they get past Oracle. Two weeks ago, one of the design team members dropped a hint at a party. Asked for the plan if Oracle were dispatched, he mimicked the motions of starting up a chainsaw.

Will Alinghi whack the stern off SUI 64 and replace it with a new section and a hula of its own? Unlikely.

We've learned that Team New Zealand hatched the idea of tacking a long, thin, horizontal appendage to the hull to increase waterline length a full two years ago. It was tested on the computer, then on quarter-scale models, then installed on the 2000 Cup-winner NZL 60 to be sure it worked. Only after all that were two new hulls designed to optimise the hula's advantages, says Clay Oliver, the American who came up with the idea.

For Alinghi to try to match two years of design and engineering work and come up with a winner to tack onto an existing hull at this late date sounds riskier than any possible rewards.

Judging by the way Alinghi has dominated the Louis Vuitton Cup, and given the proven skills of Coutts, Brad Butterworth and the rest of the crew to get the most out of their boat, Alinghi may be better served by carrying on with the sort of incremental improvements they've been making all season and trusting their excellent sailors to give the Kiwis a good fight.

A match like that could end up a lot like the one in 1983, when Dennis Conner and his crew whipped a slower boat called Liberty around the course off Newport, Rhode Island, with such dexterity and brilliance they nearly beat a faster Australia II.

Conner led 3-1 in that best-of-seven series before John Bertrand woke up to win three straight races.

They called that the yacht race of the century and it was no exaggeration. Something like that would be worth waiting a month for, don't you think?

* Angus Phillips is a journalist from the Washington Post newspaper. He is in Auckland to cover the America's Cup.

nzherald.co.nz/americascup

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