Knives in the Water (Cont.)

You Are Here:

Home >> Knives in the Water (Cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magaine November 2002

Page:

Knives in the Water (Cont.)


	Return to spender: Oracle BMW Racing boss Larry Ellison says he intends to log some serious cup time at the helm. (Jeff Reidel)

IT TAKES AN IMPRESSIVE COMBINATION of hubris and paranoia to try to claim control over a nation's airspace. But the America's Cup is hardly your average weekend regatta. It's a grueling, multiyear campaign, and a staggering display of money, technology, and ego. Sixty-two-year-old William Koch, who dropped some $68 million on the campaign that won the Cup in 1992, calls it "the most ruthless sporting contest I have ever seen." Naturally, the powerful people behind the syndicates are used to getting their way and will happily resort to all manner of skullduggery, legal shenanigans, crew poaching, and outright intimidation to win.

Software mogul Larry Ellison, the founder and CEO of Oracle, the computer database giant, heads the current crop of billionaires and near-billionaires—known simply as the B's—who are making this America's Cup the costliest and most cutthroat in the race's 152-year history. Ellison, 57, has funded his San FranciscoÐbased Cup attempt with roughly $80 million, a fraction of his estimated $15.2 billion personal fortune. With BMW kicking in an extra $20 million, Oracle BMW Racing is a daunting force, boasting more staff (142), more technology (the boss monitored his yachts' performance in real time from his Northern California desktop), and more swagger (Ellison has flatly declared that Oracle BMW is "the team to beat") than any of its rivals.

Not that the three other $50-million-plus syndicates are running scared. The roster includes Seattle-based OneWorld, backed by telecommunications pioneer Craig McCaw, 53, and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, 49; Switzerland's Alinghi, the brainchild of 37-year-old pharmaceutical heir Ernesto Bertarelli; and the talented team that lost to New Zealand last time out, Italy's Prada, the plaything of fashion-house honcho Patrizio Bertelli, 56. Five lesser syndicates are in the hunt, too. One closely watched underdog is Team Dennis Conner, backed by the New York Yacht Club and led by San Diego's Conner, 60, who has won the America's Cup four times and lost it twice, making him the most experienced Cup sailor in history.

Over the past three years, all this money and megalomania has been funneled into a quarter-mile stretch of Auckland waterfront called Syndicate Row. Here, on Viaduct Harbor, huge aircraft-style hangars loom within spitting distance of one another, like a big-box retail development gone mad. This miniature city of sail lofts, cafeterias, offices, and rigging shops has transformed what was once a series of crumbling cement fishing piers into a Formula One—style pit row.



	Cloak and rudder: Oracle BMW Racing drapes one of its yachts in heavy skirts before lifting it from the water. (Jeff Reidel)

In the center of it all, the pink-and-silver-hued Alinghi compound, created by merging two vintage-2000 syndicate bases together, rises above its neighbors, Team New Zealand and OneWorld. Farther down the pier, Oracle BMW Racing has moored a multilevel floating barge that serves as an office area and mess hall. Suitable creature comforts are close at hand: Aside from the $300 million worth of luxury condos that have sprung up in the neighborhood, Ellison's palatial 248-foot yacht, Katana, is on semipermanent station directly across from the Oracle base.

The teams are packed tight, and they aren't very neighborly. America's Cup syndicates have been jealously guarding their yacht designs since the turn of the century, when workers at the Herreshoff boatyard in Bristol, Rhode Island, used hot rivets to pelt a journalist trying to steal a look at Reliance, the defending yacht. Today, a culture of extreme secrecy permeates Viaduct Harbor. Security fences and video surveillance cameras give Halsey Street, which runs the length of Syndicate Row, a military feel. Oracle employs three full-time guards to keep spies away, and the rent-a-cops were put to the test at least once earlier this year, when a local reality-TV show sent a team of kayakers paddling under the syndicate's docks.

Snooping is so much a part of America's Cup culture that the rules of engagement are laid out in The Protocol, a 33-page document that was hammered out in the months following the 2000 America's Cup by Prada and the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron to give the competition some semblance of order. Section 13, called "Reconnaissance," allows any team to take pictures of another team's yacht on the water from a distance of at least 660 feet, or at a public unveiling event, but its rules are mostly about what you can't do. It forbids an array of surveillance techniques, including divers, submarines, satellites, computer hacking, dumpster diving, lasers, radar, and helicopters.

If this seems over the top, consider the 1992 Cup competition in San Diego. That year, scuba bubbles appeared under the keel of Dennis Conner's Stars & Stripes as it was being lowered into the water. A crew member tried to spear the mystery swimmer with a long stick used for clearing kelp from the keel, and then dove in after him. The diver escaped. But a hollowed-out flashlight containing what looked like a measuring device was later found under the boat, leaving Conner speculating about which rival might have hired a spy. In 1995 in San Diego, feuds erupted on a regular basis as RIB drivers took to ramming one another on the ocean to keep rival cameras away from their boats.

Page: