If you’re going to have a few extra billion dollars you’d like to invest in a sporting endeavor, you might want to take a shot at an America’s Cup entry. Peter Rusch of the America’s Cup website, reports that the basic rules for the next challenge have been set.
The Swiss Société de Genève is the new holder of the Cup after it was won by the Swiss Alinghi team last month. Immediately after Team Alinghi swept the best-of-five series from Team New Zealand, The Golden Gate Yacht Club, represented by the Oracle BMW Racing Team, announced plans to challenge for the Cup and became the Challenger of Record. Other teams can, and will, also issue challenges.
The two organizations have worked out some details of the Protocol … how the next challenge will be made. They did not say when the challenge will be mounted, or exactly where. Although they said it will be on European waters. They promised to announce the where and when by December 15th.
The Protocol recently announced calls for some big differences in how the contests will be run, who can be on the teams, who can organize and judge it and how much of the teams’ technology they will have to share with each other.
Rusch says that things that will not be changed include the class of boat, the course (three legs into the wind and three downwind), and a prohibition against giving the team a name that sounds like advertising.
Encouragingly, the regatta will include some pre-regattas that could start as early as this summer. Rusch says it also will include fleet races, with the defending Alinghi team included, before the actual racing start.
Fleet racing, as the name implies, includes a whole bunch of boats racing at the same time, while match races, like you saw in the America’s Cup, involve just two boats at a time. Fleet racing will be used to help weed out some of the weaker challengers, but the actual contests will still be match races.
Nationality and residency requirements were a big issue in the recently concluded competition, since the Swiss entry had only one Swiss on board, the owner. Most of the others were New Zealanders who had been on the syndicate responsible for the Kiwis having the cup.
The new rules will solve that by doing away with rules regarding nationality and residency. However, individuals who once were on one team cannot work for another team in the competition.
Another recurring controversy is technology transfer and spying. Under the new rules, teams can buy old design information until October next year and design information can be sold along with any sale of a old boat. However, new design
information cannot be shared by two or more teams.
There are some big changes in the behind-the-scenes organization of the regatta. They are a little complicated, but are aimed at avoiding the defenders having too much control over the racing.
The change I like most is the one which will have the defenders involved in the racing held before the actual challenger racing gets started.
In the 2003 contest, Team New Zealand was hampered by the fact that it had not been involved in any real competition and had not had a chance to really test their boat in racing conditions.
One of the things that sports fans who also watch news have argued about this past week is whether it is proper to hold the NCAA Basketball Championships while the nation is going to war.
The Men’s tournament started Tuesday in Dayton with the play-in game between North Carolina-Ashville and Texas Southern while the Women’s tournament gets underway Saturday.
The co-ed War may have started Wednesday evening or at any minute.
NCAA president Myles Brand says he talked with Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and decided that the tournaments should go on, despite the seemingly imminent invasion of Iraq.
Brand said his organization was convinced that going ahead with the tournaments and maintaining life as normal as possible on the home front is the right thing to do.
Maybe he’s right.
On the other hand, maybe Mark Kreidler is right. Kreidler is a columnist for ESPN.com who says that all sports should be shut down until after the conflict is over. He apparently is convinced the hostilities would not last too long.
He notes the shutdowns by Major League Baseball and the National Football League following 9/11/01, as well as the JFK assassination, the shooting of Ronald Reagan and Gulf War I.
He says that sports did the right thing those times and was the better for it.
A good argument, but certainly not the last word.