OneWorld diary

Mark Chisnell brings us up to speed with Blackhearts dirty tricksters and the latest 'where now?' theories for the AC

The Louis Vuitton Cup has – stutteringly - started; already we’ve lost two sailing days out of three in Round Robin One, all to the New Zealand weather. As we expected, we’re going to need all those reserve days and some, to get this regatta done.

The whole thing began smoothly enough, with a parade to the Viaduct Basin. This attracted crowds two or three deep for pretty much the whole length of Queen Street. There was some official nervousness about the crowd reaction to some of the former Team New Zealand members now racing for the Challengers. As a result, there were some pretty heavy looking dudes riding shotgun for Alinghi – but in the end there wasn’t any trouble.

The anxiety was sparked off by a huge uproar in the press when a supporters group - called the Blackhearts - was reported to be planning a dirty tricks campaign against former TNZ members. This was allegedly going to involve stuff like posters and newspaper ads with the names and faces of the so-called defectors, and apparently the police were watching their activities. The whole thing turned ugly as high-profile members of the local media took sides – for and against the campaign. But if the letter writers to the New Zealand Herald represent your average Kiwi, then the majority of the population think the Blackhearts suck.

The highlight of the opening day was definitely the Louis Vuitton Crew Party. They had taken over an old warehouse opposite the docks, and with a lightshow, flaming gas burners, dry ice and a lot of graffiti, had turned it into the hottest party venue in town. Wandering around was like revisiting all your past lives at once – a lot of faces from previous campaigns, some great catching up to be done.

And with the beginning of the regatta has come all the usual speculation about the future of the America’s Cup. While there has been no shortage of good ideas coming from people like Brad Butterworth and Bruno Trouble, as Bruno pointed out, it’s the next Defender that will hold all the cards. And the problem remains the same – if you’ve just proved yourself the best in the world in a particular boat, racing under a particular format and a particular set of rules, then why change anything?

Maybe all the competing teams should be forced to present a draft Protocol for the next Defence at the start of the Louis Vuitton Cup. This would provide a good source of ideas for taking the event forward, and could lead to some useful discussions. And perhaps, just ahead of the America’s Cup match itself, the remaining competitors then have to present a binding Protocol for the Defence (should they win the Cup), changeable only with the unanimous consent of all the competing teams.

A Protocol written without the knowledge of whether you are Defender or Challenger next time around is more likely to be a positive vehicle for taking the Cup and the sport forward. It’s interesting that Team New Zealand have been saying quite volubly for some time that if they lose it, then there’s no way that they will have the resources to go and wrest it back from foreign shores. That’s like Real Madrid turning round after winning a couple of Champions League trophies back-to-back and saying; we won’t be back next year if we don’t win this one, as we can’t afford to play.

If it turns out to be true, that doesn’t say much for the structure of the event. And if it does come to pass, perhaps Team New Zealand’s failure will not have been to lose the Cup – since even the USA couldn’t hold onto it for ever – but to have failed to try to develop the event in a direction that would enable them to carry on competing even after they lost it.

In the meantime, there’s another five months of racing before we find out who’s going to be calling the shots next time around. And after only one race, there’s not much to be said about who that’s going to be. At OneWorld, I think we’re pretty happy with the way the first day went, it was a good shakedown for the systems we’ve put in place for the racing. I wouldn’t risk saying it all went smoothly, because Sod’s Law would then ensure that it subsequently won’t …

Perhaps more importantly, there were no nasty earthquakes in the results to shake our view of the Challenger’s relative speeds. But this is sailboat racing, anything can happen, and probably will …