Ship of fools

THE BOATS, if these computer-sculpted splinters can be called watercraft at all, are utterly charmless.

They are mostly mast and keel, the carbon-fibre hulls functional only to the extent that they can carry 17 crew members and remain seaworthy. The monstrous bulb below the waterline accounts for 80% of the boat's weight, counterbalancing the acreage of high-performance sails high above. No amount of iridescent epoxy in between can camouflage the ugliness of its desperation: Gotta go fast.

This New Zealand spring, as the boats are towed each morning out into Auckland's Hauraki Gulf, the desperation is reaching an old but still comic level. As it was 151 years ago, when some ex-colonists stormed England with a plan to sandbag its sailors in high-stakes racing, the America's Cup is home to a wealthy rabble of rampant egos who enjoy an attention-grabbing tussle.

Chartered as a "friendly competition among nations", the event has once again collapsed into aristocratic rivalry, all the more entertaining for its nakedness of ambition and level of skullduggery.

Up to last week, six of the original nine syndicates were still vying for the chance to challenge New Zealand, the reigning Cup holder, in February, and by week's end that total was down to four.

The qualifying, called the Louis Vuitton Cup, is unduly complicated. All you need to know for the moment is that of the nine challengers, there seem to be as many working definitions of clinical megalomania on the water as there are boats.

The ridiculousness is multinational. Why would France enter its Hazmat-coloured Le Defi Areva, with full-on nuclear-power sponsorship, in nuclear-free New Zealand? So it could get rammed by a boatful of Greenpeace activists? Which it was.

The Americans had a delightful flotilla three separate campaigns, all cheerfully eccentric in the best American tradition.

What else could this be, but a stab at nouveau nobility? Yachting has never been a sport for the masses, but now it's become the last refuge for our techno-royals. Some campaigns cost upward of $80 million, and while there is sponsorship galore most has to be ponied up by moguls.

Larry Ellison, whose Oracle wealth has fuelled an enormously entertaining bravado ("Whatever I want, I get," he once said. "That's the beauty of being worth $26 billion."), chugs around Auckland's harbour in his 244-foot yacht, Katana. As all the billionaires are more or less self-made, the ego is understandable, even enjoyable. Although the Auld Mug, sport's oldest trophy, is supposed to be what it's all about, something much more elemental is really going on. Look up and down Syndicate Row, a sort of gasoline alley along the side of Auckland's shiny-new Viaduct Basin.

One hi-tech boat garage after another looms, one grander than the next, until you get to favoured Alinghi, the Swiss team backed by Ernesto Bertarelli, heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. Forgetting for the moment that Bertarelli's yacht, Vava, moored nearby, is a paltry 150-footer (and forgetting, most of all, that Switzerland is a landlocked nation; how does he get home in that boat?) your breath is taken away by the size and scale of his pink-coloured base of operations said to cost a flabbergasting $2m compared with about $500,000 for his equally rich neighbours.

But then, it's yachting's oldest story: My dock is bigger than your dock. For scale, to establish a reference point, we start at the very first dock on Syndicate Row, Team Dennis Conner. Because he alone is not a billionaire, the legendary Conner is cast as the last of a dying breed, the amateur sailor getting by with duct tape and plenty of Scopoderm. Well, compared with Ellison's Oracle BMW Racing team and Craig McCaw and Allen's OneWorld syndicate, Conner's is indeed a bargain-basement entry.

Team Dennis Conner, representing the New York Yacht Club (but not funded by it), has a budget of just $40m, less than half the going burn-rate of his billionaire colleagues "the Bees", he calls them.

Conner launched his latest crusade in July when he introduced his two Stars & Stripes boats in Long Beach, California, whereupon one of them promptly sank when it lost its rudder. He makes no apology for his penny-pinching entry, though, insisting his experience in eight previous Cups (he's won four) more than makes up for the skimping he has had to do on development and prep time and manpower. (His 70 men do the work of Ellison's 150.)

But he has no illusions about what an additional $10m would mean. "I'd be faster," he says. Conner may be the shrewdest sailor to ever put zinc oxide on his nose, and he clearly knows how to raise money. Still, his joy in this ultimately hopeless competition is unsettling. "I have everything I need," says Conner. "It's just a thrill to be here, son of a fisherman, competing against four of the world's richest men." He is keen about the history of the Auld Mug and is untroubled by the billionaires who would buy it out from under him. Whether it's the Prada team drastically cutting its boat in two for mid-challenge alterations, or Alinghi stealing away New Zealand skipper Russell Coutts for a reported $5m, it's all the same to him.

"It was always about wealth, from the beginning, going to Europe to flex American muscle. Sir Thomas Lipton spent $50m on revenge [in numerous Cup tries in the early 1900s]. And lost!"

He lets that sink in, then slaps his bare knee. "And if you win, you get nothing!"

The America's Cup is unrivalled in its attractiveness to crackpots, the richer the better, of course. Sir Frank Packer, the media mogul who bankrolled Australia's doomed challenge 40 years ago, was once asked for the motivating themes in his campaign. "Alcohol and delusions of grandeur," he said. As this group does not seem to be a particularly hard-drinking bunch, it is left to delusions to explain participation.

Bruno Trouble, a Louis Vuitton spokesperson, who skippered for Baron Bich in 1980 and has been around America's Cup sailing for a quarter-century, thinks it's all about a last stab at immortality. "If Larry Ellison wins," he says, "he will be part of history, like Vanderbilt. He will escape from the years on earth. [There are] not too many means to do that."

If immortality is at stake, no reason to go after it halfheartedly. But for Ellison, a lifelong sailor, the event is also a platform for his grandiose and combative personality. He first sparred with Prada, which had accused Oracle of spying on its boatyard from behind mirrored windows (Oracle folks said the sun was in their eyes). When Prada went to court a no-no in America's Cup rules, lest the event forever be decided by litigation Ellison requested a forfeit.

That was just a warm-up. Ellison seems to particularly relish the presence of OneWorld, which he has somehow cast as a business rival for the moment replacing his obsession with the world's richest man Bill Gates as well as a yachting opponent. Always the provocateur, he's tweaked the team for its environmental theme ("You'd think if they want to help the oceans, they'd spend $85m on the oceans, instead of a boat."

and its Microsoft technology (email "riddled with viruses").

This is somewhat bewildering, as OneWorld has a distant relationship with Microsoft. "Well, not one at all," says OneWorld spokesman Bob Ratliffe, who maintains the official attitude of puzzlement.

Ellison, in the fashion of old-time tycoons, enjoys the spotlight, appearing in his black Armani at press conferences when he can, often to say how busy he is with Oracle work on board Katana. And, until he left New Zealand following Oracle BMW's survival of the quarterfinals, he was almost always a source of some bombshell, whether it was icing one skipper, Paul Cayard, in favour of Kiwi Chris Dickson, replacing Dickson with Peter Holmberg after crew protests and then, after a troubled beginning in the round-robin, replacing Holmberg again with Dickson.

Ellison's swagger has been especially hard to endure for OneWorld, a likeably earnest group, which insists on the purity of the event, hits all the right notes environmentally and generally behaves in a modest fashion. Its boss, McCaw, is pretty low-profile for a billionaire, not pretending to be a sailor for one thing, or king of the world for another. But the group has had its problems, beginning with the decimation of McCaw's wealth in the last two years.

According to Fortune, his net worth went from $13bn to $1.8bn. Suddenly America's Cup boating began to seem like an extravagance.

He put some assets up for sale and was ready to dry-dock his dreams.

But Paul Allen, whose wealth was better protected by Microsoft's share price, stepped in for his Seattle buddy. He first wrote a $10m cheque, and then some more, until he became a 50-50 partner in the scheme.

OneWorld has set itself up as an Oracle alternative, which is to say it's on the side of the angels. At Oracle's base, there is a row of nine BMWs, parked nose out. At OneWorld, staffers putter around on electric bicycles.

OneWorld did rankle Conner when it got to pick its opponent by virtue of its record in the quarter-finals and chose his boat over the Italian or Swedish entries in last week's repechage, thus ensuring that one American team would be sent home. It was a good call, however; OneWorld swept Stars & Stripes in four straight races.

OneWorld can afford to look ridiculous; that's the prerogative of the rich. But to look sinister, as it did when it admitted having knowledge of New Zealand's 2000 design, was perhaps fatal to its PR effort. Part of the problem stems from OneWorld's lavish spending; it brought in lawyer Sean Reeves, who worked for New Zealand in 2000, to be its rules adviser, and hired Laurie Davidson, who had designed New Zealand's boat.

OneWorld insists it tried to do the right thing, self-reporting its violation, and it was penalised a point in an earlier round for its indiscretion. But now Conner's just-defeated team wants OneWorld disqualified altogether. A hearing was ongoing at the time of going to press to sort the whole mess out.

Good thing for the intrigue, because the event, unfortunately, is not much fun or even very possible to watch. A bunch of party boats leave the harbour every morning, charging about $45 a person, and linger in the shadows of islands around the Hauraki Gulf sidelines, although what there is to see is anybody's guess. This is a sport without a visible finish line, remember, so a certain seafaring sophistication is required. Otherwise, it's just boats going back and forth.

Plus, it has sport's most confusing vocabulary unless you were born to the yachting life. Does the following passage of authentic America's Cup gibberish send chills up and down your spine?

"We had a bad tack right up toward the first beat. We were pretty close to the starboard layline. It was unfortunate, but we just had a bad tack and were forced to go back and clear a sheet, which put us pretty close to the mark"

There is once in a while the spectacle of two Kevlar-coated bows plunging through the brine at the (invisible) finish, seconds apart after two hours of racing. But even so, what's the excitement? Is it a triumph of technology, ordained on a naval architect's drawing board years ago? Or is it a spectacle of seamanship, a helmsman shrewdly anticipating his opponent's tactics? Or, as these billionaires must believe, is it just a matter of chequebook sailing?

So it's a little hard to cheer for. But what everybody can appreciate is the naked yearning, the desperation of ego. America's Cup is the ultimate demonstration of desire, what's left when every appetite's been fully satisfied?

© Time Inc 2002, from Sports Illustrated