33rd America's Cup - What a waste!

Looking back at building scheduled put in place for the 33rd America’s Cup, it was interesting to note that Alinghi, Desafio, TeamOrigin and Team Germany were going to launch their first AC90 in June 2008 whilst Shosholoza and TNZ were probably working on a similar time frame.

America’s Cup’s teams would have been at full steam by now with sailmakers and mast makers finishing their work to sail these new monsters. All bases in Valencia would have been flat out preparing the launch of their first AC90. What a sight and a great feeling it would have been!

Instead? We have a waste land in Valencia and a bunch of people out of work worldwide. Not only team members but suppliers.

What a shame to see the ‘Port America’s Cup’ these past months with just a few TP52s operating out of empty basis and only Alinghi and BMWOracle with anything like an America’s Cup operation.

Unfortunately Alinghi will never get away from the 33rd Protocol which will go down in history as a huge mistake by those involved while being totally miscalculated and even worse unnecessary.

Still the process of preparing the Competition regulations and Event regulations was open and productive and this largely unwound most of the mis-justice of the protocol. It also gave all the competitors a much greater say in the regulations than anything that happened prior to the 32nd America’s Cup.

As an example all those rules were simply created by ACM, Alinghi and BMWOracle in 2003 for the 32nd America’s Cup. BMWOracle was Challenger of Record then and other challengers had very little input into any of those rules if any.

Then if we take a look at BMW Oracle’s schedule this time around:
• Alinghi wins 32nd America’s Cup 3 July
• ACM issue 33rd America’s Cup’s protocol 5 July
• BMWOracle delivers Notice of Challenge 11 July for race date 4 July 08.
• Mark Van Pethegen confirms he is working for BMWO since 12 July. Probably he had started even earlier since to design build and commission a 90x90 Multi to be race ready in less than one year is nearly impossible.
• BMWOracle submit papers in court on 20 July.
• Official announcement of Russell Coutts joining BMWOracle is made on 25 July.

Looking at this schedule, a simple question came to mind:
• How can you pull all that together in a week or two?
• And consequently wondering if BMWOracle had this strategy in place for some time?

Is the basis of BMWOracle’s strategy to win a big bonus but also to discredit and damage Alinghi’s team principal as much as possible?
Then allowing him to run another successful America’s Cup even if you have the strongest team and would have been one of the favorite to win does not really achieve your second goal, does it?

Think about it