America S Cup

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- The opening showdown between defender Team New Zealand and Italy's Prada Challenge for yachting's oldest and greatest trophy, the America's Cup, was postponed today for lack of wind. With only two knots of sea breeze on Hauraki Gulf at the start time, the race committee had no option but to fly the red-and-white postponement flag, which signaled a start delay, and two hours later the blue-and-white asymmetrical cancellation pennant. The forecast was for 10 knots at race time, and its failure to appear underlined the fickle weather on the gulf, where the wind is so untrustworthy it is described locally as "promiscuous."

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- New Zealanders are generally no more or less rapacious than anyone else, but right now they do seem to be intent on wringing every last dollar out of the America's Cup being contested here. With the regatta's final series, between Italy's Prada and defender Team New Zealand, set to get under way here Feb. 19, prices in top-end hotels have shot up. In some cases they have almost doubled in the past week. At the 272-room Hyatt Regency, the standard room rate has gone up from $118 to $180.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- Whenever anyone speaks seriously about the America's Cup, attention turns to the one ingredient that invariably determines the outcome: money. This year, 11 would-be Cup challengers from seven nations spent $217 million on their Cup campaigns. It therefore came as no surprise that the nail-biting, best-of-nine challenger finals were fought between the two syndicates that outspent all the others. The ultimate triumph of Italy's Prada Challenge, which defeated AmericaOne yesterday in the ninth race to become the Cup challenger, was the triumph of money over experience.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- Italy's silver bullet, the Luna Rossa of Prada Challenge, is to be the 30th America's Cup challenger. The Italians earned that honor in convincing style today with a decisive 49-second win over skipper Paul Cayard's AmericaOne in the do-or-die ninth race of the best-of-nine challenger finals. Though Cayard and his AmericaOne crew sailed well today, they were outclassed by better Italian boat speed upwind and down. The Italians now have an excellent shot at winning the America's Cup regatta, which is to be defended by New Zealand in a best-of-nine race series beginning here Feb. 19. This will be the first time in the America's Cup 151-year history that an American yacht has not competed in the Cup's finals.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- Lawyers for Italy's Prada America's Cup team are gathering evidence for a possible challenge over the legality of the carbon-fiber racing masts used by rival AmericaOne. Prada believes AmericaOne may have violated Article 17 of the America's Cup protocol, which specifically forbids "shared knowledge." The suggestion is that three American syndicates, AmericaOne, Stars and Stripes and Young America, which all had their masts built by the same company in Nevada, may have benefited by sharing various design concepts.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- Patrizio Bertelli has carefully positioned a New Zealand $5 note in the center of the notice board in his stark white office. The buff-colored note bears the shy, almost bashful image of a lanky young mountaineer Bertelli admires: Edmund Hillary, the first man to conquer the planet's highest peak, Mount Everest. The note is there to remind Bertelli of an important principle: the power of one, the notion that an individual with vision, courage and determination can reach apparently impossible goals.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- Two years ago, Prada's America's Cup skipper Francesco de Angelis knew nothing about the art of match racing. There are some among the American contingent here who maintain that that is still the case. They are wrong. During the past four months and the past few days in particular, de Angelis has learned the hard way that match racing at the America's Cup level is very much like back-street brawling. In the past two races alone, AmericaOne skipper Paul Cayard has shown de Angelis how to win tight races while bringing his American entry back from a 3-1 deficit to knot the best-of-nine challengers series at three victories apiece.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- A walk along the waterfront here throws a stark and sometimes painful light on the current state of play in sailing's multimillion-dollar poker game called the America's Cup. At the head of the challenger harbor, the dark blue hull of Team Dennis Conner's Stars & Stripes -- now eliminated from the competition to challenge Team New Zealand later this month for sailing's most coveted trophy -- is cradled, forlorn and lifeless....

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- In 1851, when the schooner America won the silver pitcher that bears its name, its owners passed the Cup around among themselves for a time and then decided it might be nice to offer it as a perpetual trophy for "friendly competition between nations." Commodore John Cox Stevens and his colleagues at the New York Yacht Club drew up a Deed of Gift, a weighty legal document that, far from being the basis for "friendly competition," has been the center of nearly 1 1/2 centuries of unrelenting turbulence and quite a bit of rancor and bitterness, jealousy and skullduggery.

AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- Though a faint and shifting wind forced postponement of the third race of the America's Cup challengers finals today on Hauraki Gulf, the Annapolis-based designer of the New York Yacht Club's Young America boat provided the action back on land. An inadequate repair job carried out without the knowledge of either the designer or builder led directly to the compression failure that effectively put an end to the NYYC's $40 million challenge for the America's Cup last month.