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America's Cup: 'there is no second place' - a history of the oldest trophy in international sport
The events calendar of the Golden Gate Yacht Club (GGYC), overlooking San Francisco Bay, has a distinctly homely sound: there’s Thirsty Thursdays, a Cioppino night, a Cinco de Mayo lunch, and the weekly Friday Night Beer Can Race. Even its popular winter series has a kooky name: the Manuel Fagundes Seaweed Soup Regatta. And then, every few years, there’s the America’s Cup.
The story of how yachting’s most prestigious prize – also reputedly the world’s oldest sporting trophy – ended up at this unassuming sailing club is the stuff of America’s Cup legend. In the year 2000, Silicon Valley billionaire and sailing enthusiast Larry Ellison was preparing to put together a challenge for the next Cup. When Ellison fell out with his own outfit, the prestigious St Francis Yacht Club – he was apparently demanding too much control, including choosing the boat’s name – he strolled 300 yards down the quayside to its immediate neighbour, where he was welcomed with open arms. The GGYC was $435,000 in debt, and the arrival of 100 new members from Ellison’s team, each paying a $1,000 joining fee and $90 per month membership, saved the club from bankruptcy. They didn’t care what he called his boat.
After two unsuccessful challenges, in 2003 and 2007, Ellison won the Cup in 2010, and suddenly the GGYC became the epicentre of the yachting world, joining an elite 'club of clubs’ that have won the trophy: just six of them over 166 years. Next week he’ll lead the charge to defend the cup in Bermuda from stiff opposition in the form of Ben Ainslie’s Land Rover BAR – which won the so-called World Series warm-up event – as well as teams from New Zealand, Sweden, Japan and France.
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It’s a far cry from the contest’s ad hoc beginnings. The New York Yacht Club (NYYC) was barely six years old when, in February 1851, its commodore John Cox Stevens received a letter from Lord Wilton of the Royal Yacht Squadron in Cowes. It was the year of the Great Exhibition, when makers from around the world were showing off their wares at the Crystal Palace in London’s Hyde Park, and Wilton suggested America might like to showcase its boatbuilding prowess. Stevens replied that he was indeed having a boat built for the occasion, and that, 'Should she answer the sanguine expectations of her builders, we propose to avail ourselves of your friendly bidding, and take with good grace the sound thrashing we are likely to get by venturing our longshore craft in your rough waters.’
Soon after America arrived on the Solent, her surprising turn of speed was reported by the British press, with the result that no home-grown boats were willing to race her, even when her owners offered a prize of £10,000. Finally the RYS stepped in to arrange a race around the Isle of Wight. The prize? A £100 silver cup donated to the club three years earlier that hadn’t yet found a good home. The race would be 'open to yachts belonging to the clubs of all nations’, making club membership a prerequisite from the outset.
It turned out to be a one-sided contest. Despite starting last of 15 boats, America overtook the whole fleet and, as other craft fell by the wayside, she finished several miles ahead of the few remaining contenders. When Queen Victoria asked who came second, an aide replied, "Ma’am, there is no second."
The silver cup was duly awarded to the Americans. Back home, they contemplated melting it down and striking medals with its metal, but eventually decided to donate it to the NYYC, as 'a challenge cup open to all foreign clubs’. The Deed of Gift they drew up governs America’s Cup racing to this day. And it’s thanks to a clause stating the cup shall be 'the property of the Club, not the owner of the winning vessel’, that Ellison ended up knocking on the door of the GGYC.
Long before he did, however, the Cup had a lengthy uninterrupted tenure at the NYYC: 132 years, the longest winning streak in sporting history. During that time, a galaxy of wealthy sailors (or, as one contender put it, 'millionaires with egos to prove and wallets to match’) tried to claim yachting’s ultimate prize. There was Sir Thomas Lipton (of the tea company), Sir Thomas Sopwith and Harold Vanderbilt, followed by Ted Turner, Frank Packer and Marcel Bich (of Bic pens fame). Even the Aga Khan had a go, funding the 1983 Italian bid.
It was all in vain… until Australian tycoon Alan Bond turned up in 1983 with his 'men from a land down under’ and a yacht with a revolutionary wing keel (concealed behind a 'modesty skirt’ when out of the water). In the closest racing in the event’s history – climaxing in a 41-second margin of victory for Australia II in the final race – the Royal Perth Yacht Club (RPYC) became only the second club to win the Cup.
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Australia didn’t keep the prize for long. In 1987 US yachtsman Dennis Conner reclaimed the trophy that he’d lost as skipper four years earlier. Only this time he raced under the burgee of his home team, the San Diego Yacht Club – one of the biggest and oldest yacht clubs in the USA, founded in 1886.
One of the things that makes the America’s Cup so unpredictable is that it still operates under that original Deed of Gift, a set of rules devised over 150 years ago that are so loose in places they’ve sometimes required the courts to be called in to arbitrate (to put it politely).
It was after one such episode in 1988 – resulting in the absurd mismatch of a 90ft monohull against a much smaller catamaran (which won) – that the SDYC came up with the idea of creating a dedicated boat design for the Cup.
Businessman Bill Koch funded the first successful US defence under the International America’s Cup Class in 1992 – although his all-female team failed to even make the finals in the next challenge. Instead, it was the Kiwis, led by sailing legend Sir Peter Blake, and with Russell Coutts at the helm, who in 1995 took the Cup back south, to the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron.
But the modern era of America’s Cup racing really began after Swiss biotech entrepreneur Ernesto Bertarelli – after wooing Coutts on to his team – won in 2003, flying the flag of the Société Nautique de Genève (SNG). The problem was that, while the SNG has a lively racing calendar and attractive premises overlooking Lake Geneva, it has no coastline. Bertarelli’s Team Alinghi turned this into a virtue by inviting bids from suitable venues to host the next cup. The fees from the winning city, Valencia in Spain, were then used to fund an independent organisation to run the race on a professional basis.
At least, that was the theory. But, after successfully defending the Cup in 2007, the SNG announced it had accepted a challenge from the newly-formed Club Náutico Español de Vela (CNEV), and published the rules for the next race. The CNEV turned out to be a 'puppet’ yacht club created just to keep the Cup in Spain, and the rules were impossibly favourable to Alinghi. So it was back to the courts. After months of wrangling, the New York Court of Appeals declared CNEV’s bid invalid, leaving the door open for Ellison and the GGYC.
And so yachting’s top race arrived in San Francisco Bay – not at St Francis, where many top names in American sailing are based, but at its scruffy little sister. Same view, different world. The new boats introduced for the 2013 Cup, however, were anything but scruffy: foiling catamarans with wing sails that literally 'fly’ above the water at over 40 knots. Some might question whether they are boats at all, but the AC72s certainly caught the public imagination – especially when Ellison’s Oracle Team USA staged its famous comeback, turning a 1-8 deficit into a 9-8 win against Emirates Team New Zealand.
And so, next week, to Bermuda – which beat off bids by Chicago, San Diego and Newport, Rhode Island to host the 35th America’s Cup. There, all eyes will be on Ellison.
Back at the GGYC, being the defender of one of the world’s most prestigious sporting trophies hasn’t changed much. Yes, its debts were cleared, and the
extra members’ fees have allowed it to renovate the clubhouse. And yes, all its officers are now photographed beaming next to that great silver shell. But few of its members get involved in America’s Cup racing, and Ellison himself is rarely, if ever, spotted there. Apart from their recently acquired financial security, for most members life goes on as before. Which is exactly how they want it.
