33rd America’s Cup: Thanks God it’s Over
So the 33rd America’s Cup is finally run, congratulations to Oracle who crushed the Swiss team Alinghi.
Ironically, despite writing about the shameful display of court action (that would continue for a long while) a couple of years ago, I almost missed that the race has taken place last week.
I wasn’t alone.
The America’s Cup used to be one of the most popular sailing contests the layman knew of, and being Swiss, I had been caught up in the enthusiasm of the 2003 win that helped capture the people’s imagination here.
When the next edition was held in Summer 2007 and Alinghi successfully defended their title, the mood in the country was the one you’ll see in any place when your favourite sports team is in a final and has solid chances to win the contest, no matter the sport itself.
At my workplace, for instance, we had an overhead projector showing all races live, and most of my co-workers (the vast majority of them who wouldn’t otherwise give a damn about sailing, and for good reason – for those among us who aren’t sailing aficionados, watching a regatta on TV is often barely more exciting than watching grass grow) would regularly mill around between their desk and the recreation area to watch the races, or at least part of it.
The contrast couldn’t have been more stark with what happened last week. Before even the first race saw our “champion” Alinghi severely spanked by its challenger, you’d be hard-pressed to find people giving a damn. The talk of last week, in terms of sports, was about the Olympic games and in what disciplines “we” would have chances to bring home a medal (incidentally, at the time of this writing, Switzerland didn’t just win the first gold medal of the games, we secured our third gold a few moments ago, marking this the most probably only time we’ll be #1 on the medal table. Woot. Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes).
Only the one colleague I know for participating in local sailing competitions himself admitted having watched both races. Everyone else was ‘meh’.
And the reality, plain and simple, is that the figureheads of both teams, billionaires Larry Ellison and Ernesto Bertarelli, have pretty much ruined everything that could even remotely be thought of as “sportsmanship” for this 33rd contest.
Spending more than 30 months fighting it out in courtrooms, both teams have first and foremost demonstrated that winning at all costs was way more important than the sport itself. Both teams have fought teeth and nails, with all means at their disposal, to try and win by default, disqualifying their opponents or running the clock so that they would not be able to compete. Setting totally unfair rulings favouring the defender, having these tossed out by the court in favour of an even more outrageously unfair counter-rule that would itself be overruled, most of the 33rd America’s cup was actually fought in the dirtiest arena in the world, a court of law, by the most dishonourably unsporting contenders, two armies of lawyers intent on only one thing, to crush the others, no matter the consequences.
At the end, two impressive looking boats were produced, in a size and format more removed from every day sailing than F1 is removed from a normal family car. The first two races had to be cancelled, one because there wasn’t enough wind to move those juggernauts, the second one because the waves were too high for these beasts.
What won on the water, in the end, isn’t even clearly to be attributed to the skill of skippers and crew, but first and foremost the prowess and the flair of the engineers who made a far superior technical decision.
Of course, what heavily contributed to the loss of Alinghi, beyond the inferior technical design, was also the unbelievable hubris of the very man the country had admired for making the two previous victories happen, Ernesto Bertarelli, who tried to helm the boat himself and mostly demonstrated that he lacked any skill on the water, just like he had shown, together with his opponent, that he knew no shame and no move so vile that he wouldn’t have his team try to win before the race could take place.
The disgust I’m expressing here isn’t just mine alone. For instance, the 32nd edition in 2007 attracted over 200M € worth of sponsorships. The 2010 disgrace just about 11M, and no matter how you slice it, the financial crisis isn’t the only factor to blame for this.
And speaking of the crisis, in the end, the amount of money thrown away in the court contest but also those two completely uneven boats, in the face of the crisis, is nothing short of obscene. A sporting event is something that very much can lift the spirit of the world even in the darkest of times, but the shameful spectacle that led to this underwhelming race pretty much achieved the contrary: It is, in the end, the mirror image of what led the world into economic downturn, greed without restraint, a will to win at all costs without regard to ethics nor consequences, a take-no-prisoner dog-eat-dog contest that leaves the bystander exhausted and thoroughly disgusted by what the rich, powerful and depraved billionaires are doing.
Oracle won fair and square on the water, but they won a pyrrhic victory. The reputation of America’s cup is in shambles, and nobody trusts the future to reintroduce “fair play” and “sportmanship” in the event. Only the insanely wealthy stand any chance of running another race of the same format, and the vast majority of the public is most definitely not going to care about a 34th edition if that, too, is held after the courts decide on every minute detail while the competitors try to out-cheat each other.
Is the event salvageable? Perhaps. It would require nothing short of a totally neutral and balanced set of racing rules where every boat is to be constructed within the exact same specifications (ideally under a similar budget) and not a single line exists to favour either the defender or the challenger.
Only under such conditions will the next edition pit sailors against sailors and decide what racing team is actually the best in the world, instead of who has the better lawyers and smarter engineers. But just as the early warnings in 2007 and 2008, like the January bust of French trader Jerôme Kerviel, went unheeded by the finance world, there is little hope to see that happening. Team Oracle has most definitely demonstrated that victory could be acquired by extending every mean no matter how low or dirty (and again, Alinghi’s approach was the very same on the other side of the Atlantic), and I’d be highly surprised that they would suddenly look at restoring honour to their disgraced cup.
And coming full circle with the long series of posts that occupied my Warcraft gaming days, where in retrospect PvP completely fails is in the possibility to build totally unbalanced match-ups where superior gear and the right team composition removes most of the player skill before the match has begun.
Truly meaningful PvP would require that the teams duking it out be as evenly matched as possible before the gates open, including wearing the same level of preset gear as everyone else. That would of course be a lot less attractive, because people aren’t looking for a fair and challenging fight, the vast majority is playing to crush at any cost.
And therein lies the misery of these contest. In the immortal words of XVIIth century author Pierre Corneille, “A vaincre sans péril on triomphe sans gloire” – “Triumph without peril brings no glory”.
So it was on the Sea near Valencia, and so it is in our MMOs.
