Todd Niall The golden rule of covering America’s Cups – beware the whisper

Covered his sixth America’s Cup regatta in 2021.

Ilearned valuable lessons about the world of the America’s Cup during the second Auckland defence in 2003. Prior to the regatta I was invited by Team New Zealand on a select media outing in a chase boat to watch testing and trials of the defender NZL82. Cone of silence stuff.

After a while another chase boat offloaded onto ours a broken boom, that swingarm off the mast, on the bottom of the mainsail. I was astonished at the thinness of the carbon fibre structure. Less weight above the waterline is everything.

In a pre-regatta media conference, the skipper Dean Barker told assembled international journalists he couldn’t think of anything in their build-up that could have gone better.

On the morning of the first race, a buzz went around the media centre. People who seemed to know, had heard that NZL82’s radical design feature the “hula” – a second hull layer at the rear – was worth more than a minute in a race, and the contest against Swiss Alinghi was a done deal.

Within hours, NZL82 had gear failures, took on a large volume of water, more than the blue bucket could shift, and withdrew. In race four its mast snapped and after a 0-5 scoreline the cup left town for 14 years. Lesson: believe what you see, not what you hear.

In 2013 in San Francisco, Team New Zealand pioneered foils on the giant AC72 catamaran and, but for being photographed in testing on the Hauraki Gulf, may have left defender Oracle Team USA stuck with a conventional non-foiling boat. The Kiwi challengers romped out to an 8-1 lead over the Americans, just one short of victory.

A former senior America’s Cup designer told me it was a done deal, that Oracle Team USA’s boat was a dog – just look at it – and there was no comeback.

After an unscheduled break in the regatta, during which Jimmy Spithill’s crew mastered how to get the best out of their boat, they won eight-in-a-row in one of the greatest sporting comebacks ever.

I am an unashamedly fascinated America’s Cup onlooker. Each of the six editions I have covered has been unique.

2000 was national euphoria, a re-run of the Peter Blake-run team’s 1995 5-0 win in San Diego, staged in an Auckland waterfront corner re-developed from a tatty industrial backyard. 2003 was the opposite, a campaign tinged with public division over the sailing core of the 2000 team, switching to Switzerland’s Alinghi which took the Cup to Valencia, Spain.

In 2007, Valencia on the Mediterranean staged perhaps the biggest and best event yet, attracting teams from China to