If I had a dollar for every theory that has popped up in the last 48 hours as to why the Kiwi defence fell apart, I and my family would be flying back Club Class.
Monday morning was unusually hard for Aucklanders and tough for the country, as the nation tried to come to terms with the shock of losing the Cup. Joining them in their surprise, were several hundred well informed journalists who were trying their hardest to gloss over just how convinced they once were of a New Zealand win.
At the Team New Zealand unveiling, when the bold Kiwi confidence was revealed, the running joke was of queues outside the local estate agents the following day.
To my mind, the very fact that so many of us were convinced that the black boats were faster, (and that Alinghi were surely on the back foot having not been able to develop their hula successfully), is the clearest hint at what might have gone wrong with the home team's campaign.
They believed in their boat and its array of innovative details. They believed that the hula would provide speed to burn and they believed that they had a significant advantage. They put their faith in the hardware and a young, talented and enthusiastic crew and in doing so may have ignored other crucial areas of the campaign. But they, like the rest of us, misjudged just how quick and reliable Alinghi's SUI-64 really was.
Listening to Coutts and Alinghi's chief designer Rolf Vrolijk over the last few days, I'm beginning to think that even the Swiss team was surprised at just how much more performance they'd been able to squeeze out of the boat, both before and during the event.
Looking at the series five months down the line I believe that if Team New Zealand had been racing in the Challenger series, they would have blown away most of the competition in the early stages, with the exception of Alinghi.
Team New Zealand had the perfect starting datum as they knew how quick NZL-60 was. They also knew a good deal about the other campaigns. And they knew how quick their own boats were.
And now we know too.
NZL-82 may have broken down in spectacular fashion at times, but she was one of the few boats to put serious pressure on SUI-64. By Coutts' own admission, the team had made huge strides in performance throughout the five months. NZL-82 had one shot at the fastest AC boat to date and they proved they could be in there with a shout.
So what went wrong, why did NZL-82 become a weapon of mass destruction?
I believe that throughout the TNZ build up, they had never pushed the boat to the level in training that they needed to. When Barker came off the line for the first time he had his foot hard down.
Had they experienced such conditions during their in house racing, they may well have backed off sub-consciously just a notch, unaware that they would need to push beyond this limit to get their nose ahead of SUI-64.
On top of this, it's difficult not to come to the conclusion that gear failures and the solutions that followed, were something that Alinghi had gone through much earlier in their campaign. How else could the oldest boat of the latest generation of ACC boats be this reliable and quick?
Had Team New Zealand been able to address it's reliability issues, they could well have achieved the kind of close racing that many were expecting.
Although the local team went down to the same score that they had beaten Prada last time around, their defence was fundamentally different. The Kiwis had a fast boat that was nearly quick enough at times to get and stay in front of the Swiss.
But nearly isn't good enough in the America's Cup.
So there it is, the America's Cup 2003 is over. It's been an extraordinary and intoxicating experience and one that's very hard to switch off when the final day comes. The trouble is that this event is so intense for such a long time, that after 5 months you begin to think this is normal life.
It isn't, but it's great while it lasts and has to rate as the most rewarding sailing event I have ever been involved with, without going afloat.
See you in Switzerland.
Matt Sheahan, 4 March 2003
