Thinking Outside The Box

Emirates Team New Zealand Played Their Own Game From Start To Finish To Win Back The America’S Cup After 14 Years. But How Did They Do It? Elaine Bunting Reports.

- Elaine Bunting

Baby, you’re coming home.”

You could see the eyes of Grant Dalton, the tough, straight-talking CEO of Emirates Team New Zealand, filling with tears as he lifted the America’s Cup out of its great Louis Vuitton trunk to cradle it like a first born.

It was exactly the look you might give a new infant: expected, longed for, yet still a surprise. Dalton – Dalts – actually touching the big, famous silver claret jug that has obsessed sailors and billionaires for more than 166 years.

The New Zealand press described it as redemption, the same media that crucified the team in 2013 when they lost from the brink of victory. But from the Kiwi perspective, it was a deliverance from 14 years of court cases, rule changes, egos, money, machinations. It punched back at the teams that wouldn’t give ETNZ a practice race in Bermuda, and all of them trying to change this to a two-yearly competition with their ‘framework agreement’ (which Dalts was about to scupper).

How, exactly, Emirates Team New Zealand (ETNZ) won the 35th America’s Cup is a story that will be stitched into the fable of history. It is something defeated rivals will have to try to piece together if they want to win it back. Money didn’t do it; ETNZ didn’t have the most. Time didn’t do it; two years ago they were nearly bust and on the verge of closing their doors.

But they had two crucial things: a core of smart people who had been involved for a long time; and they had walked over the scorched earth of 2013 and produced 20 goals, the most of important of which was, Dalton said: “to put it outside the square. “We won because we did it a different way.” How ETNZ seized back the America’s Cup, racing the fastest boat in the fastest class ever to sail on water, is an amazing story and probably the biggest organisational turnaround sailing has ever seen.