Betrayed by the America’s Cup

Boat trim is an integral part of racing, even in many strictly regulated one-design classes. An eighth-grader racing an Optimist dinghy at their local club will spend a large part of their day tuning their rig, carefully adjusting the shape of their sail to eke out every last ounce of power.

Criticising a race crew for making their boat go faster is preposterous, because that's what most of the crew are there to do. If Oracle did a better job of that, then they won fair and square. Money certainly helps, but it can't win races if you don't have the skill and expertise to turn that money into speed.

An equivalent article would be to write an outraged expose of Formula 1 motor racing, complaining that the top teams "cheat" by having a huge team of engineers, aerodynamicists and strategists to make the car go faster. All that stuff is an integral part of the sport and nobody has ever pretended otherwise.

After just now doing a bit of Googling – it's pretty clear all the rumours I'm hearing are all based of (and contain verbatim chunks of) this:

http://www.sail-world.com/Australia/Americas-Cup:-Speculatio... http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1309/S00253/americas-cup-la...

Not sure how much truth there is in that claim – or even if it matters much, but there's clear;y some controversy about why Oracle got so much faster after race 9…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Cup

It's not a normal sporting competition the way we think of sport today--a contest conducted by standard rules using regulated equipment under the auspices of a neutral governing body. The governing body of an America's Cup race is the yacht club that holds the cup. The rules are whatever they say they are.