The ExDub friendly "Sunday" program has had another "interesting" report. This time it's not about "Silent Witnesses" but the crucial matter of sporting kings.
Here's a report:
The Sport Australia Can't Win
February 16, 2003
Reporter :Bill Ralston
Producer : Tim Wilson & Peter Hiscock
For the past five months, in the Hauraki Gulf, just off Auckland in New Zealand, yachts from all over the globe have been racing for the world’s most prestigious sporting trophy, the America’s Cup.
Almost a billion dollars has been spent in the battle…designing, building, and buying the world’s best yachting crews.
But there is one nation conspicuous in the Cup’s history no longer in the game -- Australia. Our attempts at making it to the starting line this year disintegrated for lack of interest, support, and more importantly in any America’s Cup race, money.
This week Sunday decided to let a Kiwi tell us what went wrong. Our guest reporter is Bill Ralston, one of New Zealand’s leading political and social commentators. He looks at how one of Australia’s most successful sporting endeavours became one of our most notable failures.
Once the domain of competing billionaires, the sport has now evolved to become a major TV sporting event – bulging with sponsorship and sports marketing.
But the distinctive nature of the America’s Cup through its 152-year history remains. It’s still a dog-eat-dog, last-man-standing competition where the clash of egos and reputations on shore are as fierce as on the water.
This year is no different with allegations of treachery and betrayal thrown at the Swiss ‘Alinghi’ team -- many of whose sailors, including the skipper, Russell Coutts, and his tactician, Brad Butterworth, defected from the successful Team New Zealand crew which won the Cup three years ago, lured by the Swiss offer of million dollar salaries.
New Zealand sports broadcaster, Murray Deaker, led a public assault on his radio show against those he calls defectors and traitors: “Coutts going to the Swiss would be like Steve Waugh leaving the Australian cricket team, taking half the team with him, and turning up for the Poms at the Melbourne Cricket Ground for the next Test match. Can you imagine how that would go over?”
Races begin this weekend off Auckland with plenty at stake; a new Team New Zealand crew anxious to beat their former colleagues on ‘Alinghi’; the Swiss team who are as keen to defend their reputations and justify their decision to jump yachts; the Swiss bio-tech billionaire who has punted $200 million in his first America’s Cup attempt, and for the people of Auckland who have grown accustomed to the billion dollar benefits to their local economy, the fear of losing it, possibly forever, to the Europeans.
The book of rules, written for the America’s Cup in 1851, called “The Deed of Gift”, insisted that the race be a, ‘friendly competition between foreign nations’, but, as Sunday reveals, in the modern era, it’s anything but.