Alinghi 5, warming up to the America's Cup 2010, in Genoa, Italy 17 August 2009 (© 2009 Carlo Borlenghi/Alinghi)

Geneva, Switzerland/New York, USA (GenevaLunch) - The details of the boat BMW will be sailing in the 2010 America’s Cup race do not have to be divulged until two weeks before the race, a judge in New York has said.

The New York Supreme Court announced a verdict 22 September that went against the Société Nautique de Genève, home to the  Alinghi team, and holder of the America’s Cup sailing trophy. It rejected Alinghi’s claim to disqualify the Oracle team from the 2010 America’s Cup race because, Alinghi told the court, the Golden Gate Yacht Club, represented by Oracle, had not provided, by the deadline, the required technical details concerning Oracle’s boat. The court agreed with Oracle, which had argued that a boat undergoes constant technical modifications until the moment it begins to compete.

In her ruling, Supreme Court Judge Shirley Kornreich nevertheless scolded the Oracle team for “unsportsmanlike behaviour” which “resulted in substantially reducing SNG’s (Société Nautique de Genève) advantage as originally contemplated by the Deed of Gift.”

BMW Oracle 90 foot trimaran, sea trials in Washington, USA, 13 August 2009. Photographer: Gilles Martan-Raget

Both teams remain committed to begin the race in February 2010.

The judge’s decision comes on the heels publication of a previously confidential agreement between SNG and the International Sailing Federation (ISAF).

The SNG waived its right to secrecy last week, under legal pressure from Golden Gate, which meanwhile made public a letter to the court from Russell Coutts, BMW Oracle’s CEO and skipper, which detailed Golden Gate’s argument that the secret agreement would give the Geneva sailing group an unfair advantage in the next America’s Cup. Coutts, who lives in the Lake Geneva region, formerly sailed with Alinghi but the two parted company on poor terms in 2004.

The Guardian reports Wednesday evening 23 September that the sailing federation has given Alinghi “carte blanche” for the event’s rules, in exchange for payment of €150,000, and this includes waiving all media rights to the event. The complete seven-page document is publicly available on the ISAF site. The fee is there, as are several mentions of possible changes to the ISAF rules, but these are always in the context of the Deed of Gift. The Guardian is also critical of two other clauses: that the ISAF must cover the cost of doping testing and that judges must be bilingual, French and English. The document does state that the ISAF should pay for doping tests, not uncommon for other sports federations, and the bilingual requirement for judges states that this should be the case unless otherwise agreed, which appears to leave flexibility. The agreement forbids judges to be from the US or Switzerland, the two teams’ home countries.

The judge’s decision 18 September states, that “the Deed of gift provides that should the challenging and defending clubs not ‘mutually consent’ to the details of the Race, the race ‘shall be sailed subject to the rules and sailing regulations [of the defending club] so far as the same do not conflict with the provisions’ of the Deed of Gift. Nowhere in the Deed of Gift is mention made of the ISAF rules.”

The Deed of Gift, which governs the race’s rules, is a document drawn up in the 19th century and registered in the courts of New York State.

The Cup, a competition that is more than 150 years old, has been riddled by accusations of unfairness since its beginnings, some of which have been linked to technical advances made by one team or the other, and some of which are linked to the legal framework for the Cup, where the winner is allowed to set virtually all the rules for the next round of sailing.

Related: 24Heures, NZZ

Background: “Alinghi accused by US team of secretly plotting with Int’l Sailing Federation“, 15 July 2009, GenevaLunch and a series of articles on the America’s Cup races in BYM, sailing site.

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