Who remembers the America’s Cup?

No wonder the Kiwis hate us. This week, Team New Zealand became the first syndicate from outside the United States to successfully defend the America’s Cup in its 149-year history, and the Australian media barely breathed to acknowledge it. On the Ten Network’s Sports Tonight, the news was broken in the second last segment, just after a big Tim Webster interview with Kenny Druce about a novelty golf shot he attempted at Royal Canberra. In The Age, it was reported on page 5 of the sports section, nudged off the front page by controversial changes to the AFL’s charging laws. It seems that in Australia, winning the America’s Cup just isn’t a big deal any more.

You might remember a time when winning an America’s Cup was a big deal in this country. You might remember a time when winning an America’s Cup encouraged Prime Ministers to hit the piss and declare impromptu public holidays. A time when a yellow kangaroo delivering an uppercut threatened to push its way onto the national flag. When if you came up with a decent keel design, they’d name a car after you.

The significant difference now, I suppose, is that we are hopeless. Australia improved on its performance at the last America’s Cup in the sense that the boat isn’t on the ocean floor collecting barnacles, but even from the name of the syndicate, ‘Young Australia’, it is clear that we never expected to win. And how right we were. ‘Young Australia’ won just four races out of thirty in the Louis Vuitton Challenger series late last year, contributing greatly to the fact that nobody in this country particularly knew it was on.

I suppose the Australian media could defend itself against charges of blind nationalism by saying that even internationally, the America’s Cup isn’t the story it once was. Many would argue that what made Australia II’s victory so newsworthy was that the cup had never been won by a challenger before. There was that huge many-inched screw that bolted the Auld Mug to the trophy cabinet in the New York Yacht Club, and when it was ceremonially removed we could gaze in awe at nineteenth century rust. Those swindling Americans had finally been outswindled by a keel with wings, and we had a fat Western Australian (who we have now found out can paint), spending millions of dollars of other people’s money encouraging us to go berserk.

There’s also little doubt that the credibility of America’s Cup racing has taken a battering since Australia’s failed defence in 1987. In the early nineties, both the Americans and the New Zealanders got experimental with just what constituted a 12-metre yacht, and from memory, the result was match-racing between an air-craft carrier and a speedboat. Nobody particularly followed the regatta, and even fewer followed up to watch the exciting conclusion in the law courts. By the mid-nineties, the America’s Cup was dead in the water, and anxious millionaires looking for good public relations tax write-offs started to embrace hot air ballooning.

But the America’s Cup has been back on track for some time now. The rules have been modified to create some sort of level playing sea, although the key to success is still as much in the financing as the sailing. It is nevertheless the pinnacle event in world sailing, which is why Australia should feel somewhat shamed that it has taken next to no interest in Team New Zealand’s triumph. After all, had the Federation Debates of the 1890s progressed slightly differently and New Zealand become a State of Australia, news of Kenny Druce’s novelty four iron would no doubt have been washed away in a sea of ticker tape and goodwill. Who knows, John Howard and Peter Reith might even have picked up a slab and facilitated a quick-fire re-negotiation of 2,000,000 [number?] individual workplace contracts to give us the day off.

This year Australia is opening its doors to the greatest athletes on Earth. Hopefully, our sporting media can allocate a respectable amount of coverage to the achievements of competitors from all countries, and not get caught in that familiar cycle of narrow jingoism, typified by our complete lack of interest in the America’s Cup. Maybe we could even take special care to acknowledge Olympic athletes from New Zealand, which for a country with just over three million people, consistently outperforms bigger nations in the sporting arena. And then they might stop throwing bottles at our cricketers.