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Is SF’s Cup Bid on Shaky Ground?

With its government having pulled out all the stops to put togther a bid to host the 34th America’s Cup, San Francisco is far from a lock to host the event. Most recently, reports that BMW Oracle Racing team officials have been meeting with representatives from Newport, Rhode Island, Dubai, and a nebulous Italian venue have done a great deal to cast doubt on San Francisco’s bid. Given that the team’s imposed deadline for a bid from the City has already passed, we’re at a loss as to what the team hopes this will accomplish. It’s too late to be a negotiating ploy, which leads us to believe that all the effort put in by the sailing community, San Francisco government and civic leaders may have been in vain all along.

First of all, what’s with all this Newport, Rhode Island business? What happened to San Francisco being the only U.S. city under consideration? Ellison can do what he wants with the Cup — it’s his perogative as the winner — but he’s going to have a hard time arguing that the signed, sealed and delivered deal from the City of San Francisco will have a deleterious impact on the event. Which is the only believable argument from someone with a personal fortune estimated in the neighborhood of $27 billion. He’s going to have a hard time convincing us that Newport will generate the same kind of international appeal and enthusiasm around the Cup as San Francisco will.

The thing is, by this point in the process, San Francisco is a known quantity. Ellison and Coutts know what they’ll get here, the terms are spelled out. It seems highly doubtful that Rhode Island, motivated as it is to get the event, would be able get a host city agreement together and voted on by the end of the year. So, if they were to choose Rhode Island, BMW Oracle Racing either must risk announcing the venue without having a host city agreement in place, or put off the venue announcement and risk being sued by a challenger for not sticking to the protocol.

The team’s COO Stephen Barclay has been all over the wires with his claims that the deal was changed late in the game and that’s what caused the team to look elsewhere. But the reality is that the deal only changed because the original one no longer had the support of the majority of Board of Supervisors, due in part to the fact that the City government rightly uncovered the myth the team made every effort to perpetuate — that of the bogeyman Italian venue (while the European economic crisis swelled to a crescendo) — and that even if that competition was real, it wasn’t worth giving away the farm for anyway.

Ellison and company kept pitching the importance of an incentive — it’s still there in the revised deal, by the way — to bring the 34th Cup to the Bay. But nowhere was there any call to create an incentive for the team to keep it here. For instance, tying the length of the leases on Piers 30/32 and Seawall Lot 330 into the future editions of the Cup, which is an incentive that would seem fair to us.

The truly wrenching thing about the whole state of affairs is that the format and the boats are so brilliant, so inspired and so necessary that there’s not much we can find fault with in the vision that Coutts and Ellison are trying to execute. But what we can’t understand is, why not have the most radically progressive and innovative America’s Cup in history in a milieu that radiates those qualities? If Ellison wants to have it here, he can have it here. He won’t lose a ton of money to put on the regatta with the deal he has before him. Like it or not, we’re about to find out what his primary motivation has been all along.

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