The America's Cup returns to America

Australian sailor Jimmy Spithill has successfully won the America's Cup for America but he still wants to win it for Australia.

Thirty-year-old Spithill, from Pittwater just north of Sydney, steered Larry Elliston's USA 17 (better known as BMW Oracle) to two decisive wins in the best two out of three Deed of Gift challenge off Valencia in Spain.

Sailing in temperatures that hovered around 0 degrees and winds that rarely topped eight knots, Spithill won the first race by more than 15 minutes and the second by more than five. His huge trimaran topped 25 knots in the reaching legs of the second race and reached almost 20 knots when sailing upwind in both races.

Alinghi 5, the 115 foot catamaran built and sailed by the Cup holder, Swiss billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli, was never really in the hunt -- although it did put in a remarkable performance on the first leg of the second race where it led USA 17 by up to 600 metres at times.

Elliston, a computer billionaire, will take the America's Cup trophy, a bottomless silver ewer known affectionately as The Auld Mug, back to San Francisco on Saturday. He is expected to get a huge welcome at the Golden Gate Yacht Club, on the southern shore of the city's famous bay, when he uncrates the Cup. It will be the first time the America's Cup has been in American hands since it was won by the Kiwis in San Diego 16 years ago.

Elliston has announced that the Italian yacht club, Club Italia di Roma which sponsors multiple world champion Vincenzo Onorato’s Mascalzone Latino (Italian rascals) sailing team, will be the Challenger of Record for the next America’s Cup regatta -- which will revert to mulitiple challangers from around the world competing for the Louis Vuitton Cup for the right to meet BMW Oracle in the Cup match.

Elliston is also likely to abandon the ruinously expensive multi-hulls of this challenge and revert to a new America’s Cup class yacht -- a mono hull sloop of about 90 feet. The change back to a traditional yacht and racing format is expected to attract up to a dozen challenges from yacht clubs around the world. Already the British, the French, the Germans, the Russians and the New Zealanders have indicated they will be in the field. Ellison is also expected to face challengers from the US east coast who want the right to defend the Cup.

Whether or not Australia will have a yacht in the regatta, expected to be sailed in San Francisco in the northern summer of 2012, could hinge on the availability of Jimmy Spithill.

If Spithill, who is known is sailing circles as “Pitbull” because of his aggressive starts and who is regarded as one of the top match racing skippers in the world, leaves his highly paid position with Elliston’s team then he is sure to be offered a job of skipper on any Australian challenger.

Australia has not had a yacht in an America’s Cup regatta since Spithill, then a baby-faced 20-year-old, took the helm of Syd Fischer’s Young Australia in Auckland in 2000, but there are a number of would-be syndicates already sniffing out the chances of raising the $30million a challenge in San Francisco would cost.

With no billionaire sailors in Australia to individually back a yacht, any challenge syndicate would have to rely on generous corporate donations to fund its research and building program.

When, in 1983, Alan Bond’s Australia II became the first yacht to win the America’s Cup in 143 years (it is the oldest continually contested sporting contest in the world), the funding was provided by Bond and a large number local companies.

Whatever decision Elliston makes on the boats, venue and timing of the next America’s Cup regatta, sailing around the world will be cheering the fact that the outcome will be decided on the water rather than dragging through the New York Supreme Court as this Deed of Gift challenge has done for the past two and a half years.