Sitting in the select audience watching Ben Ainslie make his acceptance speech in Madrid, the three-time Olympic Champion having just been crowned ISAF Rolex World Sailor of the Year, were Ernesto Bertarelli and Russell Coutts. A few feet apart, but miles away in their ability to agree over the future of the America's Cup. With former Cup winner Gary Jobson as master of ceremonies at the Rolex dinner, Jobson asked Ainslie what was next on the agenda. Ainslie did not waste the opportunity to make his point directly to the two power brokers in the audience. "The America's Cup is really the next biggest challenge for me and Team Origin. We've got a great sailing and design team in place and we're really looking forward to getting the Cup back on track, getting out on the water and getting racing."

Amen to that. When I spoke to Mike Sanderson, Ainslie's boss at Team Origin, he was only too keen to pick up on the point made by his young skipper. "Isn't it tragic that you've got the likes of Ben Ainslie, Iain Percy, James Spithill, Dean Barker - these young guys who are a generation behind Russell Coutts, Brad Butterworth, Peter Holmberg - young guys whose dreams are being put on hold by politics! Ben is incredibly passionate about the America's Cup, so what he said in Madrid wasn't a dig, that was a plea. The message from Ben, the new Sailor of the Year was, ‘Dude, if you can't do it for yourselves, if you can't sort this mess out, do it for us!' It's Ben and his generation's turn to take on the America's Cup."

It's been a busy few weeks for Ainslie, Sanderson and the rest of the Team Origin gang. After an aborted transatlantic record attempt with Richard Branson and family aboard the Virgin Money branded 100-footer Speedboat, the British team flew down to Valencia to take part in a weekend regatta organised by the Challenger of Record, the Club Náutico Español de Vela (CNEV). Sailing a borrowed boat from Desafio Espanol, this was the British team's first race against Cup opposition. It started very well, with Ainslie and Co winning the first race against three experienced teams, Alinghi, Desafio Espanol and Luna Rossa. In the end Alinghi won and the Brits came third, but they were very happy with how things had gone.

Two days later and Sanderson was representing Team Origin at a meeting between Alinghi and 12 potential challengers. BMW Oracle Racing was not one of those 12, and a statement released by Tom Ehman outlined the objections that could yet see the spat between the Swiss and Americans pulled back to the New York Supreme Court. "We repeatedly have offered to drop our lawsuit on one simple condition - that Alinghi adopt fair and competitive rules," said Ehman's statement.

Sounds fair enough, doesn't it! But Sanderson had little time for American objections. When I asked him if the 33rd Cup was any closer to happening than when that disastrously worded Protocol was released by Alinghi in July last year, Sanderson was adamant: "We're a million times closer in reality. If you'd asked me a year ago, I might have thought we were close but I didn't realise how far away we were at the time. Now, I think we're very close. Lots of issues which Oracle put on the table as issues - which they wanted to use as leverage against their challenge of CNEV - have been solved.

"Now we're forming an event, between the Defender and 12 other teams who have challenged and signed documents. The reality is that we as challengers are more involved in the creation of the next event than has ever happened in the past. Certainly when the Golden Gate Yacht Club was involved as Challenger of Record for the 32nd America's Cup, I know they held on to the [Version 5] rule for several months before they released it to the other challengers, so it's a bit rich to say that it's not fair now."

As Sanderson says, the America's Cup has never been a fair fight. It's the very one-sidedness of the event that makes it so unique. Alinghi can rightly be accused of having been far too greedy with its original Protocol from last year, but as the Team Origin boss says, things have changed. The challengers have never had it so good. Where up to now Alinghi has been seen as the black hat in this gunslinging and mudslinging match between Bertarelli and Ellison, the weight of opinion is rapidly shifting against the Americans. A year ago BMW Oracle was widely applauded for taking a legal stand against the Swiss, but now the Americans are beginning to looking increasingly isolated in their resistance to a Defender who by most people's reckoning is doing a much better job of listening to, and working with, the challenger community.