Since winning the America’s Cup in mid-February, Russell Coutts has barely had time to draw breath. The CEO of BMW Oracle Racing flew with Larry Ellison and the rest of the team for some Auld Mug-wielding celebrations in San Francisco, home of the Golden Gate Yacht Club which they represented, and San Diego, where the team had carried out many months of development and testing of their winged-trimaran.

From there the Kiwi returned to his home land, to Auckland, where eight potential America’s Cup challengers were battling it out at the Louis Vuitton Trophy in the old Version 5 boats. It was a useful opportunity for Coutts to get some face time with some other big hitters in the sport, such as Dean Barker, the man who took his place as skipper of Emirates Team New Zealand, and Paul Cayard, skipper of the fledgling Swedish team, Artemis.

Coutts is continuing to talk about a very open, democratic process for making the big decisions that will govern the format of the 34th America’s Cup. He is also making this case without badmouthing Alinghi, although it is plain that he is looking to make a clean break from the way that his former employer has managed the Cup in recent years. Strangely, both Ernesto Bertarelli and Russell Coutts share a passion for making the Cup a more commercially viable event, but perhaps it was the differences of opinion around this subject that tore their friendship apart soon after they held the Cup aloft in Auckland back in March 2003.

According to Coutts in a recent radio interview: “If you create a system where the team that wins designs a better boat and sails it better, that’s what people want to see.” Sort of sounds obvious, doesn’t it! That’s what sport is all about, isn’t it? But the secondary effect of creating a fair sporting event is greater commercial appeal. “I think that it’s important to make some of these changes - fair rules and so forth - to re-engage and reconvince the commercial world that this is something they can get involved with. To make these teams viable, that’s a big consideration. Right now, the commercial value of the teams is less than what they’re costing [to run].”

BMW Oracle Racing Team
© BMW Oracle Racing

After a heavy round of consulting with other interested parties, Coutts says he plans to release a timeline of announcements by the end of March. That’s not to say that we’ll know where the next Cup will be, or in what kind of boats, or much else by the end of March, just that we’ll get an idea of when we’ll be told these crucial details.

From the way he has been talking, San Francisco is certainly a possibility and the city’s Port Authority has said it will do everything in its power to bring the Cup there. Other venues that Coutts has mentioned in passing include Miami and Los Angeles. Since departing Valencia there has been scant talk of Europe, so maybe the Cup really is headed stateside. Coutts has said the earliest likely date is 2013, possibly 2014. And still he is enthusing about the notion of multihulls making a return to the Cup. One thing we do know, it won’t be in Version 5 boats. Much as Coutts won three America’s Cups at the helm of these proven keelboats, he wants something far more dynamic for the next edition.

Above all, though, Coutts says he and his billionaire boss just want a fair Cup. “Pretty much all that Larry Ellison is asking is for independent management, so that if he loses it this time, then he could still come back next time and have a fair chance of winning it back.” I’m not sure that any previous holder of the Cup has spoken with that level of magnanimity and even-handedness before. This is new territory for the most one-sided competition in world sport.