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Larry Ellison on the future of the America’s Cup

It’s a “back to the future” scenario four millennia in the making. Larry Ellison, whose BMW Oracle racing team brought the America’s Cup to San Francisco this past Saturday, is aiming to turn the competition for the Auld Mug into a high-tech, extreme sport spectacle. And that maybe means continued use of trimarans, which were first used in Polynesia four thousand years ago.

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A model of USA17 in the Rotunda of SF City Hall on Saturday, February 20.

Ellison and the team were given the Key to the City by Mayor Gavin Newsom at a welcoming ceremony, an honor usually bestowed to visiting dignitaries, including “princes”, the Mayor said. For the folks of the Golden Bay Yacht Club, where the Cup will now reside, Ellison IS a prince, rocketing the Cinderella blue-collar club to world fame ahead of St. Francis Yacht Club, which attracts a more moneyed set. The Cup was on display at City Hall for a few hours before being whisked off to San Diego, from where it will travel to Newport, RI, as part of an American tour. The crowd who came to see the silver bauble were mainly Oracle employees and yachties, but it’s Ellison’s hope that America’s Cup racing—including the defender and challenger series’ that precede the AC races—will become like motor racing’s Grand Prix in terms of live television audience numbers, attracting a new generation accustomed to extreme sports.

Which means race locales that have reliable winds, so that viewers get sailing, not fill-in programming, at the advertised time of the races. He is confident that San Francisco Bay’s clockwork winds at one o’clock in the afternoon will do the trick, and is eager to drum up support for building an America’s Cup Village somewhere on the Bay. “All we need is the land,” he told ABC7’s Mark Matthews in the only one-on-one interview he did for the assembled media at Saturday’s event. Oh, and maybe a bond measure to fund the protective marina that will be needed. Mayor Newsom, for his part, said the idea has the support of the local “elective family”—which includes the notoriously intra-combative SF Board of Supervisors—but it remains to be seen if voters in the Bay Area will approve Bay Area municipalities going into debt for a sporting venue.

It is worth noting that Matthews is ABC7’s political correspondent, and that he also took Gavin Newsom aside for a one-on-one before the press conference. The Newsom video has not yet been posted, but ABC’s coverage of Saturday’s event has repeatedly mentioned Treasure Island as a possible AC base. This 2001 news story about former mayor Willie Brown’s connection to Treasure Island perhaps indicates why a political reporter, not a sports reporter, conducted the interviews with Ellison and Brown’s protégé, Gavin Newsom.

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/video?id=7288043

ENDS

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