NEWS FLASH: Just as SA long-ago predicted, info is that Mascalzone Latino has now paid their challenge fees and been accepted making 9 challengers. Good show Vincenzo!

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

We have been reading posts and emails about the new AC Challenger Commission website - words like "shocked to see some openness in the Cup", "transparent", "fresh air". SA even got a back-handed compliment on one site that wrote:

"The agenda of the recent Challenger Commission meeting was leaked on Sailing Anarchy (nothing new there). Everyone said 'very interesting, I'd like to be a fly on the wall'.

"Now here's a dangerous precedent. You can be a fly on the wall.

"The full minutes of the meeting are published on the Challenger Commission website. That's the sort of open-ness businesses and public bodies promise but rarely deliver. It quite shocked the America's Cup world, which thrives on rumour, leak and innuendo.

SA agrees. But, really, what's the big deal, and what took so long?

As to the AC world thriving on "rumour" and "innuendo" (we thought that was an Italian suppository), hurray for us! Because not only does SA dish the AC goss, we get it right almost every time - and usually way before everyone else. No wonder SA is the number one sailing website in the world.

Google "Challenger Commission" and you are reminded that back in 1986 there was a body with the same name that had the sad but important task of investigating the Challenger space shuttle tragedy and the agency behind it - NASA.

Ironically, sources with several of the teams, including (you have to laugh) Alinghi, tell us that the latest Challenger Commission is doing the same thing - spending much of their time investigating and prodding ACM on their "mission."

Is ACM, as many are beginning to whisper, just an expensive, slow, and bloated bureaucracy? Like NASA, ACM has achieved many "firsts" but at what price? Worse yet, is ACM about to blow up?

With Ernesto Bertarelli's bucks behind them SA doubts that, and we certainly hope not. But with the recent departure of two top ACM managers (both went to Alinghi - makes you wonder) there has been plenty of "rumour and speculation" about the ineptness of ACM management, hidden financial dealings, unhappy sponsors, paying fees for and propping up certain teams, undermining prospective challengers they deem unworthy, taking sponsors for ACM that should have gone to teams, lousy TV coverage, attempting to charge large fees to some of the teams for their bases - the list goes on. One part of their operation that the teams say does work is the Race Management under Dyer Jones.

Maybe Russell Coutts has been right about ACM, and its CEO Michel Bonnefous ("Bonnefous is a buffoon"), all along.

Next week should be interesting. The Challenger Commission meets again, this time in Valencia. As always SA gets the juicy goo, and one of our best sources already sent us the Commission's five-page agenda. We would post it again, like we did before their last meeting, but we see they beat us to the punch. See www.challengercommission.com. This only proves the point above that SA has forced the boating bureaucrats to open up. Let's hope it's not them opening up their raincoats to flash us.

You have to be a lawyer to love this, well, stuff (see, we ARE cleaning up our language), but read through the agenda and you have to wonder with all the problems that the challengers are having with ACM if Alinghi is pulling the ACM strings behind the scenes (Bertarelli, after all, owns both Alinghi and ACM) and are just loving it.

Fly on the wall time again, but SA's fly won't be eating any stuff, nor let them shovel any to our readers. Stay tuned for the fur to fly, and as always we will do our best to bring you the straight stuff first.

13-Mar-2005