In the closest America's Cup race in 11 years, the home crew had a certain victory yanked away in the last several hundred meters.
Alinghi of Switzerland passed Team New Zealand on the downwind run to the finish and held on for a heartstopping win yesterday to take a 2-0 lead.
PHOTO: AFP
New Zealand-born skipper Russell Coutts steered Alinghi to a seven-second victory that put his crew just three victories shy of taking the America's Cup to Europe for the first time in 152 years.
It was a painful defeat for two-time defending champion Team New Zealand, which seemed to be in control after Saturday's opening-race disaster, when its boat practically fell apart and forced the Kiwis to drop out just 25 minutes after the start, handing the win to Alinghi.
Team New Zealand led by 26 seconds as the boats rounded the fifth mark and headed down the final leg on the Hauraki Gulf.
After Alinghi crossed the finish line just more than one length ahead, Team New Zealand skipper Dean Barker slumped against the steering wheel in disappointment in the late-afternoon sunshine.
"On the last run, we made a couple of mistakes early on and that caused the race to be a lot closer than it needed to be," Barker said.
Coutts extended his record to 11 straight America's Cup victories. The first nine wins came when he led Team New Zealand to five-race sweeps in 1995 and 2000. He handed the wheel to Barker for the clinching race in 2000, then jumped ship along with several other Kiwis just two months later. Switzerland is the first landlocked country to reach the America's Cup match.
Race 3 in the best-of-nine series is scheduled for tomorrow.
"It looked for a long time like it would be 1-1, but now it's 2-0, and that's major," said Alinghi strategist Jochen Schuemann.
It was the closest America's Cup race since Italy's Il Moro di Venezia beat America3 by three seconds in the second race of the 1992 match. The Americans ended up winning the series, 4-1.
The Kiwis had sped past the Swiss on the downwind second leg, and the Swiss pulled the same move for the stunning comeback.
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