THE CORRUPT CUP

Until last week I hadn’t watched a single moment of the current America’s Cup regatta.  But being with my parents in Pawarenga for the past ten days has made me a captive audience to it, because they are avid watchers; or at least they were before I arrived.  More on that later. 

I can’t swallow the baited lie that this is a race between nations, with little old NZ playing David to America’s Goliath.  No.  This isn’t so much a race as a cynical marketing exercise by billionaires selling goods and products that 99% of us either will never own, use or need.  So, given the behaviour of the so-called American team in particular, I’ve personally renamed this event the Corrupt Cup. 

To understand why, take a look at the lead up to this regatta when Larry Ellison and his rich cronies tried to perpetrate a real estate scam on San Francisco. Even though San Franciscans were able to scale back that swindle, Ellison and Oracle still evicted Teatro ZinZanni from Pier 27 so they could profit from overpriced waterfront concerts at the spot they supposedly needed for their boat race; lying, cheating and corrupting the system all along the way.

Then Ellison, the world's fifth richest man, and the other 1-percenters on the Corrupt Cup Organizing Committee, stuck San Francisco taxpayers with a $20 million bill for their race because they were all too greedy and selfish to honour their private fundraising commitments – which they could have covered by simply writing cheques for amounts they would barely have noticed, and which they'd have been able to write off their taxes anyway.

On top of all that, Ellison and his team forced a true sporting event – the venerable Escape from Alcatraz triathlon – to be moved up from the warm-ish summer months to the frigid winter because the yachts were apparently unable to share San Francisco Bay for a few hours one morning.  As a result one man died of a heart attack and 150 participants had to be rescued (three times the normal number) because the water was so dangerously cold.

But the worst thing about the Corrupt Cup is how long it’s taking to finish.  I started watching on Friday 13th September when Team Emirates NZ only needed two more races to clinch the Cup.  Ten days later, they still haven’t done it. 

I’m with the facebook poster who wrote, “come on billionaire boat raceowners, who I will never meet...hurry and win your silly cup, so you can go back to your flash yacht club and stop distracting my people from the real life issues that surround us…Feed the billion starving children in the world and then I'll be impressed!”  Indeed. 

The only comfort I have in all this is that my parents are no longer watching with bated breath, and the odds are improving that New Zealand won’t have to host the next round of the Corrupt Cup.