Team New Zealand said it has fired a number of employees for leaking confidential information as spying claims rocked preparations for next year’s America’s Cup yachting regatta on Tuesday.
New Zealand
officials said they were investigating “structural and financial matters”
relating to the prestigious race in Auckland as team managing director Grant
Dalton announced the sackings.
Few details were
revealed but the America’s Cup, the world’s oldest international sporting
trophy, has a history of intrigue surrounding the cutting-edge designs employed
by teams.
“We’re not 100
percent sure what they (wanted) or what they got,” Dalton told radio station
NewstalkZB.
“But what I do know
is that the game was up quicker than they expected.”
A Team New Zealand
statement said those involved had also made “highly defamatory and inaccurate
allegations” against the organisation and some of its personnel.
“These allegations
are entirely incorrect,” it said.
Team New Zealand
holds hosting rights for the America’s Cup after winning the trophy, known as
the Auld Mug, in Bermuda in 2017.
It is organising
next year’s event with oversight from the New Zealand government, which has
poured more than NZ$120 million ($77 million) into infrastructure and
associated costs.
New Zealand’s
Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment said it was examining claims
relating to the organisation of the event.
Dalton confirmed
the sacked employees were New Zealanders working for the event-planning arm of
the organisation, not the yacht racing team.
He refused to say
how many people were involved, or speculate on their motives.
‘Like James Bond’
The yachts for next
year’s regatta are 23-metre (75-foot) monohulls that use a state-of-the-art
foiling design, making them expensive to develop and unpredictable in the
water.
Dalton said he was
concerned Team New Zealand may have lost valuable intellectual property about
the vessels.
“Of course I’m
worried, absolutely,” he told RNZ.
“But I know the
competitors and I know their ethics and I can’t imagine for one millisecond
that this has gone (to them).”
The America’s Cup,
first contested in 1851, has often seen skullduggery as competitors seek to
gain an edge in a sport where innovative design can be crucial.
Members of the
victorious Australia II syndicate in 1983 caught a scuba diver linked to a
rival team trying to photograph the boat’s revolutionary winged keel.
US billionaire Bill
Koch led America3 to victory in 1992 and later boasted “we were the ultimate in
spying”.
“We hired divers
and we picked up people’s garbage,” he told Boat International.
“We did everything
we could within the rules and the law but we pushed it to the edge.”
In 2003, US
challenger OneWorld was docked points for breaching race rules because it had
Team New Zealand’s boat data, apparently obtained from a Kiwi designer who had
switched teams.
Before the 2017
regatta, the then-defending champion Jimmy Spithill of Oracle Team USA admitted
all teams engaged in spying.
“The level of
reconnaissance is right up there,” he said. “It is like James Bond or the CIA.
We all have teams based where the other teams are, watching them all the time.”
“You can learn a
lot from the competition. That is what it is about in this game. You can look
at your competitors and not only take their lessons but improve on it.”
