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Imagine one of his myriad challengers actually kayoing Joe Louis in his prime, or a 20-game loser burning the ball past the lordly New York Yankees of the Babe Ruth era. For the sailing cognoscenti along the gilt-edged waterfront of Newport, R.I., an upset of such proportions is a very real possibility. Not in anything so plebeian as boxing or baseball, to be sure, but in the patrician world of yachting, where, over the din of clinking champagne glasses, the chitchat is about fears that the longest winning streak in sports is about to end. After 132 years...
Such foul-weather forecasts have rattled Newport before. Yet ever since they first wrested the old silver mug from a fleet of the best yachts the British could muster in 1851, the Yankee sailors have somehow managed to beat off all comers. What is different about this America's Cup summer is not that the Americans have slipped, but that the competition has got noticeably better, especially the yachtsmen from Down Under...
...radical keel ever to hang from the bottom of a 12-meter-yacht*. Though the Aussies ostentatiously drape a shroud over the keel when the boat is hauled out after each day's sail-psych is everything in the America's Cup competition-just about all of Newport knows what Australia H's secret weapon looks like: it is bulging in the front, separates into delta wings at the rear, and could pass for a cross between a whale and the space shuttle...
...midsummer, however, the basic features of the keel were common knowledge around Newport: the unusual appendage rakes forward under the hull into a bulb, then sweeps aft into two delta-shaped wings designed to give the boat an advantage while heeled over sailing upwind (see diagram). The exact dimensions of the keel were well known to the International Yacht Racing Union's Measurement Committee, which had formally examined Australia II for conformity to the complicated 12-meter standards well before the racing began...
While the keel affair simmered, a second dispute, potentially more embarrassing to the N.Y.Y.C. mandarins, rocked Newport. Race officials, it seemed, had allowed...