We’ve got a pretty lengthy and substantial article put together, and today we’re dropping the first installation. Enjoy.
Benny the Bilge Rat goes digging for detail in the AC dirt
It pains me to admit it but my scurvy colleague, The Bosun, has raised some good questions about the America’s Cup kerfuffle. He asks: “What, precisely, is the Cup? Who owns and controls it? For how long? On what basis does it become a property that individuals and corporations can exploit for their own commercial benefit?”
The answers – if they exist in any truly definitive form – are buried well down in the accumulated sludge of the Cup’s murky commercial and legal history.
But we bilge rats are good at sifting through the muck, and have assembled a revealing timeline. It seems that nobody, not even the New York Yacht Club, comes to this issue with what the lawyers like to call entirely “clean hands”.
The first revelation, quite unknown to the general public or sailing community, is that the Cup has been traded as a commercial property since 1977. The crucial component of any licensing deal is the undisputed legal ownership of the commodity or event being offered for sale or exploitation. Usually, that is established by the registration of a trademark.
For the AC, this issue has a long history. A trademark application for “America’s Cup” was filed by an entity calling itself America’s Cup Properties, Inc. in April 1976. The words “America’s Cup” were registered as a mark in November the following year.
In its 1980s registration renewal, America’s Cup Properties Inc. described itself as a “Domestic Business Corporation”. In effect, ACPI was an adjunct of the New York Yacht Club, presumably bound by the conditions of the founding Deed of Gift. (The DoG established the Cup in 1857 as a Charitable Trust on an assumed not-for-profit basis.)
But what, really, was ACPI? Was it a genuine not-for-profit entity, or did it operate to generate revenues for its principals from the intellectual property of the Cup? If so, who were they, and how were those revenues distributed? Did the principals of ACPI take fees or commissions? Did ACPI pay tax? How did they account their transactions to the DoG charitable trust as administered by the New York Yacht Club? Answers are hard to find.
The game changed forever after Australia II won the Cup in 1983. The New York Yacht Club was required, under the Deed of Gift, to relinquish its trustee status to the new holders, the Royal Perth Yacht Club.
Realising they would need to operate commercially, the RPYC incorporated a company, titled Australia’s Defence of the America’s Cup 1987 Ltd. But the Perth club had little experience in the complex, cut-throat world of international sports marketing.
Enter, the opportunistic Mark H. McCormack and his powerful management company, IMG. They could smell the heady aroma of big America’s Cup egos and even bigger pots of money.
After McCormack’s death in 2003 his papers were left to the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There, in the archive, is the 1984 contract that confirms IMG was retained by the Defenders as their “worldwide agent and representative in connection with certain commercial aspects of the America’s Cup Defence”.
The agreed rate of commission was a whopping 30% of the gross proceeds from all sponsorships, TV rights, merchandising and publishing deals secured by IMG. That contract was the beginning of what has become a lucrative (and largely hidden) component of every Cup series since.
The next key moment came in April 1987. The New York Yacht Club (now clearly listed as a “Not-for-Profit-Corporation”) assigned all its America’s Cup trademark registrations – defined in the transfer document as “the entire interest and the goodwill” – to America’s Cup Properties Inc.
Yet there is no record that the NY Charities Bureau or Attorney General were notified of this assignment, nor of any court authorisation. A diligent search found no financial accounting filed by ACPI with the Charities Bureau.
So, for something like the next 40 years, ACPI apparently had total control of the America’s Cup as an exploitable commercial property. In what way was it accountable for its actions, or for any profits it might have made for its partners and principals? How was its income shared between the Cup syndicates? It seemed to operate independently of US law.
After the Emirates Team New Zealand team won the 2017 Cup in Bermuda ETNZ boss Grant Dalton managed to take the leading role in ACPI. Eight years later, in August 2025, Dalton (representing the Defenders) and Ben Ainslie (for the Challenger of Record) announced a new entity, the America’s Cup Partnership. The old ACPI was no more.
To be continued…
