Tune into New Zealand television and OneWorld's 1pt per round penalty dished out by the Arbitration Panel only trails an Air New Zealand engine failure in the news headlines. On radio, the attention-grabbing soundbite is that Dennis Conner is now out of the America's Cup.

Out? Conner's Stars & Stripes were eliminated in the last round. It was only a forlorn hope that OneWorld would be disqualified by the Panel and TDC somehow reinstated.

It's really rather curious. Yes, most days of the week the America's Cup is the biggest story in this tiny island nation. And yet in the reporting of the Panel's sanction on Craig McCaw's and Paul Allen's Seattle team, nowhere will you find the headline: 'Laurie Davidson exonerated: OneWorld's boats not copies of Team New Zealand's!'

Balance in reporting is ticklish, I know. But somehow the issues raised at the Panel's hearings over the weekend have got muddled in the background noise of this long-running saga. Much of the noise has emanated from Sean Reeves, the rules adviser who fell out with Russell Coutts when he was Team New Zealand's skipper in the last Cup, for reasons that have not been made public, and who has since fallen out with his subsequent employer OneWorld.

It is a matter of public record that affidavits have been sworn by GBR's David Barnes, Oracle BMW's Chris Dickson and Team Dennis Conner's Bill Trenkle that Reeves offered them design secrets from OneWorld and elsewhere. It is also on record in the Washington State courts that Reeves perjured himself when OneWorld sued him for breaching his $1.2 million separation and confidentiality agreement after he was dismissed.

In short, he is a man whose standing in the Cup community is not high. And yet Team New Zealand, Team Dennis Conner and Prada were prepared to accept affidavits sworn by Reeves that there been a systematic and wholesale pilfering of Team New Zealand's design data from 2000 which had somehow transported itself to Seattle in a recruitment drive.

The most eycatching of Reeves's allegations was that Laurie Davidson had given OneWorld the design of TNZ's Cup winning boats. This was reputation damaging in the extreme. Indeed, so widespread have been Reeves's allegations that OneWorld has been stigmatised with a collective guilt in the eyes of the general public.

So how do we explain that in its latest decision, the Panel did not rule against OneWorld on the basis that it had acquired and used design data illegally, but simply on the fact that one OneWorld contractor Ian Mitchell had failed to reveal in previous submissions that he'd retained TNZ information on an old computer and on back-up discs?

Of the charge that OneWorld had cribbed, copied or worse the design of NZL 57 and 60, the Panel did NOT pass a guilty verdict. Expert witnesses - ACC Technical Director Ken McAlpine and US designer Robert Perry - verified that Davidson's drawings were similar but not identical to TNZ's boats; in other words, precisely the sort of evolved design that OneWorld and every other current team would have used as their springboard for this Cup.

The only difference was that Davidson had intimate knowledge of the original boats, particularly the knuckle bow device which he himself had come up with, while other teams produced their best possible estimates.

There are no winners in the Reevesgate saga. Only losers, even among the vindicated.
Tim Jeffery, 10 December 2002