1) Russell Coutts has supplanted Dennis Conner for the Mr America's Cup sobriquet. OK, Coutts did not win the Cup on his 41st birthday thanks to Saturday's aborted Race 5, but in successive Cups he's won as challenger, defender and challenger.

2) The values that made TNZ so great in '95 and 2000 now reside at Alinghi. If you haven't read his Course to Victory book and you are a student of the Cup, do so. It's no winner's puff.

3) Coutts also won an Olympic gold, aged 22. No one, not even Buddy Melges, who had to share steering duties with starting helmsman Dave Dallenbaugh and owner Bill Koch in 1992, has the Cup and gold medal double in their own right.

4) Welcome to the future. A hip-pocket challenge is already in place. The challenger of record will be the Golden Gate YC, a relatively low-rent entity just down the San Francisco waterfront from the St Francis YC. Oracle's Larry Ellison has an interest in the Golden Gate YC having failed to negotiate a challenger deal with SFYC. The Seattle YC was widely tipped to be Alinghi's preferred challenger of record, but ultimately Craig McCaw would not commit firmly to a second OneWorld challenge, hence Golden Gate's 11th hour return to favour.

5) The Alinghi/Golden Gate protocol is a humdinger. It will reform the entire organisation, rights and marketing of the Cup for both defenders and challengers. It will also give a useful boost to the smaller teams.

6) Welcome to the past. New Zealand had better get used the gallows' humour for losers. Remember the Dave Dobbyn theme song for the team: "Call me loyal..."? That's now "Call me fragile" in deference to NZL 81 and 82's record of breakdowns. (There's an alternative that pays homage to OneWorld..."Call my lawyer.").

7) There's more. What does LOYAL stand for? Look! Our Yacht's A Lemon. Or, NZL 82:- New Zealand's Weapon of Mass Destruction.

8) And finally, when the Cup leaves New Zealand, Alinghi will be free of some of the most antagonist newspaper coverage imaginable. Would you call stories that Alinghi wrote the death threat letters themselves fair and balanced coverage? Or photos showing Ernesto Bertarelli wearing a Suunto race timer instead of a sponsor's Audemar Piaget timepiece, a legitimate criticism of a race boat navigator?

Or the latest, where a front page headline screams Alinghi in Drug Drama before the same story knocks it down seven paragraphs later because there is no story to be told about growth hormone use by sailing team members, (their impressively large security guards might have a different tale, but that didn't show up in the story).

No wonder an exasperated Alinghi spokesman Bernard Schopfer said: "We've had 18 months of this bullshit."

Yes, it's time for the Cup to move on.

Tim Jeffery, 1 March 2003