A New Kind Of Race

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Marcello Burricks is not your typical America's cup yachtsman. Raised in a rough, mixed-race township on South Africa's Cape of Good Hope peninsula, he had to prove himself as a street fighter long before he ever climbed aboard a sailboat. In his early teens, he fraternized with local gangs and got in knife fights. These days, however, he puts his strength into grinding winches and helping to trim the mainsail of a sleek, 25-m America's Cup–class racing yacht.

Burricks' journey from local tough guy to élite sailor is just one of the remarkable stories to come from Africa's first-ever entry in the 154-year-old America's Cup, yachting's most prestigious — and the international sport's oldest — prize. Burricks is part of Team Shosholoza, a young, racially diverse South African crew defying the odds by taking on sailing's biggest names and deepest pockets — and scoring impressive victories. "So many sailors dream about being part of an America's Cup team," says Burricks. "I didn't expect myself to come this far."

In the rarefied world of the America's Cup, genuine underdogs don't come along very often. Only once has the Cup ever been won by a first-time challenger. That happened in 2003, when the Swiss Team Alinghi defeated Team New Zealand in Auckland, bringing the cup to Europe for the first time since a U.S. boat won the Auld Mug, in a race off the Isle of Wight back in 1851. Africa's yachting tradition is limited, to put it kindly. Though sailors in eastern and western Africa skillfully navigate the seas in traditional craft, yacht racing has been limited in most countries to small clubs with a few dinghies. In South Africa, where yachting is popular in cities such as Cape Town and Durban, the sport is still a long way from the professional circuits of Europe, North America and the Pacific.

The America's Cup is really two events: in the first stage, known as the Louis Vuitton Cup, would-be challengers race each other around Europe for four years to determine a final challenger, which will take on the Swiss boat in 2007. When Team Shosholoza showed up for the first pre-Cup regattas in Marseilles, France, two years ago, they won a lot of sympathy, but lagged far behind in most of the races. Cobbled together by an eccentric, Italian-born shipping tycoon and sailing enthusiast who lives in Durban, Shosholoza lacks just about everything conventional wisdom holds that a team needs to be successful. They can't compete with the experience, technological prowess and $100 million-plus budgets of teams like U.S. entry BMW-Oracle (put together by software billionaire Larry Ellison) or some of the European entries. The team has broken a mast and collided with a whale during a training run on Cape Town's Table Bay. Lacking sponsorship, they spent their first year racing in an obsolete, secondhand Cup vessel bought on the cheap. Burricks, the youngest team member, is only 20.