New Zealand sailing team regains America’s Cup

With a mixture of ingenuity and national pride, Emirates Team New Zealand got back up after a gut punch for the ages, came to the Bermuda Triangle and ripped the America’s Cup out of tech tycoon Larry Ellison’s hands.

“We’re on top of the world,” helmsman Peter Burling said Monday after steering the Kiwis’ 50-foot foiling catamaran to the clinching victory in the 7-1 rout of two-time defending champion Oracle Team USA, representing San Francisco’s Golden Gate Yacht Club.

Magnums of Champagne arrived and Burling and crewman Blair Tuke, who won Olympic gold and silver medals together, sprayed the crew.

The only non-Kiwi on the crew is Australia’s Ashby, 39, a multihull wiz and Olympic silver medalist who controlled the space-age wingsail.

Team New Zealand started this match with a negative point because Oracle won the qualifiers, forcing the Kiwis to win eight races to return the Auld Mug to the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron in Auckland for the first time since 2003.

The nation’s prime minister, Bill English, posted a short video of himself celebrating at home: “We are so proud of you,” he wrote on Twitter.

The Kiwis’ boat was powered by a revolutionary grinding system in which the traditional arm power was replaced with leg power.

The Kiwis installed four stationary bikes in each hull, with the “cyclors” powering the hydraulic systems used to trim the wingsail and control the daggerboards, which are tipped with hydrofoils.

“We knew with this format that we had to be extremely innovative and extremely aggressive with our design philosophy,” Ashby said.