August 20, 2013

The America’s Cup by the Numbers

Forget the boats. The real race is raising enough cash to make the thing worth hosting.


It sure is annoying when you plan a big party, line up the venue, and have expectations for a high turnout—only to have the regrets start rolling in. The 2013 America’s Cup (Larry Ellison Edition) has seen team after team forgo this year’s competition. As the 2010 winner, multi-billionaire Oracle founder Ellison won the right to choose the next venue and which type of boat would be raced—which makes him the face of this year’s races. He chose Oracle’s backyard, San Francisco, and picked the AC72, a revolutionary wing-sail catamaran that is extremely fast and extremely expensive, not to mention extremely dangerous.

Out of the 15 teams expected to race, 11 bowed out of this year’s Cup, due largely to the cost of commissioning one of the highly technical boats and hiring a team of competent and competitive sailors who actually know how to operate them. With so few rivals, some of the early races featured only one boat.

As a result, crowd projections are down 25 percent from 2010, and predicted race-related tax receipts for the City of San Francisco have been cut nearly in half. The Cup is still expected to benefit the Bay Area, though it’ll be a less impressive boon than originally forecast. And despite fundraisers’ assurances, it remains to be seen whether the city, which has sunk considerable resources into the races, will break even. Behold some of the numbers:

drop in attendence
Jobs down
Ouch
Taxpayers

If Oracle wins the America’s Cup, Ellison would have the right to choose the venue again next year. So when the dust settles, San Francisco may be in for another round.

Oracle boat photo credit: Jose C Silva/Flickr

City Hall photo credit: Alaskan Dude/Flickr

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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