Steely Coutts the one to forge victory from chaos

some friends were fascinated with Oracle’s helmsman Jimmy Spithill, in a sort of like-him-and-fear-him way.

“All my friends are still obsessed with Russell Coutts,” he replied.

Sir Edmund Hillary — who also competed for a foreign power — was long held by many as our greatest sportsperson. His achievements in extreme vertical hiking for a British force on the border of Tibet and Nepal left the world in awe, once it had got the telegram.

But the more you consider the astounding success Coutts has had over nearly 40 years, the more the jaw drops.

Forget the tip. Five undefeated America’s Cup campaigns is the iceberg heading Team New Zealand’s way. The man is an assassin who happens to be a boating genius, from the board room to the water.

There was a lot of scurrilous innuendo fired Oracle’s way in San Francisco, but what happened on the surface was a brilliant mid-game reboot with his team staying focused under intense pressure.

There’s a thrilling soap opera about to unfold in Bermuda, where the new frontier of foiling means the actual racing has caught up to the blood-curdling controversy which has dogged and driven this famous contest for over a century.

It could be everyone’s cup of tea, or much more so than when Sir Thomas Lipton became set on winning the cup as a way of spruiking his grocery business a long time ago.

We’ve already seen what might be in store, with a frivolously apologetic British boat ramming Team New Zealand in practise.

Forthright personalities, win-atall-costs characters, high technology, big money and a new era of knifeedge racing may turn into a bar room brawl. And this is what happens when Coutts is about. In a gunfight, everyone else blinks first. Coutts never seems to blink at all.