If you remember the Moet Cup in San Francisco a year ago or the UBS Trophy competition last June in Newport, you already have a handle on the America's Cup pre-event racing that wraps up Sunday in the Mediterranean waters off Valencia. It's the first time the world has seen Cup boats racing out of the Spanish city chosen to host the 2007 America's Cup, and it's a far cry—as it's supposed to be—from your father's America's Cup.

The sailors gave all they have on the water, and there was a cadre of journalists here analyzing shifts, pointing, and tactics as if they mattered, but these weren't the boats and this wasn't the sailing season in which the 32nd America's Cup defense will be sailed, so like the Moet and UBS events, this ultimately was about crew training and most of all public relations. Time on the water is always good for sailors, and in terms of public relations, America's Cup Acts 2 and 3 were a runaway success. When they gave out the Act 2, match-racing, prize to Emirates Team New Zealand, the day coincided with a national Spanish holiday and there were thousands more people trying to get a glimpse of the action than could be squeezed into the "America's Cup Park" at the foot of the Avenida Puerto.

When they gave out the Act 3 prize to Alinghi, the docks were crowded deep again. In Valencia, the Cup is finding believers.

There was also an ample supply of cold reality. When Alinghi led around Mark 1 of Fleet Race 2 on Thursday and immediately blew out a spinnaker, a replacement went up just as immediately. When Italy's + 39 broke a spinnaker halyard moments later, the response time was much slower. This is a blooding for rookies. There is also the likelihood that blood will be spilled between teams vying to make a good showing for potential sponsors. Can both French teams, Le Defi and K-Challenge come up with the money to be players in 2007? The common wisdom says no, they can't.

We saw some squirrelly races here in Valencia. That Fleet Race 2 on Wednesday, for example, got scrambled something good when the breeze dropped out from under the leader, Alinghi, allowing Emirates Team New Zealand to close-up and finish overlapped, two seconds behind, with K-Challenge coming from far back to perhaps a length behind. But you needn't necessarily take this as evidence that Valencia will stick the races with the fluky conditions that beset the racing the last time around in Auckland. No one can guarantee the breeze, but the real event, come 2007, will be sailed in June, not October. The locals are touting Valencia as "the Fremantle of the Mediterranean", not because the winds are as strong as in Western Australia, where the Cup was sailed in 1987, but because they predict suitable winds for racing "90 percent of the time".

BMW Oracle tactician John Kostecki said, "We sailed here last summer, and it was hot, so we had a good seabreeze that we could count on. Now you have systems blowing through, and they generate winds that fight the seabreeze, and you can get caught between. That's what happened today, and we had a day like that during the match races too."

Valencia, founded under the Roman Empire, is a city of three worlds. The old city is lovely, with the traditional ambience and occasional Moorish architectural flourishes you expect of southern Spain. Then there's the thoughtless sprawl of modern construction, and within all, the exuberant modernism that can make it an adventure to walk into a restaurant, a hotel, a public building, whether or not the place looks ordinary on the outside. "Cup City" is still a'building, but visitors to Acts 2 and 3 were welcomed dockside to a covered pavilion from which they could see the boats going and coming, with the America's Cup and Louis Vuitton Cups on display (guarded as always these days by their unsmiling, black-suited minders). It's been 21 years since the Cup was finally lifted from its glass case on West 44th Street. Now if you're Mr. John Q. Public, you can have your picture taken with the Cup while music plays and dancers dance, or you can sit and sip cafe or cerveza with your friends while watching the race of the day directo, live, on the big screen, half a soccer field away from where the boats dock.

I say soccer field, not football field, because the Cup is in Europe now. The teams promote themselves and woo sponsors by buzzing people in for a day at a time from all over the continent (no 30-hour plane rides Down Under), and Spain as a country is as obsessed with sailing as the Kiwis. RIBs are the new tow vehicles, and yes, Larry Ellison's BMW Oracle Racing team chartered the former Onassis yacht, Christina, as its hospitality platform of the week. The picture below of the harbor shows the Cup staging area at right, but it's an old shot. The scene would be more colorful now, and will be considerably more developed by the time of the races in 2007. The exit to the racecourse is through an opening bridge (the white structure) on the left.

Racing will return to Valencia in June, 2005, the season for Cup racing in 2007. There will be at least one additional 2005 event, at a port in Northern Europe that is yet to be decided. Italy is also a target down the road, and eventually, these recurring events will start to count toward points for winning the right to challenge. The real show in 2007 will open with fleet racing for points carried forward into the match racing. Alinghi came away happy for winning the fleet racing (partly on fluky winds), while Emirates Team New Zealand came away happy for winning the match racing and overall points for 2004. BMW Oracle came away not quite happy (I suspect) but mollified from winning the earlier, parallel event in Marseilles and the final day here, a soothing finish to a hard fleet race series for the team from the USA.
—Kimball Livingston