Sailing: Britain swim with the sharks

Quest for sailing's Grail: Harrison's crusaders are minnows against the big fish ? but they have enough teeth to bite

The GBR Challenge – all 96 members plus their families – sat down to dinner in a large hotel suite here on Thursday night. It was a finalmoment orchestrated by the team's founder and chairman, Peter Harrison, before he sends his troops out against more powerful, more practised and more resourced foes. Harrison quoted from Shakespeare's Henry V as he named every single member of the team in a rallying cry delivered in true Harrison style: little fluidity but full of passion.

"You have all already achieved a great deal," he said as he remembered how his seed of passion for the America's Cup had grown into a challenge that spends around £15,000 a month on lunches in under two years. "We are up against some big battalions, but what I have learned from my business experience is that the big battalions don't always win."

Harrison has named the second of his two new boats Wight Magic; so that should Britain by some miracle win the Louis Vuitton Cup, the America's Cup would see Wight Magic sailing against Team New Zealand's Black Magic. But even Harrison – whose vision and intuition have taken the GBR Challenge into a position where a country that has been out of the Cup for 15 years and fielding a syndicate that has been in existence for just 18 months is now respected around the dockside – does not expect Ian Walker and his crew to rise to those heights, though it is clear that the notion has occasionally crossed his mind.

Harrison, despite spending upwards of £22m on getting Britain back into the Cup for the first time since 1987, is a small player in these circles. America's Cup budgets of $70m-$100m are not new, but are usually the province of one or two big spenders. Of the nine teams in this challenger series, one is owned by the fifth richest individual on the planet (Larry Ellison of Oracle), one is owned by the second richest individual on the planet under 40 (Ernesto Bertarelli of Alinghi) and two others – Prada and OneWorld – are owned and run by world-class financial players. Little wonder that advanced security plans are in hand.

When the racing begins on Tuesday, there will be nine challengers vying for the chance to meet Team New Zealand at a time when the defence seems vulnerable – in 2000 their 5-0 victory over Prada was a surprise only in its overwhelming magnitude, but they are a much changed team now.

Previously the Louis Vuitton has provided four months of sailing for all entries and hence has been more of a comfortable sell to sponsors than the most efficient way to distil the challengers to one, but this time there will be a series of early baths.

The event begins with two round-robins that will take up most of October, after which one team will be eliminated and eight will progress to the quarter-finals. From there, there is a series of second chances from which the four semi-finalists are chosen. Then racing will progress almost without pause over Christmas until the two Louis Vuitton Cup finalists emerge to fight it out in January.

The overall theory is that the top performers will do less racing and be able to improve by in-house testing, while the late developers will keep getting the chance to stay in the game as their own performance improves.

But the magic of the America's Cup, the magic that is enrapturing everyone here, is that despite the conjecture, despite the bar room espionage, despite the results of all the informal inter-challenger racing, not one person has any real inkling how it will all go.

Certainly the rumours are rife that Prada are slow, that Oracle will be quick in light airs, that Mascalzone, Team Dennis Conner and the French will explode when the wind blows due to a lack of experience in powerful conditions. But the truth is that Tuesday will be the big day and that by the end of this week the shape of America's Cup 2000 will be there for all to see.

The consensus seems to be that Alinghi will be fast and that Oracle and OneWorld are favourites, with Alinghi, for a semi-final place.

Which leaves Harrison and his dreams of giant-killing with everything to play for. If three of the semi-final places do prove to be a foregone conclusion as the first round- robin is played out, then Prada, Team Dennis Conner, the Swedish Victory Challenge and the GBR Challenge will all be looking to be a cut above the French and the second Italian team, and struggling towards one berth.

And if that is the case, the GBR Challenge have much to be optimistic about. Because while Walker has consistently played down the significance of pre-series testing and its value as an indicator of form, there is no doubt that a comprehensive British victory over Prada last week tangibly raised the spirits in the camp as the years suddenly became days to the moment of truth.

The format How it works

Each race is between two boats over six legs – three into the wind, three with the wind behind – over a total of 18.5 nautical miles, or 21.29 miles.

The nine challengers go through a seven-stage elimination process to find the winner of the Louis Vuitton Cup, who will challenge Team New Zealand over the best of nine races for the America's Cup.

The challengers race two round-robin series, after which the top eight boats are split into two groups. The top four teams pair up and race each other in the quarter-finals in best-of-seven matches. The winners qualify for the semi-finals, the losers go to a repechage. The second four teams also pair off and race best-of-seven matches, with the losers eliminated and the winners facing the group one losers in the repechage.

The two winners from the top group meet in the semi-final, with the winner going to the final and the loser to a repechage. The two winners from the first repechage race against each other in the next repechage. The winner of that is the second finalist.

Schedule: Round robin 1: 1-10 Oct. Round robin 2: 22-31 Oct. Quarter-finals: 12-19 Nov. Repechage: 23-30 Nov. Semi-final: 9-16 Dec. Repechage: 20-28 Dec.

Louis Vuitton Cup final: 11-21 Jan 2003.

America's Cup: 15 Feb-1 March.