Sailing: Ellison flexes financial muscles to reinstate Dickson on Oracle

When the big man turns up to give a personal explanation of his decision to make a significant team change, the microphones are double checked and a fresh pen is poised above the notebook. The big man in this case was the computer software billionaire, Larry Ellison, and, after his boat, Oracle BMW, had scored a less than testing victory over the Italian underdogs Mascalzone Latino in yesterday's Louis Vuitton Cup Race, he wanted to let the world know why he had sacked his previously favoured helmsman, Peter Holmberg, and brought back the previously out-of-favour local man, Chris Dickson.

Holmberg had been starting and driving the boat brilliantly, but this was a professional sport and in professional sport it was results that counted. The boat had not been winning. It was thought that Dickson's personality made it more difficult for him to work with the race boat team, but Ellison had personally experienced no personality clash with Dickson, the three-times former world match race champion has been working all along for the team owner as a design coordinator and in performance development.

The last straw seems to have been the opening race of round-robin two when Oracle, having taken the lead, was rolled and then beaten by their next-door neighbours, Prada, with whom relations have, at times, been less than friendly. All Holmberg's peer group agreed that it was just a fickle roll of the weather dice and that Holmberg was powerless to stop the lottery going against him. But losing to Prada, who have now moved up to joint third with Oracle, was just not acceptable.

All of which, on one of the best match race days so far, rather overshadowed an important win for Russell Coutts as he calmly drove Alinghi of Switzerland to victory over OneWorld of Seattle. That ended OneWorld's so far unbeaten run and left the two tied at the top of the table with a 9-1 record so far. OneWorld carries a one-point penalty and the second-round win would also act as the tie-break if both end up with the same number of points when the round-robin stages are complete.

The team under pressure now is Stars & Stripes. They beat Prada by 35sec in the last round, but went down to them yesterday by 41sec. Their last two wins were over Mascalzone Latino and Le Défi and they are looking a little short of ideas about how to pick up the winning habit again.

Sweden's Victory Challenge had little difficulty beating the French by 1min 19sec, the 10th defeat for the French, who must be wondering if everything will ever click into place for them.

There is still a strong feeling of pushing forward in the British camp and there will have been no tears shed when seeing OneWorld go down to Alinghi as the Americans are the next opponent for GBR Challenge.