It is only 8am but the jacket I'm wearing is already causing problems.
'Don't wear that around here, you could get killed,' says a young woman juggling a pair of walkie-talkies. In this case, 'that' is not something with gang colours or part of a military uniform and 'here' is not South Central Los Angeles or Afghanistan's Helmand province.
Our location is the far more genteel surroundings of an Auckland yacht club and the jacket in question is a sailing anorak with the curiously comic name 'Alinghi' stitched across its back, although the woman with the communication devices is not laughing.
'The guys from the Alinghi boat had death threats after what they did,' she says. 'Walking around New Zealand with that jacket on is like having a target on your back.'
Welcome to the world of America's Cup yacht racing and the second leg of the Louis Vuitton Trophy, a competition that only exists because of what the 'guys from the Alinghi boat' did in 2003, and the antics that followed, featuring Ernesto Bertarelli and Larry Ellison, two billionaires with egos like supernovas that glitter within the capacious galaxies of their enormous bank balances.
What Bertarelli, a Swiss pharmaceutical billionaire, and Ellison, a Californian electronics baron, have done to the America's Cup, the world's oldest sporting trophy, has made grown men weep and supported battalions of lawyers, and they almost put many of the world's top-class professional sailors out of work.
The latter was only avoided because last year, Louis Vuitton's chief executive, Yves Carcelle, along with the World Sailing Team Association (WSTA - a group of eight America's Cup syndicates), created the Louis Vuitton Trophy, a series of regattas for those teams displaced from the America's Cup. All the teams sail in similar America's Cup-class yachts.
