French Sailor's Long, Eclectic Course Leads to America's Cup ALAMEDA, Calif. - "I like to be a free electron," Loïck Peyron said. At 53, Peyron has certainly bounced around the sailing world and its challenges: from the single-handed privations of the Vendée Globe round-the-world race to the intense teamwork required to claim the Jules Verne Trophy to the hundreds of other races in the multihulls that he understands as well as any other sailor. It has been a remarkably eclectic run, and the albatross-size wingspan of Peyron's career is perhaps wider than any of the other men who will try to win the America's Cup between now and September. Peyron first dreamed of the Cup when he was a boy on summer vacation in the south of France in 1970. The Frenchman Baron Marcel Bich was challenging for it in Newport, R.I., and Peyron built himself a small dinghy with a sheet stolen from his mother for a sail. Peyron said his father jokingly wrote on the sail, "le pessimiste, Newport." It would take nearly 40 years for Peyron to make it into the America's Cup itself, serving as co-helmsman with Ernesto Bertarelli, the owner of the Swiss team Alinghi, which was beaten by BMW Oracle in a contentious giant multihull duel in Valencia, Spain, in 2010. "The way Larry won it on the water was impressive; the way in which they invited themselves into the final was not," said Peyron, referring to Oracle's billionaire owner, Larry Ellison, and the legal machinations that preceded the event that year. But that was another problem, a legal problem. After that, the way in which they reacted and tried to revolutionize and give a face-lift to this old grandmother of an event was superb. The odds at this stage are heavily against him and his latest employer, Artemis Racing, which is struggling to recover from the loss of its first boat in a capsizing that resulted in the death of a British crew member, Andrew Simpson. The surprise and disappointment is that Peyron, a star in his native France, is not running his own team in this Cup. When it became clear that it was going to be contested in 72-foot catamarans, it seemed as if France, with its long-established taste for multihulls, finally might play a central role in a sport historically dominated by English-speaking nations. But instead of uniting forces, as Team New Zealand has done with tens of millions of dollars in governmental support, the leading French sailors started competing challengers: Aleph and Energy Team. Energy Team was founded by Peyron and his older brother Bruno, also a prominent offshore sailor in France. But even the Peyrons" star power was not enough to generate the financing from home necessary to mount a viable challenge for the 34th Cup. Neither French team made it to the starting line, and the Peyron brothers" failure was also, in some fashion, a failure of the America's Cup organizers to limit costs and encourage participation. Only three challengers are involved in the Louis Vuitton Cup, the winner of which will face Oracle Team USA in September for the America's Cup, and none of the challenging syndicates is from Asia. It is quite a comedown from the 11 challengers in the last Louis Vuitton Cup, in 2007. Peyron said Team Energy's goal was to raise 40 million euros, or about $52 million, well below the reported operating budgets of Artemis and the defender, Oracle Team USA. "We were very far away financially," Peyron said in a recent interview at Artemis's base. "It was complicated, and it still is," he said. The explanation is simple. It's because France is a bit of an exception in the world of sailing. It has been so well nourished by other events for so many years: the Vendée Globe, the Route du Rhum, the Transat. The French sailing heroes are not the sailors who have been in the America's Cup. Never. The America's Cup has always been a game that did not interest people. The high-speed approach embraced this time has given the Cup a more adventurous edge, clearly more in line with the extreme sailing events that the French relish. But it still was not enough to open the commercial gates.