Next Cup Battle - To Decide What Representing a Country Means - NYTimes.com Team New Zealand, with a 7-1 lead, will be able to make significant decisions for the next Cup if it holds on to win the Auld Mug. SAN FRANCISCO - With Emirates Team New Zealand holding a huge lead heading into the final stages of the America's Cup, it remains unclear just what the team will do with the competition if it goes on to defeat Oracle Team USA. Will racing be in multihulls again or in monohulls? In big boats again or in smaller boats? Close to the shore again or back in the heart of Auckland's vast Hauraki Gulf? But Grant Dalton, the combative managing director of Team New Zealand, has made two things clear. He wants the cost of competing in the next edition of the Cup to be considerably less expensive in order to attract more teams. He also wants to restore a nationality rule. The nationality debate has long been contentious in the Cup. For now, hulls must be manufactured in the nation of the challenging yacht club, but there is no nationality restriction on sailors involved. That is why Oracle, which represents San Francisco's Golden Gate Yacht Club and the United States, can compete with just one American - Rome Kirby - on its 11-man crew, which featured sailors of seven nationalities in Sunday's races. This is in keeping with the owner Larry Ellison's global approach to talent recruitment and with the prevailing recent view that America's Cup teams are closest in spirit to motor racing's Formula One teams: more about brand identity and pushing technological boundaries than about national identity and a patriotic agenda. "I love America, and I love to say that my family is American," said James Spithill, Oracle's Australian helmsman and skipper, who is married to an American. Spithill added: "But I tell you what, I'm not going to try to hide from the fact that we have different nationalities in our team, because I'm proud of every one of them and the ideas and creativity they bring." Dalton and Team New Zealand have a different vision. Nine of their starting crew members are New Zealanders; the other two are Australians with strong New Zealand connections. "It's a very homogeneous crew, while Ellison's got an international free-agency crew," said Gary Jobson, the American who won the 1977 America's Cup as tactician to Ted Turner and is now a television analyst. I strongly believe that the America's Cup Deed of Gift was written as a friendly competition between foreign countries, and I think the American boat should have all Americans, the New Zealand boat ought to have all Kiwis, and the French boat should have all French. And if you did that, I think the America's Cup would mean a lot more to a lot of people. New Zealand, with a population of about 4.4 million, has long punched well above its demographic weight in the sailing world. New Zealanders have been fixtures on nearly all the major teams in the past four Cup cycles. Oracle also has a strong Kiwi influence. Russell Coutts, the team's chief executive and former skipper, is a New Zealander. The imposition of nationality restrictions would presumably cost Kiwis some sailing jobs, as well. But Dalton says he is convinced that the event needs to tack away from the billionaire-versus-billionaire approach that has been back in vogue in the last decade. "We stand for a strong nationality rule," he said earlier this year in an occasionally testy onstage debate with Coutts in New Zealand. The question is how strong a rule. Fulfilling Jobson's vision and creating full Olympic-style national teams would probably discourage teams from emerging sailing nations like China and South Korea. Their home-country sailors simply could not be competitive against the established powers. "Grant Dalton's idea, from what I understand after talking to him, would be to have a weaker nationality rule for newcomers, for new countries, which seems fair," said Bruno Troublé, a French former America's Cup helmsman. But established teams could also struggle with a new rule. Artemis Racing, which represents the Royal Swedish Yacht Club, had no Swedish sailor on its primary crew during this year's Challenger Series.