I'm feeling strangely guilty. A globally prestigious sporting event has come and gone in the past two weeks and I missed it. It last took place four years ago and has not been staged in Europe for 156 years, yet it passed me by, quite literally, like a ship in the night. What does the America's Cup have to do to get me to care?
For six months the PR teams of the race's various sponsors have been priming me for the contest like hyperactive personal trainers. There were so many reasons why this was the year to follow sailing's greatest race. The host city was Valencia, there would be daytime TV coverage, and for the first time in 130-odd years, the defending champion was a European boat. It didn't make any difference. I still didn't follow it.
Now, I can watch sporting events of which I know next to nothing and consider myself a devotee within half an hour. I recently went to the Isle of Man TT to watch my first ever motorbike race and by the afternoon I was embedded in a bikers' bar whooping and gasping at a TV feed from the Italian MotoGP. Or take the Tour de France. My knowledge of cycling isn't enough to mend a puncture, and cycling's blue riband event has never been in a poorer state. But I'll still be there at Le Grand Départ, cheering on the Kazakh favourite whose name I learned last week, even if the whole race proves to be nothing more than a high-profile outing for Narcotics Anonymous.
So this America's Cup should have brought my Damascene conversion to sailing. I am told, by the experts, it was one of the most thrilling and close-fought Cups ever. It had personality clashes. It had Lazarean comebacks. Damn it, there was a Brit in one of the boats (our Olympic champ Ben Ainslie, who sacrificed his World Championship campaign to compete in the Cup, then was left on the bench).
And I tried to like it, I really did. The pundits said that race three, when the score stood at one-all between the Swiss defenders Alinghi and the New Zealand challengers Emirates NZ, was one of the best the competition has ever seen. I watched the highlights - aired at 1.30am, which should have told me something - and apart from the five-minute countdown to the start, a sort of sailing foreplay where the boats circle each other like frisky whales, I was rigid with boredom. I can well up like a Tiny Tears doll at a great darts finish, but even Sky's sentimental closing montage, complete with Lenny Kravitz soundtrack, left me stony-faced.
So what's the problem? It can't be that the sport is not so much gilded as sloshed in sickening amounts of cash and full of billionaire playboys - I love Formula One and cling shamefully to the hope of one day being invited to the Monaco Grand Prix. I can't blame the unfathomable terms, either, since they really are so lovely on the tongue, even if I don't know my jibs from my spinnaker (having team members called "grinders" and "sewers" does, however, seem a little unfortunate).
Look, I'm sorry. You can get yourself fully kitted out in Louis Vuitton chic. You can give your skipper a cheek-mounted piece of nanotechnology that makes him look like the Terminator. But you just can't make two boats moving gradually towards small inflatable buoys look interesting, and you can't get me excited about a contest that pitches Switzerland against New Zealand. Even with the combined PR budget of every luxury goods brand on the planet.
