The America's Cup races in Naples
The oldest trophy in world sport is racing in the Gulf of Naples this week.
From 24 to 27 September, Naples hosts the second Louis Vuitton preliminary regatta of the 38th America's Cup. It is the first time the boats race on the water that will host the match itself in July 2027.
The cup is older than almost everything it is compared to. It started on 22 August 1851, when a schooner named America beat the British fleet around the Isle of Wight and took the trophy home. The modern Olympics came 45 years later. Emirates Team New Zealand hold it now, after winning in 2024, the first team to win it three times in a row.
There is an Italian in the story long before Naples. In 1899 the New York Herald hired a 25 year old engineer named Guglielmo Marconi to follow the America's Cup from a boat and send the race back to Manhattan by wireless telegraph, while it was still being sailed. It is counted as the first time a sport was reported live from a distance.
The film in this reel comes from those years. It sat on a spool of unidentified silent fragments at the Library of Congress, catalogued only as Atkinson number 41, until a curator went through it shot by shot in 2019 and matched the footage to the America's Cup races off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. One of the boats in the last seconds is thought to be the one a newspaper chartered to carry the wireless reports. Thought to be: the catalogue says likely, and so do we.
americascup.com, Comune di Napoli, Library of Congress / AFI-Atkinson Collection, American Journalism 30(2).
