THE ANNOTATED AMERICA'S CUP

As a TV sport, sailboat racing is relegated to the same sorts of channels and time slots as bowling and poker: They're worse than those for fishing and golf. The problem is that even passionate sailing fans can find it hard to follow races on television, where producers cut back and forth between video of the boats and animated simulations of the action, attempting to show where the boats are in relation to one another. If you're channel surfing and you come upon a yacht race and have no idea which boat is in the lead, what would you do? Change the channel, probably.