Is there a favourite memory that still lingers from that time?

Crossing the finish line in that final race after coming back from 3-1 down. I mean, the odds of doing that were 1000/1 against ... So when we crossed the line and the gun fired, it was just an unbelievable sense of relief. It was sensational. It still is ...

How did you celebrate that night?

Well, everyone around the team celebrated like there was no tomorrow. I remember skyrockets and balloons and thousands of people. But we’d been at it as a team for two and a half years, and that was my fourth America’s Cup, so I’d been at it as an individual for 12 years. So in that final day we just went into our own cocoons with our loved ones ... In our own way, we’d been at war for five months in Newport. We had to beat the Canadians and the French and the Brits and the Italians before we had the right to challenge the US. It was like a war zone for us. And when people come back from war, they often need to go into a rehab hospital, to get over what they’ve been through. You know, it took me three months before I could go to a dinner party and enjoy it in a normal, relaxed way. The day after we won, virtually everyone in the team – 34 people including the secretary – came down with a variety of illnesses. It was quite a case study ...It sounds like post-traumatic stress ...

Well, in five months, we had three days off. We were seven-days-a-week for five months. It was a supreme effort from the team.

From the sublime to the ridiculous, can you put us on the deck of oneAustralia in 1995 when it broke apart and sank?

For these projects, you push the envelope in every way, and that day in San Diego there was a set of extreme conditions that we never saw again. With the wind strength and the wave frequency, the boat was under extreme stress. And it wasn’t the only one: Dennis Conner’s boat nearly lost its keel and America 2 broke its mast. But the atmosphere that day was just one of shock. We’d been through all the scenarios – what if the mast breaks, what if a sailor gets injured – but we never went through the scenario of the boat breaking up and sinking, which was a catastrophic failure. So there was just an unbelievable sense of shock. It was something we just weren’t prepared for. But we then resurrected our trial boat and went on to beat all the other nations except New Zealand, so we were second in the elimination series. And then New Zealand went on to whitewash the Americans 4-0. So, in hindsight, I think we could’ve even beaten the Americans with our pace boat ... Yes, it was a total failure in terms of the boat sinking. But we still beat all the other nations except the Kiwis. It was a highly competitive project we had there ... It was a project I was actually very proud of. We achieved a lot. We didn’t win the America’s Cup, but we weren’t far off.