Earlier post: Oracle Team USA and Emirates Team New Zealand are back in action today on the San Francisco waterfront. The standings in the best-of-17 event: New Zealand 3, USA -1. Yes, you read that -1 for Larry Ellison's Oracle team correctly. An international sailing jury hit the team with a two-race penalty after finding Oracle guilty of illegally altering its boats during an earlier regatta. The jury also banned Dirk de Ridder, the crew member responsible for trimming the 72-foot catamaran's giant wing, from the America's Cup finals.

Oracle will try to get back to zero and edge ahead of New Zealand in today's two-race event. Last Saturday the Kiwis swept the first two races. The teams split Sunday's pair of races.

The penalty against Oracle has been called the harshest in the history of the America's Cup. Was the punishment fair? That question came up on KQED's "This Week in Northern California" last Friday. The panel featured Kara Swisher, longtime tech industry journalist who's working on a Vanity Fair profile of Ellison, and Julian Guthrie, a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who wrote "The Billionaire and the Mechanic," the story of Ellison's quest for the cup.

It wasn't exactly a knock-down, drag-out fight (we don't do that at KQED). But Guthrie responds very much as an Oracle partisan while Swisher focuses on Ellison's possible role in the jury's thinking. (See 14:30 of the video if you're not automatically placed there).

via YouTube

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America's Cup: Kiwis Win Again, Debate Continues Over Oracle Penalty