With the first series of Louis Vuitton Cup round-robin races finishing yesterday and the elimination date looming for all but four of the 11 would-be America’s Cup challengers, Team Shosholoza are still clinging to their dream. Victory over Luna Rossa was followed by a defeat by Mascalzone Latino, one of the South African crew’s main rivals for a semi-final place, alongside the slick and quick BMW Oracle and the surprisingly ragged crew of Emirates Team New Zealand.

Win or lose, it has been a journey of discovery for the crew of Shosholoza, a name borrowed from an old Zulu workers’ song and used initially by Salvatore Sarno, the charismatic 60-year-old head of the syndicate, as the nickname for his company’s football team. The phrase means “go forward”. The speed of progress under the Italian-born Sarno and the British-born team manager, Paul Standbridge, has surprised rivals and rewritten the rules of engagement for future America’s Cups.

There have been exotic challenges before, but none as colourful as Team Shosholoza. Much of the credit for the increasingly competitive mentality of the team can be claimed by Sarno, who has blended white Afrikaners and young black township men into an effective crew. With the help of a sprinkling of experienced internationals and a largely British design team, he has grafted a Latin temperament on to the stolid conservatism of the South Africans.

If Shosholoza flies the flag for post-apartheid South Africa, it speaks with the accent of Naples, where Sarno graduated from the naval academy, and with such force of personality that Shosholoza was named 2005 team of the year ahead of cricket and rugby union sides and received high-profile patronage from Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “Everybody is proud of what we have achieved,” says Sarno. “A friend who emigrated to Canada called to say that normally when he goes to the pub he keeps his nationality secret. Since the success of Shosholoza he is proud to be a South African. But we want to show we can do well here. Nobody likes the loser.”

It is ironic that an Italian who arrived in South Africa on business 20 years ago should be responsible for reawakening the country’s passion for the sea by launching its first challenge for the greatest sailing prize. But to do so with what he calls some “Sunday sailors” recruited from the least promising of backgrounds has been a greater revelation. Two of Shosholoza’s starting crew, Golden Mgedeza, a miner’s son, and Solomon Dipeere, the son of a boiler-maker, grew up in a township 50 miles east of Johannesburg. The nearest ocean was a day away, but both boys won apprenticeships to study engineering and marine science in Cape Town and fell in love with the sea.

“Solomon was one of my original crew,” recalls Sarno. “His father had just died and he had qualified to become a mechanical engineer, and when he told his mother he was leaving his job to go sailing, she said, ‘You will kill me, Solomon, how can you do this?’ But he followed his dream and when his mother came to visit him on the boat in Cape Town, it was one of the most emotional days of my life.

“I had my boat in Durban at first and I started to have a black crew. They learnt and then they raced with me, and people were laughing at me with my black crew until we started to overtake them and they didn’t laugh any more. We had a nice dream, a nice project, but when it came to racing in the America’s Cup, if you are a loser all nice things disappear. You have to organise yourself to do better.”

In August 2005 Sarno called a team meeting and addressed a truth that, deep down, he had known all along. Passion and vision were never going to be enough to make Team Shosholoza competitive. Idealism had to be sacrificed to the prerogative of winning. “I said to the team, ‘What do you prefer – that we continue to be 100% South African and sit on the bottom, or we bring in some good specialists and start to win?’ Everyone said, ‘We want to win’.”

Yet one of the abiding images of the early stages of the 32nd America’s Cup has been the figure of Mgedeza, Shosholoza’s bowman, silhouetted against the waters of a world he barely knew existed and, via the onboard camera, of Dipeere working in the bowels of the boat alongside Reinhardt Rauscher.

Rauscher, the youngest member of the crew, rigged up his own grinding machine in the garage of his home in Boksburg on the high veldt and practised until he was good enough to enlist with the team. Then his parents caught the mood, sold their house and set sail for the Mediterranean to catch Shosholoza’s breeze.

“I was going up the ladder in my career and then I had to give it all up,” says Mgedeza. “I sat down and thought, ‘What am I giving up?’ I was risking all I had achieved.” He has not regretted the change in his career. RSA 83, the Shosholoza boat first launched in 2005 and heavily adapted by designer Jason Ker for the Louis Vuitton Cup, has proved competitive in light airs but more vulnerable when the wind blows. Shosholoza’s teamwork has also held up well under pressure, a tribute to the patient tuition of Standbridge and to the new format of the America’s Cup, now divided into 13 acts, which allows a crew to train and develop under race conditions for two years before the start of the cup.

On his long, vain trawl through the boardrooms of South African business, Sarno was surprised to be told the America’s Cup was too elitist. “Too elitist? This was from one of South Africa’s most prominent diamond companies,” he says, laughing. But it’s the shifting perception of South Africa and the reconfiguring of a vision that will be Shosholoza’s legacy. “Yippee and yippee again, wow and double wow,” read a message to the team from Tutu in the wake of a victory last week.

“The crew is made up of all different races,” adds Dipeere. “There are black guys, white guys, all working together. That’s the theme of the new South Africa.” With the backing and belief of the South African business community – noticeably absent from this campaign, sponsored by a German company – Team Shosholoza will return. “We began as Sunday sailors and will leave as experienced professionals,” says the Sarno. “This is just the start.” Desafio Espanol beat BMW Oracle Racing yesterday, inflicting the Americans’ first defeat in challengers’ series racing. The Spanish boat led from the start and increased the gap at each marker before pulling away on the final lap to win by one minute in the 10th flight of the first round-robin stage of sailing.

Louis Vuitton Cup, today, Sky Sports 3, 12.30pm

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