THE raid on New Zealand’s family silver by its own sons was completed yesterday here in Auckland when Ernesto Bertarelli’s Alinghi crew from Switzerland, led by Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth, swept away the challenge of Team New Zealand, the defenders, to complete a 5-0 whitewash in the 31st America’s Cup.

After a comfortable win for Alinghi in the fifth race of the best-of-nine-series, the Auld Mug is on its way to Europe for the first time in 152 years, an exciting prospect for European and British sailing. But watching the last rites for the Cup was an uncomfortable experience.

Three years ago, thousands of people turned out to celebrate Team New Zealand’s first defence, against Prada, as Coutts and Dean Barker, his young protégé, paraded the Cup around Auckland’s waterfront. This time, Barker, the beaten New Zealand skipper, joined a far smaller crowd to watch the frenzied celebrations of the Swiss team, which is made up of sailors from 14 countries and includes Team New Zealand’s six best sailors from the 2000 defence.

As the Alinghi crew took turns to hold the Cup aloft on the pontoon next to their boat and sprayed each other with champagne, cheered on by a few hundred supporters, the rest of the crowd watched in silence, occasionally breaking into ripples of polite applause.

One Aucklander summarised the sense of collective shock for a nation that, up until two weeks ago, had fully expected to be applauding a second successful defence. “They’ve been brainwashed for three years into thinking they were going to keep it and now they are watching it being taken away,” he said.

The final race saw Alinghi sail to a clinical victory on a hot and humid summer’s day on the Hauraki Gulf in medium-strength winds. Racing again in front of a small spectator fleet — indicative of the sharp decline in interest from home supporters who have seen defeat coming for some days — Coutts beat Barker at the start for the fifth time and then sailed away from him up the first beat.

In another display of faultless tactics and excellent boatspeed, Alinghi was 21 seconds ahead at the first mark and was never headed from there, going on to win by 45 seconds. After rig failures in race one and a dismasting in race four, the hometown crew’s problems continued when they broke their spinnaker pole on the second run, but by then the race was already lost.

For Coutts, this was his fourteenth consecutive victory as a skipper in America’s Cup racing, eclipsing Dennis Conner’s 13 wins and making him the most successful America’s Cup skipper. For Barker, the Cup has been a painful and humiliating experience that he has nevertheless handled with great dignity.

Sixteen days ago, the outcome looked so difficult to predict, with many commentators favouring Team New Zealand. With the advantage of hindsight, it is now clear that the loss of so much sailing talent in 2000, both to Alinghi Swiss Challenge and to other teams, triggered a sense of insecurity in Team New Zealand about the ability of the sailors it had left. To compensate, the designers went for a radical boat, which turned out to be no quicker than Alinghi and was too fragile for the job.

In five straight defeats, Team New Zealand became the first defender in the history of the Cup to retire from two races. In the races it did complete, its fears over the abilities of its sailing team proved well-founded. They were outsailed by Coutts and his crew, in boathandling and tactics.

Tom Schnackenberg, the Team New Zealand syndicate head, said that he had watched Alinghi throughout the Louis Vuitton Cup and had hoped that he had done enough to beat them. Clearly they had not. “I take my hat off to the whole Alinghi team,” he said. “It’s been a magnificent campaign and we’ve been soundly beaten.”

Bertarelli is the first man to win the Cup after just one challenge and he has ambitious plans to reform the event for Alinghi’s first defence, which is expected to be in 2007 at a European location that has yet to be decided. He said that he never expected to win the Cup this time round and that the achievement had made this one of the greatest days of his life.

The young pharmaceuticals billionaire from Geneva paid tribute to Coutts and the other New Zealanders in the Alinghi crew. “I think New Zealand should be proud of these sailors,” he said. “Think about it . . . you guys produced sailors who have won 15 America’s Cup races in a row and are still undefeated.”