4. Compare the role of big data in Team USA’s America’s Cup victory with its role in the German team’s 2014 World Cup victory described in the chapter-opening case. On September 25, 2013, Oracle Team USA pulled off one of the greatest comebacks in organized sports by winning the last race of the 34th America’s Cup Race on breezy San Francisco Bay. Oracle was down 8–1 to its archrival New Zealand in the previous week after losing seven races in a row. Looked like a rout.

But then a miracle: Oracle won seven races in a row.

And in a winner-take-all finale, Oracle beat Team New Zealand by 44 seconds over the 12-mile race course before thousands of spectators lined up along San Francisco Bay. Both Team USA and Team New Zealand were the highest of high-tech boats ever to leave a designer’s computer screen.

In earlier days, America’s Cup races were typically among single-hulled sailboats in the 70-foot range that looked like sailboats in the local yacht club, just more so: a single, long, narrow hull, and a really tall mast to hold the sails up. They might get up to 10 miles an hour on the race course.

In 2010, software billionaire Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, changed all that by spending over $300 million on a new kind of Cup racer: a three-hulled catamaran made of carbon fiber with what looked like an aircraft wing instead of a mast with sails. In two races, the boat, BMW Oracle USA, beat its Swiss contender, Alinghi. Having won the 33rd America’s Cup, Ellison could set the boat design and rules for the 34th race in 2013.