'Oracle' reach semis, 11 in a row with Dickson

Reuters, Auckland

Software billionaire Larry Ellison's Oracle team completed its fourth successive win over bitter U.S. rival OneWorld on Saturday to become the second team to reach the America's Cup challengers series semifinals.

Oracle finished off a 4-0 victory in the best-of-seven race quarterfinals with a solid 33-second defeat of OneWorld, backed by telecoms investor Craig McCaw and Paul Allen, co-founder of Ellison's avowed software enemy Microsoft.

Oracle had struggled through the first qualifying round robin but has been one of the form teams since Ellison shook up his afterguard and named New Zealander Chris Dickson as his skipper.

Oracle now joins biotechnology billionaire Ernesto Bertarelli's Swiss syndicate Alinghi in next month's semifinals race.

Alinghi, the top seed after two qualifying round robins last month, was handed a semifinals berth on Friday when Italian team Prada conceded its quarterfinals after losing its third successive race to the Swiss team.

Prada, the defending Louis Vuitton Cup challengers champion, decided to forfeit its last race and use the time to fine-tune its boat for next week's quarterfinals repechage.

Under complicated regatta rules, the top two teams from the seeded 1-4 "double chance" quarterfinals group go through to the semifinals while the two losers go into the quarterfinals repechage, where they will sail against the winners of the seeded 5-8 "single chance" group.

French team Le Defi Areva stood on the brink of elimination before Saturday's races, trailing fifth-seeded Swedish team Victory Challenge 0-3.

But in shifting winds ranging between 10 and 24 knots, the eighth seeded Le Defi won for only the third time in 20 races when it upset the Swedes by 34 seconds.

Victory led for the first four of the race's six legs but Le Defi took advantage of a big windshift to catch and pass the Swedes.

The pair raced aggressively down the fifth leg until the normally reliable Victory crew botched setting their spinnaker, enabling Le Defi to widen their lead.

In the other sudden-death quarterfinals, Team Dennis Conner opened a 3-1 lead when it beat Britain's GBR Challenge by 34 seconds.

Conner's Stars & Stripes boat led GBR, Britain's first Cup challenge in 15 years, across the start line by a massive 14 seconds and controlled the rest of the 18.5 nautical race in the Hauraki Gulf off New Zealand's largest city of Auckland.