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#VOR - Team New Zealand is giving this year's Volvo Ocean Race a miss, instead fixing their sights on the America's Cup.

As the New Zealand Herald reports, the team that finished second in overall points in the last edition of the VOR - and claimed victory in the final leg to Galway - was planning to mount another challenge at the round-the-world yachting title.

They would have joined a field filled with newcomers to the race, including the first all-woman squad for a decade and one of the youngest ever teams to compete.

But "in the end, time was against us," said team CEO Grant Dalton.

"Every passing day magnified the impact that preparations for a round-the-world race would have on Emirates Team New Zealand's other operations."

Those operations, more specifically, are the team's preparations for the 35th America's Cup, the defence of which is scheduled to take place in 2017.

Dalton added: "The team exists to win the America's Cup."

Published in Ocean Race

William M Nixon has been writing about sailing in Ireland and internationally for many years, with his work appearing in leading sailing publications on both sides of the Atlantic. He has been a regular sailing columnist for four decades with national newspapers in Dublin, and has had several sailing books published in Ireland, the UK, and the US. An active sailor, he has owned a number of boats ranging from a Mirror dinghy to a Contessa 35 cruiser-racer, and has been directly involved in building and campaigning two offshore racers. His cruising experience ranges from Iceland to Spain as well as the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, and he has raced three times in both the Fastnet and Round Ireland Races, in addition to sailing on two round Ireland records. A member for ten years of the Council of the Irish Yachting Association (now the Irish Sailing Association), he has been writing for, and at times editing, Ireland's national sailing magazine since its earliest version more than forty years ago