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Abstract
A significant legacy of the 1986–1987 America's Cup Defence ocean yachting event in Fremantle, Western Australia, is a mythology – an America's Cup mythology that has become a part of ongoing development debate in the city. While being a non-tangible legacy, the mythology is manifest and endures in the context of city re-imaging and regeneration. The focus of this paper is on how stakeholders with an interest in local issues generate and maintain America's Cup mythology within local development debates, in contrast to re-imaging aimed at tourists or to external evaluation of regeneration. The paper uses a sub-set of data collected within a longitudinal and critical political ethnography of the city. Discourse analysis of a broad range of formal and informal public documents pertaining to a variety of often-controversial development projects forms the basis of the ethnography. Within this is a particular focus on rationale that refers to tourism, or tourism-based rationale, and America's Cup mythology is recognised as a particular tourism-based rationale. The themes of fatefulness and the local political habitus are employed in the analysis of how the mythology of the event has been created and sustained. The theme of modern mythology is employed to explain how this particular rationale, as mythology, has become significant.