Oracle founder and island owner Larry Ellison had a vision for yacht racing: it would be a sport so insane and magnificent, only the kings who ruled other kings could afford to participate. But in his pursuit of perfection, The Wind God went too far—his America's Cup racing team just got penalized for cheating.

The Cup hasn't even begun.

It wasn't enough that Ellison could buy the best and fastest kind of watercraft ever devised. It wasn't enough that Ellison insisted on a make of yacht that's so expense, teams had to drop out of the race altogether—they had to stack the deck, with "illegal weights added to Oracle Team USA’s 45-foot catamaran," the Silicon Valley Business Journal reports. "The Oracle team was accused of — and later admitted to — adding about five pounds of illegal weight to their 3,086-pound boat." That sounds minute, but it makes all the difference in a down-to-the-wire race.

Ellison's team will now have to win extra portions of the competition in order to make good on the hundreds of millions of dollars he's poured into guaranteeing a win, that brave Bloomberg of the seas.

Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty