It is a record of unremitting sporting failure which one of the key figures behind London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympics is determined to change.

In 156 years of the competition, Britain, one of the planet’s leading maritime nations, has never won the America’s Cup. The tone was set in the very first contest, when a lone American yacht beat 14 British boats in a race around the Isle of Wight. Since then, the closest Britain has come to bringing the venerable trophy, made by London’s Garrard & Co, home was a bid by Sir Thomas Sopwith, founder of the aircraft company behind the Camel, in 1934. There is not even a British entrant in Valencia, although there are plenty of British nationals spread among the 12 teams.

Now, Sir Keith Mills, founder of the Air Miles business and proud owner of a Salcombe yawl, a classic wooden sailing boat, is trying to turn the tide of history. He announced in January the creation of Teamorigin, a new British America’s Cup sailing team. This will contest at least the next two America’s Cup campaigns over a period of perhaps six years. In a sign of the seriousness of its intentions, Mike Sanderson, winning skipper of the 2005-2006 Volvo Ocean Race, was recently appointed team director.

Interviewed in his London office, Sir Keith methodically sets out the reasons why he believes the prize is now “winnable” for a British boat. These include the wealth of British sailing talent, this year’s staging of the competition in Europe, which has raised its profile in Teamorigin’s home market, and a sense that many of the New Zealand sailors who have recently dominated the contest are nearing the end of their careers. “I think that the time is right for a new, younger generation of sailors, many of whom happen to be Brits, to take it away,” he says.

Financing a credible bid is also perhaps more feasible than it was in the past. The estimated annual cost of between £20m and £25m “is not 100 per cent fully financeable, but you can get to 60-70 per cent,” he says.

Teamorigin’s business plan is “based on 50 per cent of the cost of the campaign being funded commercially”, with the balance coming from investors, including Sir Keith himself. “As an investment, like lots of investments, this is a binary investment,” he says. “In other words, if we win the America’s Cup, there’s a significant financial return for the investors; if we lose the America’s Cup, there’s a significant financial loss.”

As for the sponsors, “The America’s Cup is a unique property,” he argues. “It is a global marketing opportunity… It is up there with Formula One racing in terms of its profile and its image, but in relative terms it is a fraction of the cost.”

Teamorigin meetings with potential sponsors started in March, and Sir Keith has detected “very strong interest in those companies whose primary business is business to business”. He expects to have the first sponsor on board by the autumn. “This isn’t about branding,” he explains, “this is about utilising the America’s Cup to drive business.”

Citing one of the top teams in Valencia, Sir Keith says they “have 900 people at their base every day from their corporate sponsors. They come down, they see the base, they meet the team. Then they go out on the boats and watch the racing. They come back and have dinners. It’s a pretty sizeable operation.

“[Teamorigin] will have a fleet of small race boats and companies will be able to take their customers or their staff out racing with America’s Cup sailors on board. If you were supporting a normal sport, you wouldn’t get the chance to play football with a Premiership footballer.”

With British sailors enjoying recent success in ocean racing and the Olympic Games, there is certain to be a big local presence on the boat. Sir Keith is not though, for the moment, naming names, partly because so many potential recruits are currently employed by America’s Cup teams.

Equally, as demonstrated by the appointment of Mr Sanderson – who is from Whangarei, New Zealand and is married to British yachtswoman Emma Richards – Teamorigin will have no qualms about recruiting the best foreign talent. “There are many positions where we simply don’t have the right level of talent,” Sir Keith says.

“In finding somebody to lead the team from a performance perspective, I was trying to find somebody who was great technically both on the water and off the water, in other words in sailing the boat and design and build of boats. Apart from the fact that [Mr Sanderson] was world sailor of the year last year, his credentials both on and off the water are exceptional.

“I couldn’t find a Brit who had that mix of experience,” he continues. “[Sanderson] also had three America’s Cup campaigns under his belt, so he has got lots of experience, yet he is still quite young. He will lead from the front because he knows what it is to race a boat quickly. And yet he has, I think, true leadership qualities that not many people have.”

Sir Keith readily acknowledges that a team established by him might have been in Spain for this year’s competition had the 2012 Olympic bid not intervened. “I got sucked into the Olympic world and did the Olympics for three years and so the America’s Cup was put on the backburner,” he says. “When Barbara Cassani [orginal leader of the London bid] was trying to persuade me to do the Olympic job, her sales pitch was, ‘Look, you can do an America’s Cup any time, but this will be the only opportunity you will ever have to run an Olympic bid and bring the Olympics to the UK.’ She also said, ‘And if you win the 2012 Olympic Games, your chances of putting a successful America’s Cup team together would go up exponentially.’”

The idea of putting an America’s Cup team together had actually germinated on a round-the-world race Sir Keith undertook with Alex Thomson, the British solo sailor, in the late 1990s. “When you do an ocean race… and you are sailing for weeks on end, all the way through the night you talk about all sorts of things,” he says. “I did start thinking then about what is the viability of putting together a team.

“Alex… couldn’t understand why anyone would be excited about going out and having a race for two hours and then going back into a hotel room…. There are certainly different views about what the sport of sailing is all about.”

His own interest dates from the time his father took him out in a small dinghy in Poole harbour “when I was about eight or nine years old”. He has been sailing regularly ever since – except for a 10-year spell when “I was working too hard”.

David Owen is the FT’s former sports editor