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Marcello Burricks is not your typical America's cup yachtsman. Raised in a rough, mixed-race township on South Africa's Cape of Good Hope peninsula, he had to prove himself as a street fighter long before he ever climbed aboard a sailboat. In his early teens, he fraternized with local gangs and got in knife fights. These days, however, he puts his strength into grinding winches and helping to trim the mainsail of a sleek, 25-m America's Cup–class racing yacht.

Burricks' journey from local tough guy to élite sailor is just one of the remarkable stories to come from Africa's first-ever entry in the 154-year-old America's Cup, yachting's most prestigious — and the international sport's oldest — prize. Burricks is part of Team Shosholoza, a young, racially diverse South African crew defying the odds by taking on sailing's biggest names and deepest pockets — and scoring impressive victories. "So many sailors dream about being part of an America's Cup team," says Burricks. "I didn't expect myself to come this far."

In the rarefied world of the America's Cup, genuine underdogs don't come along very often. Only once has the Cup ever been won by a first-time challenger. That happened in 2003, when the Swiss Team Alinghi defeated Team New Zealand in Auckland, bringing the cup to Europe for the first time since a U.S. boat won the Auld Mug, in a race off the Isle of Wight back in 1851. Africa's yachting tradition is limited, to put it kindly. Though sailors in eastern and western Africa skillfully navigate the seas in traditional craft, yacht racing has been limited in most countries to small clubs with a few dinghies. In South Africa, where yachting is popular in cities such as Cape Town and Durban, the sport is still a long way from the professional circuits of Europe, North America and the Pacific.

The America's Cup is really two events: in the first stage, known as the Louis Vuitton Cup, would-be challengers race each other around Europe for four years to determine a final challenger, which will take on the Swiss boat in 2007. When Team Shosholoza showed up for the first pre-Cup regattas in Marseilles, France, two years ago, they won a lot of sympathy, but lagged far behind in most of the races. Cobbled together by an eccentric, Italian-born shipping tycoon and sailing enthusiast who lives in Durban, Shosholoza lacks just about everything conventional wisdom holds that a team needs to be successful. They can't compete with the experience, technological prowess and $100 million-plus budgets of teams like U.S. entry BMW-Oracle (put together by software billionaire Larry Ellison) or some of the European entries. The team has broken a mast and collided with a whale during a training run on Cape Town's Table Bay. Lacking sponsorship, they spent their first year racing in an obsolete, secondhand Cup vessel bought on the cheap. Burricks, the youngest team member, is only 20.

But no one counted on spirit. In Malmö, Sweden, last August, Shosholoza won its first victories against boats from Sweden and China. Then in the final round of events in Sicily last October, the South Africans placed fifth out of the 12 competing teams. The Louis Vuitton Cup starts up again on May 11. "We're definitely surprising a lot of teams," says Ian Ainslie, a veteran Olympic sailor, and one of the more experienced crew members. "Our competitors are giving us a lot more respect than they would have done a year ago."

The South Africans know they are loved for being different. While the other boats are sheathed in corporate logos, the sleek black hull of Shosholoza — named after an old work song from the mines — is emblazoned with bright African motifs. Nearly one-third of the sailors are nonwhite. "We want to show that South Africa is a country that can conceive of the construction of a racing machine," says Salvatore Sarno, the businessman who mounted Shosholoza's challenge. "It's a country where different races, different cultures can work together, challenging the top countries in the world."

After the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Ainslie took a job as a high school teacher in the navy village of Simon's Town. There he met Golden Mgedeza and Solomon Dipeere, both teenage naval cadets from Kwa Thema township outside Johannesburg. Ainslie nurtured their passion for sailing, and offered free lessons to other poor black and mixed-race kids in the surrounding townships. Burricks was one of the keenest. "We had to chase him away to get him to do some schoolwork during exams," Ainslie recalls. For Burricks, sailing provided an escape from the violence of township life. "You grow up thinking that's your way of living," he says. "But if you give kids something else to do, like sailing, most will stop being naughty."

Sarno appointed the young men to the crew of his own Durban yacht, on which they began winning some local events. But when Sarno began talking about entering the America's Cup, even his crew members thought the idea was nuts. Undeterred, Sarno bought a boat, talked the city of Cape Town into giving him the use of prime waterfront dock space, and started recruiting. In Simon's Town, the sailing school now accommodates more than 300 children. Some of them are around one afternoon when Mgedeza and Burricks visit with a group of journalists, maneuvering hand-painted bos'n's dinghies and tiny plastic Optimists around buoys in the harbor. Ask any kid here what he wants to do when he grows up, and he'll say he wants to sail on Shosholoza. "They've proved that they have the passion and the inspiration to take on such a tough challenge," says Alinghi's helmsman and sports director Jochen Schümann, who was in Cape Town recently to attend a Shosholoza charity auction. "It's an open question how far they will get." For many of South Africa's young sailors, blazing a trail for the next multiracial generation of sailors is victory in itself.

• MEGAN LINDOW / Cape Town
• For the first time in the history of the America's Cup, an African team is sailing its way to excellence — and maybe victory