If the America’s Cup trophy could speak, I imagine its voice, in silvery, baritone whispers, counselling the human spirit to “challenge and defend”.

This wise advice works for contenders among us all, particularly those dealing with an overwhelming foe: cancer.

The America’s Cup inspires everyone to challenge this disease and to defend against it. AC35 has paired with the Conquer Cancer Foundation as its official charity to these ends.

Today is the second of two dedicated “Conquer Cancer Foundation” days in the America’s Cup Village. Its purpose is to support Conquer Cancer’s mission for a world free from the fear of cancer. The foundation is the charitable arm of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

Enhanced reality on television is superimposing boundaries, markers and other visuals over the watery AC35 racecourse, exciting millions more viewers to the Cup this year.

Similarly, Conquer Cancer provides enhanced reality over the racecourse for cures. It shows everyone the parameters, potentials and gap-closers needed for innovative treatment.

Each of us has been affected by the tyrant cancer, “the emperor of all maladies”, described as such by a bestselling book of that title. Cancer rates are rising worldwide. Cancer overtook my parents in the prime of their lives. Cancer exiles many to sickening seas of treatments and lonely horizons of uncertainty.

Increasingly, some patients are charted back to safe harbour, but sadly those voyages deplete their purses, take far too long and are unacceptably few.

Bermudians are world-class sailors and world-class cancer conquerors. Last month many thousands of this small population took to their feet for the 24-hour Relay for Life, the largest fundraising event for cancer in Bermuda and in the world. At that time, the Bermuda Cancer and Health Centre celebrated the opening of the island’s first radiation therapy unit. Along with a modernised hospital, there is growing demand and support for treatment paths, combining overseas resources with home-town support systems.

Oncologists everywhere, including my wife, have fought for improved treatments for their patients. Drug development bottlenecks have been costing lives.

The challenges of bringing a new drug to market include ten years and $1 billion. This is ten times as expensive as Oracle’s $100 million defence of the Cup, which has become similarly prohibitive and unsustainable. America’s Cup leadership has wisely planned radical changes for the Cup’s more cost-effective and sustainable future. New drug development is slowly gybing in that same direction, but more wind is needed.

During AC35, the sharing of technical information between Oracle Team USA and SoftBank Team Japan was a risky innovation that proved to be an advantage for both. Cancer researchers and drug developers can learn from this AC35 success story. They, too, must collaborate, take what’s known, then tweak and fast-track it.

Fortunately, one expert on how to share has joined Conquer Cancer’s cause. Sean Parker, founder of file-sharing website Napster and first president of Facebook, launched the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy last year. It has incentivised openness and collaboration among researchers and industry, and along with Conquer Cancer, it is furiously forging a cancer-conquering armada to set course for many cures.

On the course in Bermuda, AC35 opponents have been competing fiercely. Nonetheless they have been united by a mutual, unpredictable foe — the sea. Similarly, the foe cancer is just as unpredictable. It can strike, then lull, and without notice rage implacably into jaundiced swells and oceanic despair.

Across the oceans, cancer has risen to epidemic proportions. This is owing in part to increased survival rates of other deadly diseases, but also because of patterns of human behaviour in changing times. It is possible that there could be more impact from personal lifestyle changes than from kinked medical pipelines.

Therefore, to protect against cancer we each need to become a sailor. We need to know how to read personal health “telltales” regarding our habits and surroundings. We need to grind, move, trim and steer our way to good effect. Each of us can take measures to clear our course with the hope of keeping cancer at bay.

AC35 has built up to its culmination this weekend. We have seen that when wind, water, money, technology and lore come together, there is “The Perfect Sail”. Within such a thrill is a stillness, a moment where the sailor is at once challenger and defender — against himself. In that alarmingly lonely moment, courage needs to be at its strongest. It is that same courage that cancer patients need in their moment.

Kudos to AC35 for sending the America’s Cup voice worldwide to provide courage to patients, to promote the Conquer Cancer Foundation, and to challenge and defend against this global epidemic.

•Hugh Dugan served as United States Consul in Bermuda, and he and his family are frequent visitors