AUCKLAND, New Zealand -- In the closest America's Cup race in 11 years, the home crew had a certain victory yanked away in the last several hundred yards.

	Team New Zealand led for most of Race 2.

Alinghi of Switzerland passed Team New Zealand on the downwind run to the finish and held on for a heartstopping victory Sunday to take a 2-0 lead in the best-of-nine.

New Zealand-born skipper Russell Coutts steered Alinghi to a seven-second victory that put his crew just three victories shy of taking the America's Cup to Europe for the first time in 152 years.

It was a painful defeat for two-time defending champion Team New Zealand, which seemed to be in control after the opening-race disaster Saturday, when its boat practically fell apart and forced the Kiwis to drop out just 25 minutes after the start, handing the victory to Alinghi.

Team New Zealand led by 26 seconds as the boats rounded the fifth mark and headed down the final 3.25-nautical mile leg on the Hauraki Gulf.

After Alinghi crossed the finish line just more than one length ahead, Team New Zealand skipper Dean Barker slumped against the steering wheel in disappointment in the late-afternoon sunshine.

''On the last run, we made a couple of mistakes early on and that caused the race to be a lot closer than it needed to be,'' Barker said.

Coutts extended his record to 11 consecutive America's Cup victories. The first nine triumphs came when he led Team New Zealand to five-race sweeps in 1995 and 2000. He handed the wheel to Barker for the clinching race in 2000, then jumped ship along with several other Kiwis just two months later. Switzerland is the first landlocked country to reach the America's Cup match.

Race 3 in the best-of-nine series is scheduled for Tuesday.

''It looked for a long time like it would be 1-1, but now it's 2-0, and that's major,'' said Alinghi strategist Jochen Schuemann.

It was the closest America's Cup race since Italy's Il Moro di Venezia beat America3 by three seconds in the second race of the 1992 match. The Americans ended up winning that series, 4-1.

The Kiwis had sped past the Swiss on the downwind second leg, and the Swiss pulled the same move for the stunning comeback on the six-leg, 18.5-mile course.

As the boats sailed under asymmetrical spinnakers practically across the wind out toward the left side of the course, Alinghi fouled the Kiwis' air and was able to sail over the top of them.

When the boats turned back to the right, the Swiss were in the controlling position and they held it into the finish line.

NZL-82 had been repaired overnight after the end of its boom broke and its jib blew out twice during the chaotic race Saturday.

The race Sunday was delayed for more than two hours while the committee waited for the breeze to build, and there was a further delay because a portion of the huge spectator fleet had drifted onto the course. The wind was 10 knots at the start, much tamer than the conditions Saturday.

Alinghi rounded the first mark with a 12-second lead, but it wasn't long before the Kiwis rolled past the Swiss on a long starboard gybe.

The Kiwis went from trailing by just more than two lengths at the first mark to leading by two lengths about halfway down the leg. When they rounded the mark, they were ahead by 34 seconds, or about six lengths.

Alinghi closed the gap to 14 seconds after the second lap around the windward-leeward course, but the Kiwis extended it to 26 seconds during a series of tacking duels up the fifth leg.