Ancient Olympics
Looking back through the annals of the Olympic Regatta in Los Angeles 20 years ago reveals much that is similar and much that has changed since August 1984. There were only seven events, the Flying Dutchman, the 470, Soling, Star, Tornado, Finn and for the first time the sailboard division, then raced on Windgliders.
There were no women's categories. That is not to say that women weren't present, as Cathy Foster was representing Great Britain in the 470 with crew Pete Newlands, and they won the final heat to finish 7th overall. In the Tornado class, Trine Elvstrom was crewing the Danish legend, four-time Olympic Champion Paul Elvstrom, although they just missed out on a medal, finishing 4th.
Racing took place on the big old Olympic courses, a triangle-sausage arrangement with just one race a day, to make a seven-race series. They used a weird scoring system that involved numbers like 5.7 for third place, and if you were involved in a collision, there was no 720 penalty option. You either retired immediately from the race or fought it out in the protest room that evening. This seemed a bit pointless. Even if you were port tack boat in a port/starboard incident, which option would you take? Fall on your sword now, or fight it out in a court room later with the possibility of arguing your way out of it?
So there has been a lot of progress over the past 20 years - women's sailing, more races, 720 penalties, on-the-water umpiring, simpler scoring, and so on. A bit disappointing that so many of the same old classes are still there, with only the Tornado in its new configuration fully keeping pace with the times. But overall, ISAF - or the IYRU as it was known back then - can pat itself on the back at having shoved Olympic sailing in the right direction.
A look back through the names in the results is also quite revealing. At the top of the Finn table is a 21-year-old Kiwi called Russell Coutts. Britain's representative Mike McIntyre was expected to fare better than his 7th place at this Games, but at least he would make amends four years later to win Gold in the Star class.
From a British perspective this was a lacklustre regatta, with Jo Richards' and Pete Allam's Bronze in the Flying Dutchman little consolation for such a talented team. Richards and Allam had won Pre-Olympic Gold a year earlier, and with their super-advanced Nomex honeycomb hull were expected to clean up at Long Beach. But it was around this period that the dinghy world woke up to the joys of extreme mast rake. The Kiwis had been dominating the 470 class with their ideas about raking the rig right back in a breeze, and with just a few months to the Games the FD sailors were catching on to the idea. How much it came into play during the regatta I don't know because it was a relatively light wind event, but a young Jonathan McKee won Gold crewed by the tall William Carl Buchan Jr.
Meanwhile, over on the Star course, Carl's dad, William (Bill) Buchan Sr was notching up another Gold for USA, crewed by Steve Erickson. There can't be many occasions when father and son have become Olympic Champions in the very same week. The whole event turned out to be a USA bonanza, with the home team recording three Golds and four Silvers from the seven categories. They were helped of course by the Eastern Bloc countries choosing to snub the LA Olympics after many of the Western nations boycotted Moscow 1980 when Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan.
Not surprisingly, very few of the representatives from 1984 are to be found in Athens in 2004, although the shining exception is Brazil's Torben Grael who won the first of his four medals in 1984 - a Silver in the Soling - and who is looking to add a fifth in Athens this month. But many of the names from '84 are to be found at the forefront of modern America's Cup campaigns. Grael of course also fits this category, along with Rod Davis (Soling Gold), Luis Doreste (470 Gold) Thierry Peponnet and Luc Pillot (470 Bronze), Tomasso Chieffi (5th 470). Of course, we've already mentioned Russell Coutts, but strictly speaking he's not an America's Cup sailor these days, is he? Equally interesting is that way down the 470 rankings in 14th place were Kiwi representatives Peter Evans and Sean Reeves, both Team New Zealand representatives in their time, but Reeves perhaps better known as the naughty one who tried to sell TNZ secrets to the opposition for a million dollars.
This Kiwi team secured qualification for the 1984 Olympics under pretty controversial circumstances (although through no fault of their own), winning a one-week, first-past-the-post trials ahead of David Barnes and Hamish Wilcox who had won three out of the previous four World Championships. Barnes and Wilcox were dead certs for a medal in Long Beach but despite that disappointment, Wilcox has remained heavily involved in the 470 class, having been Team GBR's coach in Sydney and now again in Athens.
Highlands Drifter
Winning an Olympic medal is all about putting a consistent series together, as it is in the vast majority of racing. It is rare that dinghy sailors get hung up on winning a single race, but there are few more special occasions to do so than in the Prince of Wales Cup in the International 14 class, and this year the winners were Andy Partington and Ben Verniere. It was the strangest of races in the strangest of weeks. Having been greeted with howling winds on arrival, the POW Week was dogged by light winds and hot weather, not at all what you'd expect for Scotland. For the one race that mattered (POW Cup and not POW Week is the National Championship), the wind turned through 180 degrees and did all its usual tricks, threatening to drag itself out to the full time limit of six hours. But the race was long enough for the main contenders to drag themselves to the front of the fleet, and Partington and Verniere sailed past the form boat of the week, Andy Fitzgerald and Simon Marks, not through good fortune but through good boatspeed. They were worthy champions despite the bizarre sailing conditions.
It was a shame the wind didn't live up to the rest of the great reception that East Lothian Yacht Club laid on for the fleet. Despite the lack of good sailing conditions, the big trip North reinforced my belief that fleets should travel for their major championships. ELYC is a small club with a big heart and with the ambition to match. As I write this, they are currently hosting the Nationals for the RS200 and 400 fleets, which between them must account for well over 150 boats.
The RS fleet specifically requested Jim Sinclair as their Principal Race Officer, and it was Jim who ran our racing at the 14s. I can see why the RS sailors wanted him, because he has a great knack of giving the sailors what they want. The fact that we went through such a bad week - where we lost two days from the middle of the week and where the last two were only just sailable - and that the sailors were still having pleasant conversation with the PRO speaks volumes for Jim's abilities. Normally by this point, disgruntled competitors are talking about the race officer in less than complimentary terms. But Jim was always to be found in the boat park, always ready to listen to comments and suggestions, and because of this was well placed to gauge the mood of the fleet. When he thought we'd had enough of waiting to go sailing, he'd abandon early so that people could play golf, go go-carting or continue the seemingly endless hours of boat bimbling that some sailors appear to enjoy.
A different point of view
One of the other dubious benefits of spending so much time ashore in windless boat parks is the opportunity to talk rubbish for hours on end. The added benefit for me is that I can then recycle this rubbish into useful ways of filling up the last 200 words of Rolltacks. I could tell you about my trapeze harness hook and how it snapped during Race 2, and the mirth that this caused to other Fourteeners. Some suggested I might want to take a dietary warning from such a breakage, but I think I'll get a stronger hook instead. For the rest of the week Ian Pinnell's crew Sam Gardner was kind enough to lend me his spare harness, which was signed by former Italian footballer Gianluca Vialli, but which seemed to imbue me with none of his talent or speed.
Anyway, whilst whiling away the hours in the boat park, I got to hear about the lesser-known hazards of polarised sunglasses. Because I'm too tight-fisted to use anything other than cheap throwaway sunnies for sailing, I've never experienced the benefits of £100-plus polarized specs with fancy words like ‘thermonuclear' imprinted on them. Apparently they are very good at helping you ‘see' the water, distinguishing gusts from lulls and so on. But one benefit they don't mention on the packaging is their ability to make LCD displays invisible. For most dinghy sailors this isn't an issue, but for keelboat sailors not being able to read masthead displays is almost like sailing blind. I remember reporting on the last Volvo Ocean Race when illbruck's instruments shut down during the Southern Ocean leg from Cape Town to Sydney, and they had to sail the last few thousand miles of the leg by the seats of their pants. Maybe in retrospect the real problem was that no one took off their sunglasses for three thousand miles. Just a thought.
Apparently the other side-effect of polarised sunnies is their ability to make the water look ‘scary', according to Mike Lennon. Looking through a set of hi-tech shades can turn a pleasant Force 4 into a terrifying Force 6. Again, think about the Volvo Ocean Race, how even the most hardened professional comes back from the Southern Ocean with tales of 60-knot storms and waves the size of skyscrapers. It's because they're looking at the Southern Ocean through expensive polarised sunglasses.
There's a simple solution to this, and that is to keep a quiver of sunglasses aboard with you. When the wind looks too strong for your liking, put the cheap-and-nasty set on, and hey presto everything's calmed down nicely. And when the wind is on the light side, put on your polarized set, and rough up the water a little. It's interesting to note that in Scotland, Mike and his crew John McKenna were one of the fastest boats there, easing sail when most of us were still marginal trapezing. Now I know why. Time to invest in some expensive sunglasses.
