Coutts for charity
Well, I've been lucky enough to get back to Australia just when everything seems to be happening this side of the world again. The 18-foot skiff unofficial world championships, the JJ Giltinan Trophy has just got underway. The International 14 Worlds just over the pond (well, about three hours' flight away) in Auckland have concluded in the most dramatic and controversial of circumstances. I have come over to report on the Rolex Farr 40 Worlds, and one of the side benefits has been participant Russell Coutts taking time out of his professional keelboat duties to give a talk for charity to some of the local 29er kids.
Organised by Julian Bethwaite and Woollahra Sailing Club, Coutts agreed to impart some of his hard-earned wisdom to the gathered throng. Despite being better known for his exploits on the big boat scene, Coutts clearly retains a soft spot for small boat sailing. Indeed since his exile from Alinghi and the America's Cup scene, the talented Kiwi has spent much of his time racing Dragons and Etchells 22 keelboats.
Although by his own admission he has never had much success with skiff sailing, he loves this aspect of the sport. "I've enjoyed my successes," he said, "but I've enjoyed a lot of the times when I haven't won. I tried to learn 18 foot skiffs in Sydney Harbour, and I wasn't any good at it, but I enjoyed trying to learn it." Coutts said if he was a kid growing up today, he would be racing a 29er.
One of the unexpected benefits of being an outcast from the America's Cup scene has been to remind himself just how many different aspects there are to the sport. It has also reminded him of the fun you can have sailing, perhaps a difficult thing to keep in mind even if you find yourself on the winning end of the arduous America's Cup game.
He is a strong believer that youth sailors should have fun and enjoy the sport above all else. It sounds obvious, but it is a point worth remembering as youth training programmes become ever more structured. It doesn't have to be this way, but quite often added structure and organisation can also remove some of the fun and spontaneity from things.
This seemed to be the point Coutts was making. "When I see sophisticated youth programmes, that all helps, but passion is the most important. I learned to sail on Otago Harbour, and the yacht club there was tiny, but it produced two youth world champions in a very short time." Coutts says he and his friends would be out any spare time of the day, looking for ways to get better. Racing one against one was common place, or setting a windward/leeward course in strong winds that got shorter and shorter as they got better at coping. They would do this to the point where no sooner had they gybed around the leeward mark and sheeted on again, but it was almost time to tack and bear away around the windward mark.
Sailing so keenly and in such concentrated fashion in his little P Class dinghy - the Kiwi equivalent of the Optimist - gave Coutts his grounding in good boat sense. Being able to sail the boat by feel is one of the most vital skills in racing, he believes. "So much of sailing is getting your head out of the boat and being able to look around you, at the patterns on the water, the clouds, or in the case of Sydney Harbour, the traffic coming towards you. We did so much sailing in those early years that we didn't need to look to see where the mainsheet was or look down into the boat much at all. The less you need to rely on the mechanical operations in the boat, the better you'll be."
Categorising
It is easy to assume that great sailors are simply talented and that it all comes very easy to them. But to hear Coutts talk suggests a far more analytical and methodical approach, one that is very replicable by other sailors looking to improve their game. "One of the things I try to do is to simplify our complex sport as much as possible. I try to order the day, by determining which category the day is likely to fall into. Is it a sea breeze day, a strong wind day, light winds, or shifty breezes?
"Once I've categorised the day I have a set of rules which I follow, and I do my best to apply those rules to the best of my ability. If for example it's a light air day, then clear wind is a vital factor. If it is blowing four knots and you get into one knot more breeze, that's a big percentage increase in wind. In five or six knots the boat will behave very differently to when it's in four knots. It will go faster, it will pointer, so the gains are enormous. But in strong winds, sitting in bad air might only lose you half a boatlength, so it may be OK to stay there because it is still taking you the right way up the beat."
Coutts says he built up a grid of different factors and their relative importance in different types of sailing conditions. While we are highly unlikely to see Coutts taping a copy of his magic grid to the side of his boat, he says that even now he relies on those same basic principles to determine his broad strategy for the day.
Keeping those broad strategies uppermost in your mind helps you determine what is most important at any given moment on the race course. Coutts says you often see people get caught in winning the moment rather than seeing that moment as a building block to winning the race. He drew the example of getting off the start line when the right hand side of the course is favoured. "You often hear people say, ‘I had a great start, but I got forced the wrong way out of the start. I couldn't tack over there because of the other boats.' But who's forcing you? Only yourself. Perhaps you should have put yourself in a position where you could have tacked off earlier."
Thinking ahead
As this example illustrates, a key part of Coutts' approach to racing is his ability to think far ahead up the race course. While most of us struggle to think about the next move in chess, they say that a grandmaster is capable of thinking up to 20 moves ahead. The same appears to be true of Coutts, who talked through the series of moves that he and Alinghi played in Race 2 of the last America's Cup to come back from a 30-second deficit at the final leeward mark, to clinch the winner's gun by the finish. Using a marker pen and whiteboard, Coutts outlined the series of moves up the final beat and their approach to the windward mark, followed by a radical choice of tight-luffed gennaker down the final run that drew the defending Kiwis into playing to Alinghi's tune, and eventually being Swiss-rolled just before the finish.
Like a chess grandmaster, Coutts seems capable of not only thinking many moves ahead for himself, but also anticipating the likely response from his opponent. To hear him explain it makes it all sound deceptively simple. Clearly the man has put an awful lot of thought into every aspect of his game.
He then set a rules quiz for the audience, which proved his view that the majority of sailors really don't understand them. If you are one of them - and I certainly am - then Coutts believes you are missing a vital part of your tactical armoury. "There are many misconceptions about the rules. When a boat on port is looking to cross a starboard boat, you often hear them shouting ‘Hold your course.' But there's no rule that says the starboard boat has to do that. You don't have to hold your course, you merely have to allow ample opportunity for the other boat to keep clear. So I might be thinking, ‘No, I'm not going to hold my course, I'm going to luff up because I want you to tack.' Then I can tack off on to port towards the starboard layline, and beat you round the windward mark."
Calm down, calm down!
Behind Coutts' cool and calculated approach to his racing is an ability to remain calm no matter how pressured the situation. "I think it's very key in any sporting arena that you remain calm, no matter how much bad is going on around you. If you're helming an America's Cup boat and you get stressed up, that is just going to spread throughout the team very quickly."
Looking back again to the miraculous comeback from Race 2 of the Cup, he says: "It would have been easy to start panicking, where you make a tack hoping for the best, when you know it's really not on, and then all of a sudden a 30-second loss is down to a one-minute loss, and then the game really is over. It's important to remain objective. Recently in the Farr 40 we were over the starting line and had been going for a couple of minutes before we realised it, but it just doesn't do any good to start jumping up and down and screaming and yelling, or whatever you think the solution is at that moment. That's not to say that I don't get upset at my team or whatever, or they might get upset with me, but we try and control it to the point where the discussion happens after the race. Because if you try and have a debrief at the time, then you're not actually thinking about how you're going to get out of the situation."
Again, the idea of staying calm is hardly rocket science, but how many of us can actually remain calm under fire? It is a skill that needs to be worked on just like any other. Underlying all of Coutts' thinking, both in the heat of the moment and also off the water, is never ceasing to ask how something can be done better. Whether it is improving the design of a rudder, or developing a better mode of communication between the team, or thinking his way out of a tight spot on the race course, Coutts is clearly one of those people who has taught himself to focus on the solution rather than the problem. "Sometimes your options may not be that great. "It might be the difference between finishing 25th or 26th, but it's still worth taking. Always look for the best solution to the problem, no matter how bad things get."
