It's not until you come to Australia that you realise just what a big deal the Rolex Sydney Hobart Race is. On Boxing Day, the whole nation stops to watch the fleet tack their way out of Sydney Harbour and into the Pacific Ocean. It is a big deal that goes way beyond being just a yacht race - it is a national event. I was pleased for both winners in the race, the line honours victor Nicorette and the handicap winner Aera. Both were chock full of sailors with strong dinghy backgrounds. The 90-foot Maxi was crewed by many names from the 49er and 18-foot skiff scene, while the British boat Aera included skipper Jez Fanstone, a former Finn and Star campaigner, and former 505 World Champion Jeremy Robinson. It was one of the toughest races in 60 years of a very tough yacht race, but the competitive instincts and good boat sense that sailors learn from their dinghy years are still highly relevant to getting across a storm-tossed Bass Strait.
Visiting Australia gave me the chance to meet some dinghy sailing legends from some of the unlikeliest places. Victor Kovalenko and Ilya Wolf are two former Eastern Bloc sailors that grew up in very different times and surroundings to the ones they have now. Victor Kovalenko is someone I have always wanted to meet. He is the ‘Medal Maker' who has been responsible for more Olympic success than pretty much any other coach I can think of. The former Ukrainian coach extracted a gold-medal winning performance from Yevhen Bratslavets and Ihor Matvienko in Savannah 1996. Then, having been invited to move to Australia as 470 coach, he produced gold-medal winning performances in both the Men's and Women's 470 on home territory in Sydney 2000. These have been no flash-in-the-pan results either. Time and again, Victor's protégés have come up with championship after championship result throughout the past few Olympic cycles.
Victor is, by the account of many of those who have trained under his guidance, a very hard task master. You may recall a story I wrote in Rolltacks last May, when Chips Howarth related to me the secret of the 470 Men's success in Sydney. Tom King had been a competent but not especially accomplished 470 helmsman, but Victor coaxed an increasingly impressive performance out of him and crew Mark Turnbull which culminated in a 470 World Championship win followed soon after by the Olympic Championship on Sydney Harbour. As with winning any Olympic medal the Aussie team had to master every aspect of their performance, including a high technical understanding of the boat and rig. But Tom King attributed the big leap in performance to the magic 40 days that Victor just made them go out and practise the most mundane aspects of 470 sailing - the tacks, the gybes, the mark roundings, simply sailing in a straight line. No faffing around with rig settings or sail choices was permitted during that time.
When King and Turnbull returned to the Olympic circuit in 2000 they were virtually unbeatable, winning all three races on one particular day of the World Championship. I don't think even the sailors themselves fully understand the reasons for their transformation into world class athletes but I suspect the process of concentrating fully on the most basic aspects of sailing rather than the high-end nitty-gritty of the 470 made them much better at sailing on ‘automatic pilot'. Like many elite fighting forces, the US Rangers train and train until it hurts, then train some more. They operate on the basis that under times of stress, the mind and body will always revert to the most familiar and ingrained habit. If that ingrained habit is to panic and run away when under enemy fire, you won't be much use to the US Rangers. So the idea is to train the desired response repetitively until it becomes second nature. Psychologists who have worked with the US Rangers believe that you need to repeat an action 2,500 times until it becomes the dominant action - ie the one that you will revert to without thinking, even under extreme stress.
Presumably this is what many athletes from different sports do - martial artists, track and field athletes, swimmers, to name a few. The thing about these sports is that they are repetitive, quite one-dimensional pursuits, where there is little alternative but to knuckle down and ‘Just Do It'. The trouble with sailing - or you could say the very nice thing about sailing - is that there are many ways to succeed. It is such a complex, multifaceted sport that you can find several different approaches to success. If you get bored or disheartened, you can try another tack. If boatspeed is your thing, you can find the right class and throw time and money at developing a fast boat that gives you such a speed edge so as to make you virtually invincible - even if you start badly or go the wrong way up the first beat. Or you can get really good at the weather and local knowledge and outsmart your way past the opposition with some good seat-of-the-pants sailing skills. Or you can practise, practise, practise.
The latter option isn't always the most appealing. Much more fun to go out and race all the time. But the Victor Kovalenko approach seems to require a much harder practice regime than many sailors would naturally subject themselves to. And while it might seem dull and repetitive work at the time, who cares if the next time go out you end up winning the World Championship? Train hard, fight easy.
The strange thing is that in the recent Olympics, Australia was fielding a very strong sailing team - and yet it came back with nothing. You get the sense that the sailing community is still reeling from this disaster, still trying to work out exactly what went wrong. Some sailors have regrouped and are already underway with their new 2008 programmes. For example Darren Bundock, a dead cert for a medal in the Tornado if ever there was one, has found a new crew following long-term partner John Forbes' retirement from Olympic campaigning.
There have been some switches around in 470 personnel and the Sail Melbourne regatta is their first opportunity to test new partnerships. Victor is as perplexed as most people about Australia's failure to deliver in Athens, but it has probably made him all the more determined to get it right for China. At least 2004 saw him invited into the 470 class Hall of Fame, although the irony of doing so in a year where he came back with nothing from the Games had not escaped him. To meet him for dinner in his apartment overlooking Sydney Harbour, you get little sense of the hard taskmaster that must exist behind his smiley exterior. Through the still heavy Ukrainian accent you can still detect a very dry sense of humour which is probably what helps endear him to his Aussie disciples.
The reason I got to meet him was through Ilya Wolf, the boyfriend of one of my media colleagues working on the Rolex Sydney Hobart. Ilya and Victor were contemporaries in the Flying Dutchman class during the early 1970s, although while Victor has moved on to become a pre-eminent coach Ilya has faded into relative obscurity. The former East German won the Flying Dutchman World Championships in 1974 at Weymouth, in the era when Rodney Pattisson was still one of the dominant forces. Ilya should have been a clear candidate for a medal two years later at the Olympics in Montreal but by that time had fallen out of favour with ‘The Party'. Another less accomplished FD crew - who did sign up to The Party - were then given the green light for Montreal while Ilya was left on the bench at home.
So in his early 20s he hung up his boots and that was the end of his Olympic career, cut short by a refusal to sign up to the politics that went hand in hand with sport in East Germany. What a waste, except that Ilya seems to spend little time on regret. I think he is proud to have taken that moral stand, and these days the now 50-something Ilya Wolf is fully integrated into western society, Ipod, downloadable music and all. To hear his story makes you thankful for what we have in the UK. You don't even have to be a paid-up member of the RYA and yet you can still earn hundreds or even thousands of pounds in grants from the RYA. Yes, there are still politics involved with top-level Olympic or Youth sailing, and that will always be the way, but it doesn't come close to the sacrifices made by Ilya and many others in the old Eastern Bloc countries. I remember the Toniste brothers in the 470, who were infinitely more proud of the bronze medal they won for Estonia in 1992 than ever they were for the shinier silver they had earned four years earlier for the Soviet Union.
Interestingly, none other than Jochen Schuemann used to crew for Ilya in the 420 during the late 1960s, and Schuemann's record is legendary. But unlike Ilya the outcast, Jochen was one of the German Democratic Republic's favourite sons, winning Gold in the Finn in Montreal at a very young age and then winning another Gold in the Soling in Pusan 1988 just a year before the Berlin Wall was pulled down. He has since added a further gold and silver to his tally during his time racing for the unified Germany, but he still has very fond memories of the East German days. As a fully integrated member of western society, and as a wealthy America's Cup winner with Alinghi, he is expected to denounce the old system but he will not. I think with Jochen, sailing was the overriding drive in his life to such an extent that any rights and wrongs of the politics did not even occur to him.
I think the story of Ilya Wolf and Jochen Schuemann, the two boys who sailed together, but who as men followed different paths, has all the makings of a great novel. While there is much to divide these two, there is something that they both share - along with Victor Kovalenko for that matter - and that is a phenomenal work ethic. All three of these men are in their 50s but they are all in phenomenal shape for their age. There is barely an ounce of excess fat between them. At times in Hobart, Ilya was going to the gym for up to four hours a day. Jochen goes running or cycling virtually every day of his life, regardless of whether he has been hard racing that day or not. For us from the West, it's hard to imagine such commitment to a purpose. But having met these three remarkable people, it's not hard to see why East Germany in its heyday was such a medal machine. Sheer, hard work can get you a long, long way.
