It's all in your head

If you'd like to get better at your sailing but you only get out on the water maybe one or two days of the weekend, how are you going to do it? Practise it in your head on the way to work in the car or on the train, perhaps. That at least is the advice of Steve Lovegrove, who has become mental skills coach to the likes of 49er Olympic aspirants Paul Brotherton and Mark Asquith.

"Practising your starting, or your windward mark roundings, is almost as good doing it in your head as it is for real on the water," says Steve. "These are things that I work through with Paul and Mark, and admittedly they spend almost all their waking moments thinking about sailing and how to get better at it. But the exercise is equally valid - if not more so - for people who have limited access to sailing time and simply want to do more to help themselves get better."

Steve says it is all about rediscovering the imagination and learning how to make believe the way that kids are so good at doing. "If you practise leading around the windward mark of a race at your national championships, and thinking how you are going to deal with the last run to the finish, you'll be much better equipped to cope with that situation than if you suddenly find yourself there and don't know what to do when you get there."

Don't mess with my mind

From Ullman sailmaker and Tornado Olympic campaigner to mental skills coach, Steve Lovegrove has gone through quite a career change over the past year, and knows that some sailors will raise an eyebrow or two at what he is doing now. Some sailors don't like the idea of having their minds ‘messed with', but Steve says that is not what he is about. "It's not about changing people or analysing them, it's about offering them choices to realise they can choose to think differently about a certain situation."

He cites an example he witnessed while racing on board a 40-foot keelboat last year in the Solent. "The navigator made a layline call about two miles away from the mark, and as soon as the boat tacked, the mainsail trimmer started saying, ‘We're never going to make that, we're really struggling to hold this layline.' And then I saw the trimmer proceed to trim the main very badly for the next two miles, and guess what, the boat missed making the mark by about half a boatlength and they had to double-tack.

"I'm not saying the mainsail trimmer deliberately set out to sabotage the team's chances just to prove a point, but once he'd got it in his head that they were going to miss the mark it almost became a self-fulfilling prophecy. It would have been far more useful if he'd have said something like that, ‘OK, guys, if we work really hard at this and make the most of every little lift we've got a good chance of making this mark."

Mind your language

But can language really make that much of a difference to the way we perform? Steve says each of us has an ‘inner voice' that we use to talk to ourselves just about the whole time, and the tone of voice and the way we talk to ourselves - and to others - often sets the tone for our performance. If after reading the last sentence, you've just thought, ‘Well I don't have an inner voice,' then you've just proved Steve's point.

Steve believes the quality of this inner voice is what sets the great sailors - or sportsmen in any field for that matter - apart from the rest. Certainly anyone who got to know the late John Merricks was struck by his unquenchable optimism in the most dire of circumstances. I remember Ian Walker saying he always thought he was optimistic as a sailor until he started crewing for John, and by comparison he felt like an utter pessimist. It was undoubtedly that optimism and never-say-die attitude that helped them grind out a silver medal at the Olympics in Savannah in 1996.

Changing your thinking

But surely you are born with the personality you are born with, there's no changing that is there? Steve doesn't deny this, and doesn't claim to be able to change people's personalities, but he does believe that the mind is a muscle that can be worked on and made to do what you want it to by giving it a work-out, in the same way that we all understand that going to the gym can make your body fitter and stronger. "The more you practise thinking a certain way, the more that will become the natural way for you to think in the future," he says.

Start listening to yourself and see what you find out about your attitudes to certain aspects of your sailing, advises Steve. For example, if you wake up to find it's blowing 25 knots and you're thinking, ‘Oh no, it's time to go swimming,' then with an attitude like that you probably will end up swimming at the first gybe mark. Better to think back to a time when you did get around the course in a breeze and survived it. Perhaps you surprised yourself, but if you've done it once you can do it again.

Decision time

For Paul Brotherton and Mark Asquith, Steve's input is all about making sure they are thinking the right things at the right time, and that the communication is running smoothly between the two sailors. Paul says: "In the course of a week's 49er regatta with 16 or 20 races, you'll have four or five key moments every race where you have to make the right decision. So that's 80 key decisions to be made across the week. The thing is, you don't always know when you're going to need to make those decisions, but if you've got anything else distracting you then you're likely to make the wrong decision or maybe even miss that key moment altogether. And if you're going to win a regatta, you've got to be hitting 85-90 per cent of those decisions correctly.

"So Steve helps us highlight when we're doing things right, and wrong, and how we can make more of the wrong moments right." At the age of 37, it goes to show that here is one old dog who is prepared to learn new tricks. Few sailors have gone through such a transformation of character, as anyone who knew the tearaway of 15 or 20 years ago will testify. Paul has lost none of his northern sense of humour, but he has tempered it with a more mature attitude to his sailing that has carried him to third in last year's 49er World Championship in Hawaii.

With the likes of Steve Lovegrove and technical coach Jo Richards, Paul and Mark are leaving little to chance in their quest for Olympic selection. But does all the hard work and scientific analysis affect the original flair and talent that propelled Paul to early success in the youth classes?

Talent versus hard work

"I've certainly got a lot less flair than I used to have, and I'd like to get some of that flair back. It is important to do all the technical, analytical stuff too, of course, but I've probably gone too far the other way. It's a matter of knowing when to turn on the analytical and when to turn on the flair."

That said, Paul does believe that flair is often overrated. "I was always told as a youngster that I was a flair sailor, but when I was told those things I never won anything. The only time I've ever won anything is when I've knuckled down and worked bloody hard. I've had the privilege to sail with or spend time around a lot of very successful sailors - Neal McDonald, Andy Hemmings, Ellen MacArthur to name a few - and their unceasing work ethic is the one thing that has been the common denominator with all of them. It amazes me just how dedicated they are, they are never too tired to do something."

It's incredible that after nearly 20 years of Olympic campaigning, Paul hasn't yet tired of the hard graft required. But he's enjoying it more than ever, and he admits the Lottery money has something to do with that. "Funding has made the whole thing more realistic in terms of achieving your ambitions. When I was Olympic sailing in the late 80s or early 90s, anyone finishing in the top three or four was a big deal. These days you've got to win an event with a race to spare for it to be real news. It's great. It just means we're having all the fun of doing what we're doing, and that's purely down to opportunity."

Age before beauty

And while he is one of the old hands on the circuit, he sees his age as advantage, not hindrance. "I think one of my big advantages is that I'm small, so I've put less strain on my joints and my body, and also I can be more agile because I'm a pygmy. I noticed in the last couple of years that I have to work a lot harder to keep up my levels of fitness. But I wouldn't swap my experience for a bit of extra zip around the boat. Sailing is an experience sport, you can't have enough experience in this game."

One thing that experience has taught him is to get away from the idea of having a sailing style. "You should have  set of skills and not a style, otherwise you'll end up being a one-dimensional sailor." This is something that concerns him about the new crop of youth sailors who are coming through the fast asymmetric style boats such as 29ers and moving into 49ers without any time spent in the slower, more traditional classes.

"This is one of the things I worried about when doing some coaching with the RYA, that you will potentially get extremely good boathandlers in asymmetrics and you will generally see fewer good tactical sailors because there are fewer tactical options to be made. Your strategic decisions are very important but your boat-on-boat tactics are not so significant.

"When you've been slogging around in slow boats for a while, whether in Mirrors or 420s, you get to know what's an attacking position and what's a defensive position because that's your bread and butter. With the faster boats it's more about getting into the leeward mark with pace and getting out of there with pace. The boathandling side is much more dominant."

Slow boat to China

Paul says he fully understands why young sailors want to get straight into the glamorous classes without going into something that seems less exciting, but for those who aspire to reach the very top of the sport, perhaps win a medal in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, he believes it is essential to "do your time" in the slower, tactical boats.

"Going through the tactical mill gives you more than one way of solving the problem. You have more time to consider the information, there is less requirement to focus so heavily on speed, and the boats are generally going through the water more or less at the same speed. So the differences are more about positioning, whereas with a skiff it's not always that difficult to get of out an imperfect decision whereas with a 470 if you tack in the wrong place you're stuffed.

"Moving into big boats, you will find a whole generation of sailors who won't have the basic trade craft to do the job as well as people who have been through that kind of apprenticeship. For myself, I'm really glad I've had the experiences in the way I've had them, because it's very hard for some of the kids now to contemplate going into 420s and Cadets when they're faced with these zippy new boats to go and play with."