The Olympics have finished and the post-mortems have begun as to why the sailors didn't do better in Athens. Fortunately, I'm not talking about Team GBR, who remain the envy of the world and return from a second consecutive Games with five medals. It was just a shame that the regatta seemed to finish on a low note for the team after such a blazing start in the first week. But by the time they were flying home I'm sure Stephen (Sparky) Park and his team of coaches and support staff were feeling extremely proud.
To put the team's performance into perspective, other sailing powerhouses such as Germany, New Zealand and Australia came home with nothing. Australia is the most surprising of all, having won two Golds, a Silver and a Bronze on home waters four years ago. The reigning 470 Women Olympic Champions made no impression on the fleet in Athens, while the 470 Men were pegged as pre-regatta favourites and yet didn't even make the top 10. Michael Blackburn has shown all the form and consistency in the Laser to suggest he could match or even improve upon the Bronze that he won on Sydney Harbour. Darren Bundock and John Forbes have been the most consistent team in the Tornado for the past four years, and there were also serious medal hopes in the 49er and Europe.
Australia had never been particularly strong in Olympic competition until they hired the ‘Medal Maker', leading coach Victor Kovalenko. Kovalenko's hard training regime is legendary in Olympic circles, and it was under his tutelage that Australia's 470 team won double Gold in Sydney. After Sydney he was promoted to National Coach. So what went wrong in Athens? "This time the sailing gods were not with us," he said. Which sounds like a cop-out but is probably a fair assessment, as the strange conditions brought many sailors to the fore that hadn't really shown medal-winning form in the lead-up to Athens. The light and fluky winds probably account for why 20 different nations won medals at these Games, more than any previous Olympiad.
I caught up with Sparky a few days before he flew out to mastermind Team GBR's assault on the Saronic Gulf. He was looking remarkably relaxed for someone about to take on the most important fortnight of his life. He gave some insight into the preparation that has gone on behind the scenes. Aside from the 18 sailors that they took out to Athens, there were 22 support staff. These included class coaches, admin and media staff, meteorologist, doctor, physiotherapist, physiologist, masseuse, bosun, cook, rules expert and performance analyst.
Most of these job titles I understood, but performance analyst was a new one for me. Steve Evans was doing this role for the sailors, despite the fact that he has a background in badminton and is only a casual sailor. Apparently it's all about looking at breaking down a sailing race down into its component parts and seeing which moves pay and which moves don't. For example, does it pay more often to tack off at the leeward mark or to keep on going? Apparently this type of analysis has long been used in sports like hockey and football but is very new to the sailing world.
Physiologist Pete Cunningham has been working in this role for the RYA for many years now, but Pete's particular focus for these Games was to monitor the hydration levels of the sailors. With an average temperature of 33 degrees Celsius during the day, but often rising to 40, and humidity up to 80 per cent, Pete was prescribing an intake of 8 to12 litres a day. To keep the sailors going through the build-up period and the Games itself, the RYA shipped 20,000 bottles of sports drink to Greece, and this consignment took up around three-quarters of a 40 foot container. This was just one of nine containers that were sent out, the others being packed with equipment such as the sailing boats, coach boats, a workshop, and an air-conditioned container for the athletes to relax and escape from the oppressive heat.
The RYA have always been good at scoping out venues early and they managed to secure a house for the sailors to live in, rather than submitting themselves to the journey across town to and from the Olympic Village. Sparky said this helped the sailors feel like they could treat the Games as "any other regatta", within reason. Living in the village, along with 5000 athletes and a 24-hour giant restaurant serving food from every corner of the globe, and with an hour and a half by bus to the regatta centre, would have made day-to-day living considerably more complicated.
They also spent considerable time and resource on researching the weather, with the RYA gathering their own data on the Saronic Gulf since the beginning of 2001. There was plenty of weather data available on the area, but the RYA still prefers to run its own checks. "It allows you to increase your confidence and help build a picture of what might be involved," explains Sparky. "Recording our own wind information allows us to have reliable, calibrated data. It allows us to calibrate the data that anyone else can get off the Olympic website. When it says that the wind is blowing 12 knots at 170 degrees, is it actually blowing that from the Olympic buoy? It helps to know the accuracy of what you're being given." Fiona Campbell, who ran the weather for GBR Challenge in Auckland, was the team's meteorologist.
The last three Games have been a weather forecaster's nightmare, with the sailing held in the most unstable of conditions. There is every sign that Qingdao in China could offer more of the same. Sparky comments: "The 2008 event will be even more difficult because the wind conditions are even more extreme - either no wind or too much. You can have 60 knots and tidal waves, or 2-8 knots. You've got every imaginable extreme at this venue: hottest, wettest, most humid, most sun, most rainfall. But this is what makes time at a venue so important. You may start to see a pattern from what appears to be chaos."
The Optimist fleet noted a distinct pattern to the wind when they went to Qingdao in 2001 for their World Championship. It wasn't a particularly encouraging pattern, in that there was no wind at all. Even Sparky's assessment of 2-8 knots looks optimistic (if you'll pardon the pun) when you read event reports from those Worlds. This extract gives you a flavour of the dark mood that descended on the fleet. "Three days into the Optimist Worlds at the 2008 Olympic venue in Qingdao only one race has been held. While there is some wind in the dinghy park there is almost none, and certainly none fixed enough in direction, on the race-course 800 metres away. The Optimists are lucky enough to have Olympic Race Officer Michel Barbier present but even he cannot invent wind! The general opinion among the coaches is that any available wind is killed by the high-rise new city."
And a few days later at the class AGM: "Today's Annual General Meeting of IODA produced an understandable bias in favour of guaranteed wind in choice of future venues." Organisers of the Olympic Games 2008, please take note, and stick the sailing somewhere a bit more useful. Right now, all we can hope for is that the next Olympic Regatta is afflicted with the usual championship malaise of "It's not normally like this!", and that it blows an uncharacteristic Force 4 to 5 for a fortnight.
Iain Percy has already made his views known on Qingdao, suggesting that sailing without wind would be like skiing on grass. But after the severe disappointment of Athens for Percy, you can bet he'll be back for vengeance in China, with or without wind. Of course, the Olympic game will have moved on even more during the next four years, four vital years for other teams to unpick the secret formula of herbs and spices that have made the RYA so successful these past two Olympiads. It's not all about the money though, despite what some people have said. Sparky admits it is a vital part of the mix, and he makes no bones about the fact that the team is well funded by the Lottery and team sponsors, but he says they are by no means the best funded.
The Brits probably lie around fourth or fifth in the funding rankings, with some of the major continental European nations ploughing in far more cash into their Olympic sailing programmes. "It's very flattering to hear what some great sailors have to say about us," says Sparky. "Paul Cayard described us as the team to which all others aspire, and Chris Nicholson said it's not the money, it's the use of resources that makes our sailors successful." Certainly, there is a wide acceptance on the Olympic circuit that the RYA are the canniest spenders of their money. "I'm Scottish, tight and proud of it. When the sailors say they need more money, they know I'm going to be tight and I'm going to ask why." But where Sparky believes the RYA differs from other national bodies is in their willingness to spend on the sailors themselves. "We do have a culture of trying to pass as much money directly to the sailors as possible. We don't want to forget that that's what's important."
Sparky illustrates the point by example. "We wanted to buy some spinning bikes, because sailors need to keep up their fat burning regime throughout the regatta. Purchased new, they cost between £800-£1000 each. But Pete Cunningham found them on ebay [the auction website www.ebay.co.uk]. He found six of them brand new and boxed for £40 a piece. That was £240 for six machines, about the same price as one 470 jib."
It's unlikely that Sparky will have allowed himself much time for celebration. His colleagues were amazed to see him in the RYA offices two days after the Athens closing ceremony. This is partly due to the fact that Sparky is on his way back out to Athens to join Mark Barron for the Paralympic Games. "One of the things we've tried hard to do is to integrate the Paralympians with the Olympic sailing, so it will be strange going to a different event for our Sonar and 2.4m sailors." After the Paralympics, even Sparky might be forced to take a break before the build-up to China, as his wife is due to give birth to their first baby at the end of the year. Sparky has probably already painted the baby's bedroom in the red, white and blue of Team GBR.
