Add in low-tech, supplied boats that don’t require much tuning or technical tweaking, and college sailing can easily be viewed as four years of distraction from winning a medal. (Caleb Paine, the lone medal winner in Rio, chose a Finn campaign over more school.) Page hopes to align the strengths of college sailing much more closely with Olympic preparation, so sailors don’t have to choose between an education and their Olympic dreams. ‘If we connect well, get all these different circles to actually overlap, we will then get the best out of it for everyone.’ Then he laughs. ‘It sounds so easy… the execution is going to be hard, of course. And it’s going to take more than one cycle to get it right.’
Malcolm Page began his Olympic sailing career ‘late in life’, after he’d already completed a degree in electrical engineering. Looking back, it’s easy to see his own search for performance excellence as a steady, inevitable climb through the 470 ranks: from 2000 Olympic hopeful to 2004 Olympian to 2008 and 2012 gold medallist.
Living through it, though, the view was quite different. Not earning selection in 2000 was ‘my first big learning experience… it made me hungrier, and maybe a little wiser as well’. Then came the 2004 Olympics. After winning the 470 Worlds that year Malcolm and skipper Nathan Wilmot ‘were obviously the favourites’. Malcolm shakes his head. ‘And then we got a solid 12th.’ They were still in medal contention going into the last race, but an OCS sent them home empty-handed – along with the rest of the Australian team. ‘It’s the Games… deer in the headlights.’ He sighs. ‘Like nothing else.’
Australia rebounded quickly to win 11 medals over the next three Games, thanks to a renewed focus initially spearheaded by the athletes. In 2012 Team Oz won the medal count – much to hometown Team GB’s chagrin – with three golds and a silver. So Malcolm has already seen what a return to performance excellence looks like. Now he’s excited to put that experience to work. Team culture Sailing with Nathan, Malcolm says communication and teamwork came quite naturally. ‘We grew up together, learning how to win together, and to keep the pressure off. Our objective was to win a medal. But we knew we could win a gold if we did our job properly.’ In Qingdao they did just that, thanks in part to the lessons learnt in Athens (and the ongoing support of coach Victor ‘Medal Maker’ Kovalenko). The morning after winning that first gold Malcolm was approached by Mat Belcher to sign on for 2012. ‘I think I was still a bit… seeing double,’ Malcolm laughs. But he also had ‘unfinished business’, even after winning the gold. So he asked Mat for three months to decide, and when he did sign on it was for a different programme right from the start – even though they would have the same medal- making coach, and eventually the same golden result. ‘When I committed to Mat,’ Malcolm explains, ‘I said, “I’m sorry, Mat, but we’re going for the gold. I know I’m done after London, that’s the last hurrah, so we’ve gotta get it right.” It was a different philosophy, because I knew what it was like.’
And Malcolm quickly discovered that sailing with his new skipper required a new approach. ‘I had to change a lot to make Mat and Malcolm work – in the end, even better than what Nathan and Malcolm did as a team,’ he says. ‘I don’t know if age had a lot to do with that? But Mat was distinctly from a different generation. ‘The way we talked was almost a different language. The first year I said yes to everything – even though I didn’t understand him. And then I said, “Hang on, that’s not good… we need to understand each other.” So the second year I started to say, “No, I don’t under- stand.” We spent a lot of time working on our communication. We had to really work on that glue between us.’
Their hard work created ‘that resilience, that team work that all great teams have…’ Malcolm grins. ‘People tell me about the Green Bay Packers, the NFL team that keep producing against all odds. ‘Sailing with Mat for my fourth quad was the most detailed campaign I’ve ever done,’ he continues. ‘Victor always said to us, “Dominate in the last year,” but I never thought it was possible like we did. The level we got to, it was incredible.’
And now he has to figure out how to use those two very different team experiences to transform the US programme into a cohesive whole – not by starting again, but by building on what’s already in
SEAHORSE 21
Round the world
in 40 days ! Thank you Francis Joyon & Idec Sport
raises the performance of IMOCA and maxi trimarans:
Jules Verne trophy, Vendée Globe, The Transat, Route du Rhum, Jacques Vabre transat
Flying sail furlers & Stayfurlers
thur hur
hu iu ia Créd tPhoto Crédit
t Phot : Pr: P ofurl - D131 o
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