restrict physical actions like pumping and now to consider banning individual coach boats
from major regattas would be
another major mistake. If there are not enough support boats, so that some sailors are disadvantaged, then results become more random and if that happens vital financial support from countries and sponsors will ebb away. SH: But what about junior sailing… VK: The future of our sport is junior sailing and without youngsters coming onboard sailing will die. Great Britain is the world’s leading Olympic sailing nation, not because their coaches are telling everyone where to go, but because British sailing has gained a high profile with well-delivered junior programmes that translate into results and more interest in dinghy sailing at the youth levels. They are team number one because you have seen how their national centres are working, how many courses and feeder programmes there are, how many children are involved. They have fun in sailing every day. You have seen in Weymouth how they are working and there are hundreds and thousands of people involved in the sport.
So too in France, where sailing is a mainstream sport. In the south of France parents are coming for holidays and they bring their kids to sailing school to learn to sail. All day they are in sailing school and with good coaching they become enthusi- astic about the sport. So many of them then move onto a more formal pathway
38 SEAHORSE
where there are very big and serious devel- opment programmes.
One of the problems of our sport is we
are spending money in the wrong areas. We worry about changing classes and format, but we are not spending enough money on building the profile of the sport itself. Our sport is amazing – much more interesting than cycling or rowing – but they are investing a lot of money to build their sport’s profile. We now have a lot of judges around our sport but not enough storytellers.
Think about the goalkeeper in football. You can see his hands, his eyes, his reac- tions. Instead, we show a panorama from the helicopter, or now a drone, trying to explain with on-screen graphics what is happening on the course. But we do not give nearly enough attention to the athletes. We explain where they are going but that is not enough. We need to explain who they are.
We need to build the profile of the sport through the profile of our champions, like Ben Ainslie, Robert Scheidt, Peter Burling, Tom Slingsby, Marit Bouwmeester and Xu Lijia. Who the top sailors are, how fantastic they are, their key abilities to win the races, their characters, actions and emotions, why they are winning. This is what is important in sport.
Deliver that and the youth of tomorrow will come naturally and enjoy the sport that we all love.
Victor Kovalenko was talking to Rob Kothe
JONATHAN MCKEE
– double Olympic medallist, offshore champion, sailing coach and much sought-after professional tactician My own perspective on coaching comes primarily from my many years as a high- level competitor in a variety of classes, including racing FDs and 49ers in the Olympics, and more recently racing a range of smaller keelboats. While I have been thinking about this for a long time, my recent experience as a coach in the Nacra 17 class, including coaching at the Rio Olympics, convinced me that coaching and coach boats have become too big a part of modern Olympic class regattas. Let me start by saying that I think coaching can be a very valuable part of sailing. I personally have benefited tremen- dously from coach input and structure, starting with my time sailing Flying Dutch- men in 1982-4, when Robert Hopkins was coaching the US FD team. I experienced the value of a trained eye and an off-the- boat perspective, as it allowed my partner Carl Buchan and me to rapidly improve in a technical class, to the point where we won the gold medal in Los Angeles in 1984 despite having sailed full time for only a few months before.
I recognise those were different times but my point is that high-quality coaching allowed a new team to be successful, and I think this is a positive thing for sailing. Apart from technical development, Robert was also able to bring a group of American FDs
together, and promoted a team
CHRISTOPHE GUIGUENO/DPPI
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