A bleak training venue that will be very familiar to older British Olympic sailors: Charles Currey sails his Firefly at Calshot ahead of the 1948 Olympic Regatta in Torquay – long before the advent of the vastly improved modern dinghy clothing which made these less than welcoming winter training waters marginally less unbearable… Currey did not win a medal in Torquay that summer but he took a silver medal in the Finn four years later in Helsinki. There he was beaten only by Paul Elvstrøm, which is surely sort of OK?
What does it take…
US Olympian Carol Cronin has recently spent a considerable amount of time grilling some likely suspects
Each quadrennium Olympic programmes spend the equivalent of a small country’s GDP honing their best medal prospects, and still we don’t really know what makes an Olympic champion. Is it nature: the dream that burns brighter/starts earlier? Or is it nurture: parental guidance, federa- tion support and a well-defined pathway? Since my own disappointing finish at
the 2004 Olympics I’ve thought quite a lot about the vagaries that make it so cursedly hard to win a medal in sailing. All Olympians are driven, hardworking and focused on a specific lofty goal. All have trained for thousands of cold, wet hours, in search of an elusive speed edge (Kiel, anyone?). Only a few step on the podium. Maybe, by taking advantage of sailors’
accessibility (leaping between all the vague connections), I could interview a bunch of recent medal winners. Maybe linking their stories together would help us see a pattern and figure out what enabled them to rise above an already elite group. Maybe.
54 SEAHORSE
Scope and commonalities After considering a wider approach, I only reached out to medallists from the three most recent Games. (Otherwise, I might have crawled back into bed and pulled the sheets over my head, overwhelmed by the project’s immensity.) Nineteen medallists from around the world answered questions about early sailing, support and Olympic experiences. Other than two notable aber- rations, Sir Ben Ainslie and Robert Scheidt (who each won the first of five medals way back in 1996), all the respondents won medals between 2008 and 2016. The specifics vary widely, but there are
at least two common threads. The first and most obvious is a total dedication to the ultimate goal (always either ‘a medal’ or ‘gold’; nobody writes down ‘I wanna win a bronze’ or ‘I hope to finish 10th’). That requires setting aside much of everyday life: friendships, favourite foods, financial security. It also means developing and then fine-tuning a personal risk/reward metre to make the endless decisions that will maximise the chances of being the best. The second universal theme is the benefit
of previous Olympic experience – though, surprisingly, just over half our interviewees won medals at their first Games. In 2008 Nathan Outteridge (AUS)
capsized in his first Olympic 49er medal race, dropping him from the gold medal
position to fifth overall. Four years later he won gold in Weymouth without having to sail the medal race. For Rio 2016 ‘Things didn’t go our way early on’, Outteridge remembers. ‘After two days we were sit- ting in around eighth or ninth. Very differ- ent from the previous two Olympics where after two days of sailing we were leading.’ If Rio had been their first Games he and
teammate Iain Jensen probably wouldn’t have clawed back onto the podium. ‘What got us to silver in Rio is not sailing bril- liantly and having things go your way; it’s about doing really well when it wasn’t going your way. The experience is what digs you out of big holes in the end.’
Childhood Most recent Olympians learned to sail early, within an organised (often Optimist) programme, but their first sailing memo- ries don’t focus on competition. ‘Freedom and independence…’ smiles double gold medallist Malcolm Page (AUS), as he remembers growing up right on Sydney Harbour. ‘I had control of the boat, I was deciding where it was going. Although Mum was very strict; on a school night we weren’t even allowed to go windsurfing!’ Ben Ainslie also grew up near the water.
‘I started off in the Oppi, sailing around with my fender on the bow. Every time I came down to the club they had to launch
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