Still with the 1948 summer Olympics and David Bond, Stewart Morris’s crew in the Swallow class, throws their spare kit onto the committee boat before a race start. Morris and Bond won Britain’s only sailing gold medal that year (and not a RIB in sight)
skills. ‘The women’s team was ranked number one so it was the winning mental- ity right from the get-go. ‘I loved that – a positive drive to always
want to be better.’ As soon as she gradu- ated Tunnicliffe started training for the 2008 Radial trials, motivated by a rivalry with fellow American (and Radial World Champion) Paige Railey. Zach (and Paige) Railey’s parents
the rescue boat because I barely knew how to tack or gybe. They saw this kid going off not really knowing how to get back.’ Lucas Calabrese (2012 470 bronze,
ARG) won the 2001 Optimist Worlds before graduating into the 420 and later the 470. ‘My best memories are all the time spent with my friends,’ he says. ‘I would go to the yacht club at 9am, sail all day and then stay till it got dark. The club and the river were our playground.’
First spark Robert Scheidt competed in every Olympics from 1996 to 2016 and won five medals including two golds. He remembers exactly what first sparked his Olympic dreams 34 years ago. ‘I was 10 years old when I saw the runner Joaquim Cruz win gold for Brazil over 800m.’ 2012 Laser silver medallist Pavlos Kon-
tides (CYP) was 14 when the Olympics came to Athens. ‘I was there with my dad and we watched some of the sailing. That really ignited it all, watching all these top sailors and dreaming about the day you might be able to meet them… or even perhaps become like them.’ 2012 Radial gold medallist Lilja ‘Lily’
Xu (CHN) watched the Atlanta Olympics on TV with her parents. ‘My father sort of joked to me that “you’ll make it one day’’, she remembers. ‘I just smiled… but a little dream had started.’ The nine-year-old didn’t even know what sailing was; instead, after swimming two hours a day since the age of four, ‘we were looking into the freestyle long distance, which is my speciality’. A year later she was recruited to the Shanghai sailing team; after that ‘I no longer wanted to swim any more. It just seemed so boring and limited.’ 2008 gold medallist Anna Tunnicliffe
(USA, Radial) also credits those 1996 Games as her inspiration. ‘I don’t remem- ber the event but I was watching the medal ceremony and thinking, wow – that would be really cool, to stand on that podium and get a medal.’ Three weeks after the Atlanta closing
ceremonies 12-year-old Zach Railey (USA Finn silver, 2008) sat his parents down at
dinner and announced he wanted to go to the Olympics in sailing. It had taken him that long to figure out that the Olympic sport called ‘yachting’ was the same as the Oppi sailing he was already pretty good at. Double gold medallist Dorian van
Rijsselberge (NED, windsurfing) also first announced his Olympic intentions at 12. ‘My dad asked me to write down how I saw my future. I wrote: “I wanna be an Olympic champion in 2012.” My dad could see that I was being serious so together we made a roadmap how to achieve it. I still have that letter.’
Pathways Most childhood proclamations never develop into medal-winning performances because the next steps are too hard – or just not obvious enough. All Lily had to do was choose sailing over swimming and the Chinese system took it from there. ‘When my swimming coach approached my parents,’ she explains, ‘we’d never seen [sailing] on TV, never heard about it. ‘After trying it I said to my parents, “I
want to sail.” They gave me the right to decide [which sport] for myself.’ For the rest of her school years Lily travelled around China with a state-organised sailing team and their teacher, combining Olympic training with a basic education – though also ceding more child-rearing responsibility to the state than most Western parents would tolerate. Three-time Olympic 470 crew Igor
Marenic (CRO, gold 2016) also left home to pursue his sailing dream; at 15 he moved into skipper Šime Fantela’s family house. Fantela says, ‘It wasn’t easy… he needed to change school, find a whole new set of friends.’ But Marenic says it was the only way forward. ‘In Croatia we didn’t have many options: Laser or 470. 470 sounded like great fun. It’s two people in a boat and Šime and I were getting on really well together so why not? And we had great support from our parents which made it happen, we were lucky.’ Anna Tunnicliffe admits she wasn’t a
very good youth sailor; Old Dominion University is where she developed her
responded well to his youthful Olympic announcement. ‘They said, “We have no idea how to do it, we don’t even know how to sail. But we’ll do everything we can to help you get there… as long as you put in the hard work.’’’ Four years after winning silver in the Finn Zach walked into the 2012 Olympic opening ceremonies along- side his sister – though neither stepped onto the podium in Weymouth.
Training partners: home or away? Ben Ainslie’s exposure to the benefits of training with others started in the youth squads. ‘For me it was an eye-opener, how much the group can improve together, versus sailing around on your own.’ He carried that approach into every one of his five Olympic campaigns. ‘We always trained with the Brits,’
Ainslie states. ‘That was something I was very strong on: I wanted to train British sailors and support young guys coming through. I trained Giles Scott for 2008. And of course that almost backfired on me – he was so good by 2012. You’ve got to expect that: the better your training part- ners the better chance to get gold. If you’re going to win you have to be the best… you might as well be training against that.’ Ahead of the women’s match racing
event in 2012 Anna Tunnicliffe’s team trained with the Finns – who ultimately ended Tunnicliffe’s shot at a second medal. ‘We shared everything,’ she says. ‘The plan was we’d meet in the gold
medal round of the Olympics. Instead, we met in the quarter-finals…’ Asked if she’d do the same again, Tunnicliffe doesn’t hesitate, ‘Yes, because what’s gonna make you good? Sailing against the best in the world. We won everything else that year, fifth at the Games was our worst regatta. I don’t mean to sound cocky but we were a damn good team. What made us good was sailing against the best.’ Nathan Outteridge trained with both
fellow Australians and internationals. ‘For London we had Peter and Blair [NZL’s Burling and Tuke] training with us a lot. We often had an Irish team and one of the British teams with us too.’ That was a big help in the final year,
when Australian teammates fell away. ‘They haven’t been selected so they don’t come to events and you’re left high and
SEAHORSE 55 w
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100
