dry on your own. When we were at the Olympics in London we could do a line-up with the Kiwis, we could do a line-up with the Irish or the British and get a good feel for how each race was going to play out.’ Leading up to his first Olympics in 1996,
Robert Scheidt trained with Brazilian Peter Tanscheit who won the Laser Worlds in 1991. ‘Having him around helped me a lot, a great example of discipline, fitness train- ing and a superb downwind technique. But I also trained alone a lot too.’
Pivotal moments Psychological theory states that to achieve peak goals any team must go through the following evolution: ‘Form, Storm, Norm, Perform’. To capture the ‘Storm’ I asked athletes to name a defining career moment; all but one knew the answer immediately. 2012 gold medallist Tom Slingsby
(AUS) almost quit sailing in 2004 after two unsuccessful years in the Laser. ‘I decided to do one last trip to Turkey for the worlds to try for better funding. Luckily I got seventh. It was my last attempt… had I not made top 10 I was giving the sport away.’ 2016 bronze medallist Caleb Paine
(USA, Finn) says the pivotal moment for him was hearing Zach Railey would sail the US Olympic Trials. ‘It pushed me to go beyond what I was doing already. If he hadn’t come back I might have just coasted through… and not won a medal.’ For another 2016 bronze medallist,
Camille Lecointre (FRA, 470), finishing fourth in 2012 ‘changed my life… only 1pt!’ Three years later she and teammate Hélène Defrance finished fourth again at the 2015 Olympic Test Event. ‘I’m very sensitive to this place,’ Lecointre explains, ‘so I really took it badly. In the end failing was a good thing for the year after.’ Malcolm Page unhesitatingly ticks off
three pivotal moments in his own 470 career: ‘Missing selection for the [2000] Sydney Games; going to the Athens Olympics as favourite and failing; and realising during my third campaign that we’d started out right but lost our way
56 SEAHORSE
halfway through the quad.’ That third set- back led to a six-week hiatus in Page’s campaign with skipper Nathan Wilmot, only 18 months before Beijing 2008. Page now claims they wouldn’t have won gold in China without working through that stress together, ‘because it was only after- ward that we really competed as a team’.
That first Games Can the Olympics be treated as ‘just another regatta?’ After sailing 160 days in Weymouth leading up to his 2012 bronze, Lucas Calabrese thought so. ‘We took the regatta as we would any other and were able to perform as we expected. We were both extremely fit by then and that helped a lot with maintaining our confidence.’ Before the first race at the 1996 Games
in Savannah Robert Scheidt admits, ‘I was very anxious! But once the gun went off I relaxed and just did the best I could. ‘Claudio Biekarck, my coach, kept me
calm and didn’t let me get too excited by the whole Olympic thing. Having Torben and Lars [Grael] on the team helped a lot too, they knew what it took to win medals and were pretty relaxed.’ On the second day of her first Games in
2008 Anna Tunnicliffe placed the leader’s gold dot on her Radial sail. ‘I was still very chill,’ she remembers; she’d eventually post only one score out of the top six. ‘I felt really confident in how we were approach- ing the sailing… and in my speed.’ Double 470 medallist Jo Aleh (NZL)
started her Olympic career in that same 2008 Radial fleet; she finished seventh. ‘The mistakes were made in the weeks and months leading up to the Games – the actual Olympics I think is pretty much decided by day one. If you have gaps in your skill set (as I did), then those just show up even stronger as the regatta goes on.’ Nathan Outteridge says the Australian
coaches did a very good job conditioning their athletes to treat a first Olympics like any other event; then he got his Olympic uniform… ‘Very bright yellow and green, and the clothes don’t really fit properly.
Star guys putting on a rowing suit… just weird stuff. That was the moment I realised, no, this isn’t like any other event.’ Fellow Oz sailors Malcolm Page and
Nathan Wilmot planned to treat Athens 2004 as just another regatta too. ‘But – it wasn’t,’ Page explains. ‘Suddenly we were staying with the road cycling team, and we had this special uniform… and my parents and family turned up. There was security to get into the venue and right away I lost my pass. Failed in that area…’ With an OCS on the final day the Australian favourites would also fail to win a medal. Seventeen-year-old Sir Ben definitely
had first-race jitters in 1996. ‘I just got overawed by the occasion. I was com- pletely over-excited, my muscles cramping up, and I was overheating. The first race was a disaster, I think I had a 25th or 26th. I started panicking… what would every- one say at home?’ With only an hour between races he
rehydrated and managed to sort himself out. ‘I had a good second race, top five or something. And after that I had one of those events where everything just sort of clicked, a bit of luck here or there just came my way.’ His silver medal would make him hungry for a rematch with gold medal winner Robert Scheidt. Camille Lecointre says it’s ‘impossible
to think it’s a race like any other. Things happen in the Olympics. The pressure you deal with is so high.’ All these athletes found their own way to do exactly that, though many wouldn’t successfully man- age the stress until a second (or third) try.
Subsequent Games Tom Slingsby finished 22nd at his first Olympics, six months after winning the 2008 Laser World Championship. Four years later he opened the 2012 Games with a 2-1-2. He remembers telling him- self, ‘This was not 2008 (where I failed). If I do what I know I can do no one in the world can beat me. ‘There would be highs and lows during the event, and it’s how you deal with those
PPL/SAILING ENERGY/INGRID ABERY
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