Young Mathias Coutts gets ready for another race at the O’Pen BIC Worlds on Lake Garda where the promising 11-year-old won the under-13 title. Back home Dad has thrown himself into helping New Zealand youth sailing while he builds a new waterfront home that will also be perfect for viewing the ‘adult racing’ in 2021. As for what’s below the tubes on the Coutts RIB… where would you start?
be possible. We’ll soon know how the 36th America’s Cup will unfold. And which teams step up to do the unfolding…
THE TRUMP CARD – Carol Cronin In January 2017 two new ‘chiefs’ came to power in the US: our highly visible Commander in Chief, and the new Chief of Olympic Sailing, Malcolm Page. One pledged to ‘drain the swamp’, while the other pledged to win two medals in 2020 (see ‘Malcolm in the Middle’, issue 446). And after their first six months in office both men have found that any significant change will take longer than they initially thought. ‘I came in all gung-ho and ready to fire from both cylinders,’ Page
says with a chuckle. ‘I thought it would be quick and easy to change. But when you start talking about cultural shift, and then marrying it with the financial backing that we’d like to have to make that shift – it is going to take a long time.’ Unlike that other guy, though, Page has actually made significant
progress toward his lofty goals – because he is quietly implementing a carefully focused plan. ‘I would say at times I still feel overwhelmed,’ he admits. ‘At other times I panic. [Laughs.] And other times I feel confident. And I guess that is the main underlying thing: I feel confident of the direction that we’re going.’ What direction is that? The stated goal is to build a programme
that provides US Olympic hopefuls with everything they need to win medals in 2020 and beyond. It sounds deceptively simple – and identical to the stated goal of every other Olympic programme, even outside sailing. Copying an already successful national programme (like Page’s native Australia) would seem like the logical approach, but the US system has some unique and unavoidable challenges. Without the centralised support of government funding US athletes
have traditionally been rewarded for independence. And uneven access to funding (born into the right family, or knowing the right private sponsor) has historically restricted the talent pool to those with the luxury of choosing full-time training over more gainful employment.
Cultural evolution will take time but, just six months in, Page
claims athletes have already noticed operational improvements. The terms have certainly evolved – and not just to accommodate Aussie slang. Historically, the cash that trickles down to athletes was called ‘direct athlete support’. Page uses that same phrase to cover all support from US Sailing. ‘I would say the cash to the athlete hasn’t changed in any way. It’s the services that we provide.’ Asked for an example, he responds quickly. ‘Paying for the
coaches. That would be the single biggest chunk of cost in any campaign, probably somewhere in the 50 per cent range. And that’s something I’m now promising to every one of our athletes: “That will not be your issue this quad. We will provide that to you.”’ (Possible side bonus: athletes who learn to view ‘support’ in a broader context might be less likely to grouse about the limited cash they do receive.) Coaches hired by US Sailing also help build a unified approach.
‘One of the conditions is of course they have to work in the team environment,’ Page explains. ‘We’re not allowing as many individual coaches. Therefore we’re getting more cost-effective use of the money, and stronger team structure.’ And the quality of the coaching is higher than most sailors could hire on their own. David ‘Sid’ Howlett is working with the Nacra 17 teams. Nathan Wilmot (Page’s skipper for his first gold medal) has taken on the 470 men’s teams. (That’s ‘teams’ plural, which wasn’t always the case for previous quads.) There are at least two other linguistic updates. ‘A coach – to me,
they’re a platform manager,’ says Page. ‘That platform is that class, and they’re the manager of it. They’ve got to be big enough and bold enough to say “I can’t be the expert in everything”. They have to tap into those resources and find them.’ And finding additional expertise in tuning or tactics makes coaching ‘part of the technology piece’, he continues. ‘Technology to me means expertise, not a computer.’
Athlete attitudes Taking on a management role can gradually blind even a double gold medallist like Page to the day-to-day reality of an athlete’s life, so it seemed necessary to reach out to a few sailors for a fact-check
SEAHORSE 11
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JACOPO SALVI
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