If one or the other wins around the world


they will become the first sailor ever to have completed The Triple. Winning in one arena brings context to the other areas of the sport; sailing is a sport with no single peak of excel- lence, but it offers many mountains to climb. That’s what makes the sport so appealing, but it also makes it difficult to explain and sell to the rest of the world. If one of these two Kiwis wins the Volvo, it will be both unprecedented and great for sailing.


The remarkable Šime Fantela Winning an Olympic gold medal is hard enough for anybody, let alone coming from a small nation. But occasionally someone breaks through to defy the odds. At London 2012 no one was going to catch the hot favourite in the Laser, Tom Slingsby, who wrapped up gold for Australia with a race to spare. Best of the rest, however, was Pavlos Kontides who won silver, Cyprus’s first Olympic medal of any colour in any sport- ing discipline. Kontides also won this year’s world championship – his London success was no flash in the pan. Then last year at Rio Laser sailor Tonci


Stipanovic looked set to win a first ever sail- ing gold for Croatia until it all went wrong in an aggressive pre-start against his closest threat, Australia’s Tom Burton. Stipanovic was judged to have fouled the Australian during the heated tussle and was forced to take a penalty while Burton sailed away to claim gold. Still, Stipanovic took a very respectable silver which was, in a way, a vic- tory for Kontides too, even if the Cypriot could only manage seventh on this occasion. Stipanovic and Kontides are part of a small training group of small nations, working together and sharing knowledge in the belief that this is the only way to beat the big pow- erhouses like Australia and Great Britain. But Croatia didn’t have to wait long for


that elusive gold medal to arrive… the day after Stipanovic’s silver along came Šime Fantela and Igor Marenic who wrapped up 470 Men’s gold. It had been a dominant per- formance by a pairing that really shouldn’t be capable of such world-beating perfor- mances; not just because they’re from a small sailing nation, but because Fantela and Marenic sail the ‘wrong way round’ in the boat. Why? One of many questions we put to Fantela at the Sailing World Cup event in Gamagori, Japan, where the Olympic champion was competing in the 49er crewed by his younger brother Mihovil. Seahorse:What have been the advantages and disadvantages of coming through a small nation programme? Šime Fantela: The advantage is that, as you say, we have had to create our own system. Our federation is not as strong as the British or Australian ones, with the advantage that we don’t have to follow the strict rules of the federation to join the camps, to join regattas. Together with our coach and with the team that we assembled, we discuss between us in a small environment where we go and who we train with. That freedom means that we choose our own sparring partners and we


Relief, it’s always the relief that stands out immediately after a crew wins an Olympic gold medal. Even an odds-on favourite like Giles Scott in the Finn in Rio, when he was told by his coach he’d done enough you saw right away in the first shot (front cover – issue 440) the massive release of tension long before celebration kicked in. This is Šime Fantela and Igor Marenic’s magic moment (left) followed by the very much more relaxed traditional victory swim


decide where to go ourselves. The drawbacks are that we don’t have the


resources and the budget of the big nations, which means we can’t have all the equipment that we want, and we can’t have a new boat in every different part of the world. There’s a bit of a lack of equipment, let’s say. SH:Also there’s a lot of support stuff that comes with the big programmes, are you aware of some of the things they have that you don’t? SF: I was always performance oriented, so I was never sad because we didn’t have a physiotherapist, or a nutritionist, psycholo- gist or things like that. It was much more about why I can’t have a designer with me to make the best sails for Igor and myself. SH: If you had more money, what would you have spent it on? SF: It depends which part of my career. The last campaign was easier; it was our third and we knew what we needed to do to achieve the goal – winning an Olympic medal. So in the beginning, let’s say, when we were campaigning for Beijing or London, I would change a few things trying to find small ways to improve my speed – rather than travelling to different places around the world to train in different conditions! SH: So do you think, for example, you could have done more valuable work with tight two-boat tuning sessions closer to home rather than travelling overseas? SF: Yes, exactly. Having a really strong sail- ing partner you can trust, where everything is open books. We had this for Rio, with a French team – Sofian Bouvet and Jérémie Mion – and we really did have open books and mutual trust and it was amazing. SH:How do you run that? Do you think there was anything you or they ever held back knowing that you were going to race each other in the Olympics? SF: We knew from the beginning this was the set-up; we knew that we will fight for a medal with each other, but we knew we will improve our sailing with each other prior to the Games. And this was the deal, because


both can win a medal. But we knew that if we work together we could put a bigger dis- tance between us and the rest of the fleet. This is what we were able to do and we were happy with it. We spoke many times and I said, ‘I will be happy if you win gold and we win silver,’ and it was the same for them. They are really good guys and the coaches were really nice and we have the same sail designer, so it was a really good set-up. SH: So it worked out for one of you with the gold, but the French didn’t do so well... SF:Yeah, they had a really bad two-race day just before the end; they had a 15 and 20 and they lost the chance to be on the podium. They finished sixth or seventh, though – it was a good result. But I know we both aimed for the medal and they were a bit sad and we were sad for them too. SH:One of the things I think a lot of people would have struggled with mentally is that physiologically you and Igor sail the wrong way round. You’re tall enough to be a 470 crew, but you were a 470 helm. SF: It all happened back when we were young, racing Optimists together and already very good friends. Once we finished sailing Oppies Igor and I decided to do an Olympic campaign and it was one of two choices in Croatia. It was Laser or 470. Obviously the 470 is much more fun than the Laser. At the time Igor was 172cm, as much as he is now, and I was 150cm. I was a late developer. And I was really short, so my father believed that my height would stay the same. But in the next three years I grew up to 183cm and Igor stayed exactly the same – and we won two junior worlds and Europeans and we got good results in the seniors as well. So it was kind of stupid to change and actually there was never a thought to change. We said to ourselves that weight is most


important not height, and we believed that we had the right things to win, to be at the top in the senior class. We developed our technique and we were fairly fast in normal conditions, but in strong breeze we never had problems. We were always in the top five. Obviously we were struggling most with


the Australians because Mat Belcher is small and Will Ryan is really tall, and the same with the British, Luke Patience sailing with Stu Bithell, because they are really big guys. So they were a bit faster before the London Games, but apart from those two we were the same speed as the rest of the fleet. The secret of our speed was my hiking. I was hiking almost like a Laser sailor, and that extra push made up for having ‘little’ Igor as the crew. SH:Anyway you managed to make it work for you, but you don’t often see people defy the physical type forms. SF: Yeah, it’s really tough. We don’t have the base of sailors in Croatia where the fed- eration comes and says, ‘Guys, you should switch, this is your new helm, this is your new crew, or change class.’ We didn’t have the budget for me to go to the 49er straight away, we had the budget only for the 470, and we tried to make the most of it. And we worked hard and it worked.


q SEAHORSE 51


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