News Around the World
before the day’s racing. Wild Oats X featured a Popeye theme – a tribute to the nickname of the great Bob Oatley, and other yachts displayed superheroes suspended up the rig, Star Wars characters and human-sized seagulls. But it was the sight of the usually sartorially peerless Blackmore moving and shaking with his crew that caused a few jaws to drop in the judging area. Thursday then saw a continuation of what has been the windiest
race week for many years, testing the smaller boats and giving photo graphers excellent opportunities to record what it is about this event that makes it so special. This year regatta director Thompson increased the courses available here to 42, giving every competitor a different challenge and fresh scenery every day. The Extreme 40s had a blast around the islands in some chal-
lenging sea states, which also made it a wet ride for the 11 trailable yachts in their division. This class reflects the raw attraction of race week – highlighted by Derek Shepard and brother Martin who have
this year from Wild Oats X, plus they secured the Leon O’Donohoe Trophy for boat of the week. Marcus was presented with a tidy new watch by the head of Rolex Australia and so it is fitting that the final comment on the week goes to him. ‘Coming down the last run of the final race we turned the corner to be confronted by a wall of at least 100 spinnakers in front of us and I thought, how on earth are we going to navigate our way through... We did – and I have to say those are the people that make race week so special, they take the time to come up to the Whitsundays and I salute and thank them.’ Blue Robinson
USA Triumph and disaster When Project Pipeline was first announced in 2014 by US Sailing and the AmericaOne Foundation many sailors rolled their eyes at yet another attempt to build a feeder system for the US Sailing Team. Since then, thanks to a good budget and the persistent leader ship of Leandro Spina, a dependable bridge between youth sailing and Olympic dreams had indeed been built. Athletes have been given a chance to try Olympic equipment, get evaluated by good coaches and, when they want it, receive help developing a personalised Olympic pathway to fit in with other life goals. Five years later, in early September Spina described the
programme as ‘exactly on track. Maybe a little bit ahead in some areas and a little bit behind in others.’ The first phase of identifying talent and setting up a system to work with existing organisations (yacht club programmes, regional Opti ‘travel’ teams, college sailing and so on) had concluded last year. ‘We’re very confident starting phase two,’ Spina says, adding that a big focus is the retention of athletes from one quad to the next. ‘All this talent coming from phase one,’ he said, ‘they now need to find a life balance between academics and their Olympic dreams…’ Retention is crucial, Spina repeated. ‘Once the [2020] Games
are over, if ODP has a system in place with domestic training, it will be a lot easier for the Olympians from Tokyo to come back into sailing Olympic-class boats right away because they’re not going to be alone. There’s this wave of talent coming behind in full flow.’ Then came the bombshell. While athlete retention was a priority,
management retention seems not to have been handled quite so diligently. In what cannot be described any other way, just weeks after Spina gave his upbeat report the US performance programme suddenly and unexpectedly unravelled. First came the resignation of COO Greg Fisher, shortly followed by the even more ominous departure of programme chief Malcolm Page. Honestly, where things go now no one knows. Everyone involved
The early fruits of New York YC’s decision to invest in a fleet of new Melges IC37s were obvious at this year’s NYYC Invitational which delivered a much higher standard of racing than in the past – the use of a proper racing yacht prompting some of the (especially European) teams to take the event far more seriously
downsized from their Bénéteau 45 Black Sheep, retaining the name for a much smaller Elliott 780… ‘We just chose the biggest boat we could tow that didn’t need permits,’ said Derek, ‘but which gives us a little freeboard to handle a bit of weather. It was a great move!’ By Friday the two top performers – Hooligan and Team Hollywood
– had secured the top divisional prize. Humpback whales decided to join the party, with a mother and calf breaching well away from the fleet, who were revelling in the 18-22kt southeast trade winds. This was Ray Roberts’ fourth race week win in a row, confirming
the highlights for him are the really good breeze and excellent course setting by Thompson and his team, ‘The sailing was not only boat- on-boat challenging, but geographically challenging and just all of it thoroughly enjoyable.’ At the prizegiving the crew of Hooligangot their prize for their bright green skin suits. Hooligan also won IRC Division 1 for the fifth time,
28 SEAHORSE
is knocked sideways. The recruitment of Page two years ago, double Olympic gold medallist in the 470s, was much heralded, with talk even of a magic bullet. So his sudden loss now can only be seen as a vote of no-confidence in the resources he was given in a brutal challenge to reverse the collapse of US Olympic sailing… and even, whisper it, deliver a medal or two in 2020. Pity the young athlete. Carol Cronin
All in We’re stunned there remains a perception (including in these pages) that offshore racing is ‘dead’ in the US. Fake news, my friends! Every year thousands of both amateur and pro sailors take off
in hundreds of boats racing for a few days to points in Florida or the Caribbean in the south or Mackinac Island in the north, a few more days to Mexico or Bermuda or Halifax, or even longer to Alaska, Hawaii or (gasp) even England, and next year even longer to Tahiti. US-based teams participate regularly in offshore races in the Med, the Baltic, across the Atlantic both ways, and in Australia. And like this year’s race around Fastnet Rock, sometimes they even win. Yet somehow this news is delivered as a surprise. After all, even
in a political arena it was 50 years ago this month that the Cruising Club of America and the Royal Ocean Racing Club combined forces to form the Offshore Rating Council (ORC) to formulate a new Inter- national Offshore Rule (IOR) for the handicapping of ocean racing
DANIEL FORSTER
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