jumping off… We had 16, 17 people on the boat. The chase boat was busy picking people up everywhere.’ Mike was one of the last people off the
boat, he remembers. And instead of jumping overboard he headed aft – toward higher ground. Just as he got there another RIB arrived. ‘So I stepped off, never got wet!’ But there’s another bad memory from
that same campaign. ‘We had a mast that had some voids in it. I was right next to the vang, taking a picture of the mast bend or something. And it snapped right above deck level, barely 4ft away from me; that was really scary…’ The team finished a disappointing fifth in the challenger series.
Cool coaching challenge After Alinghi won the 2003 Cup and Valencia became the next venue, Mike says, ‘Things were really rolling in Amer- ica’s Cup world. Ten-plus challengers for 2007! I was recruited by Oracle, but I couldn’t leave the business for three years so that was a non-starter. And… again it didn’t seem like such a good fit.’ He’d always been so lucky with his Cup
teams, he says; ‘Great sailors, but really high-quality individuals. People who, out- side of sailing, you’d still want to hang around with. ‘The Oracle team was a little different,
in my opinion; a lot of really good talent, but individuals who were not really com- patible. And a year into it they still had a lot of turnover… and some issues.’ They recruited Mike again, but it still
‘didn’t seem like the right fit, so I declined. And then the South African Shosholoza team asked me to help coach, and that was a pretty cool challenge. I flew down to Cape Town, and they bought one of the old Italian boats. They would go out and train every day; it would blow 30 in Table Bay and they’d be out there regardless. ‘Later I spent a lot of time with them in
Valencia, and it was really rewarding for me. They didn’t have any experience at all, so they would never say “we can’t do that; this is the way we did it before”.
46 SEAHORSE
‘There was a clean sheet of paper, and
really energetic people who were good sailors. I forget exactly what the final results were, but they beat a lot of boats they weren’t supposed to beat. And a lot of those guys are still good friends.’
Too many hulls, and trickledown And then, he says, the multihulls came in – and ‘everything changed. That was kind of a forced retirement… the end of my America’s Cup. ‘Seven campaigns, two wins,’ he adds,
both face and voice dropping into neutral, as if to convey: not bad, but I could have done better. I’m too engrossed in his story to point out that he actually won three Cups – if you count his very first, as an 11-year-old dock boy. ‘The America’s Cup has been really good
for the sport of sailing,’ Mike insists. ‘All that R&D budget that all those teams spent on developing just the smallest amount of performance gain eventually trickled down to what we all sail, whether we’re cruising or racing. Look at the 2007 Cup… 3Di came out of that. Carbon winches came out of that. And composite rigging; that was all perfected then, and everyone uses it now. Wasn’t even that long ago!’ But that progress stopped in 2007, he
says. Since then ‘it’s all been about foiling. A lot of composite structure development, which is good. But I’m not sure it’s trick- ling down to the majority of sailors like it did in the past. That’s a pretty big change. ‘And the cost to compete… Today the
dollar cost of entry is high, but there are also the intellectual property costs; you need a big squad of foiling designers – and that just doesn’t exist, except within those groups. So you have to hire them away or start from scratch. All of a sudden trying to challenge for the next America’s Cup becomes really… challenging. But it’s still fun to follow! ‘I hope American Magic wins,’ he says.
‘I hope they’ll bring it back to Newport. The average American citizen, they have no idea what the America’s Cup is. Not
any more at least. Maybe having one here… we’ll see.’ His smile returns, happy to speculate all
day long about the next Cup, but instead I finally remember to ask about his personal life. (By now the outside air temperature has dropped significantly, and Mike is still in shorts… so we’ve relocated to the comfortable chairs in his office.)
Family fun, and parent-coaching When his parents died Mike was able to buy the Newport house where he’d grown up. ‘Nothing happens in Florida in the summer; it’s too hot. And Newport’s the centre of the sailing universe so it was the perfect opportunity. I was busy in Florida in the winter, and busy up here in summer.’ Mike and Libby’s three daughters all
learned to sail at Lauderdale Yacht Club, in Optimists. ‘The junior programme started really early, at nine. But as soon as you learned how to sail the only next option was the race programme. And they weren’t interested.’ So that summer in Newport Libby
rented an O’pen BIC for the girls to sail off the beach. ‘It’s the coolest little boat, just a toy. You can jump off it, capsize it, flip it right back up and keep sailing. They’d go sail around, have a ball; they loved it. ‘Then we go back to Florida, all their
sailing friends are now racing – and they still didn’t want to. So I bought a BIC. And all of a sudden their racing friends wanted to sail the Open BIC more than they wanted to sail Optis and 420s! That kept them in sailing,’ he says. ‘Keeping them in the game; I’m a big fan of that.’ As a result, the family went to a lot of
junior regattas together all over the world. ‘It was just like going on a ski trip; you’re together all the time. Fun family vacations, very healthy – and great memories.’ When I compare that to the usual Opti-
parenting stories Mike chuckles. ‘I kind of stayed as far away as I could! In fact, most of the coaching I did was coaching other parents to back off! Because you could see how horrible the effect was on the kids, as
ONNE VAN DER WAL
DANIEL FORSTER
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