Opposite: Hamish Willcox and wife Ulrika Silfverberg during a hard-earned two-year sojourn in the Pacific on their Laurie Davidson-designed 45-footer Adamite. Left: celebrating (yet) another major win for his 49er team of Pete Burling and Blair Tuke; the New Zealand pair astonishingly went unbeaten in a major regatta between London 2012 where they took silver and Rio 2016 where they won gold (that would have been quite the upset…). Since then they both competed in the Volvo and won the America’s Cup. Currently the world’s most complete sailors… hard to argue? Below: Dave Barnes and Hamish Willcox – barefoot obviously – training before winning a third 470 World Championship in Takapuna in 1984. Subsequently the editor campaigned offshore with Willcox and readily acknowledges his good friend as ‘one of the two most brilliant breeze and windshift spotters that I have ever been fortunate enough to go sailing with’. The other… Sir Charles Benedict Ainslie
sails around the Proctor Epsilon mast. ‘Steve Benjamin was the man to beat
when we arrived on the scene,’ says Willcox. ‘He had a very complicated boat, some- thing where you could adjust everything from the cockpit – very similar to how the boats look now. ‘You varied the mast rake with five pin
basics, things like boathandling, which you can do much more effectively at home by yourself or at a training camp. ‘It’s a total waste of money to do these
big regattas if you’re just going to be sail- ing round at the back of the bronze fleet. Even if you’ve got the money it’s the wrong way to go about putting a success- ful campaign together.’ The inability for some sailors to place
the correct priorities on their time, effort and money came home to Willcox when he was asked to coach the Japanese 470 squad in the mid-1980s. By this time, with three world titles to his name, Willcox’s expertise was much in demand. ‘I remem- ber a time when one of the Japanese sailors asked me to explain the tiny details of a roll tack or something like that,’ he says. ‘He had so many of the basics to master
and he was asking me about some really high-level detail of one single manoeuvre. That’s when I realised that I needed to lay out a road map, a manual for how to put together an effective campaign.’ So Willcox set about writing a book
called Road to Gold which strangely was only ever published in Japanese. It proved so popular that a second edition was com- missioned and even today is considered essential reading for anyone sailing 470s. ‘It is a pathway that lays out the order of things that you need to tick off,’ he
explains. ‘For example, there’s no point in working on your race strategy or tactics until you’ve sorted out your boatspeed, and there’s no point in working on boat- speed unless you’ve already reached a good level of boathandling.’ Willcox admits that he and Barnes
weren’t fully together in all aspects of the Road to Gold when they were campaign- ing the 470. Gear breakage at the Cascais Worlds in 1982 prevented them from defending their title. The New Zealanders had to settle for third that year, finishing behind East Germans Jörn Borowski and Egbert Swennson and the runners-up from France, Daniel Peponnet and Pascal Champaloux. Ever since learning that lesson the hard way Willcox has placed a high emphasis on meticulous boat prepa- ration, which is why this features in one of the early chapters of Road to Gold. Although the fit-out of the first Marten
hull was less than precision-perfect, Barnes and Willcox were great technical innova- tors in the 470 class. In the Olympic cycle leading up to the Moscow 1980 Games Americans Dave Ullman and Tom Linskey had won three of the four world titles. Ullman sails were the benchmark product of the time. With Ullman and Linskey retir- ing from 470 competition, sailmaker Steve Benjamin was one of the leading influencers in the 470, further developing the Ullman
settings and a bunch of other adjustments that was overwhelming for us and too com- plicated. We didn’t have money to put together a boat like Benjamin’s. So we bought our boat from Steve Marten, and the only fitting it came with was the stem fitting which was fibre-glassed into the bow. We spent a month in my parents’ garage work- ing out how to fit out this boat as cheaply as possible, identifying what was important or unimportant.’ Their new 470 didn’t look much more complicated than a 420. Rather than Benjamin’s multi-pin
approach, Barnes and Willcox ran a rig with fixed shrouds on a mast with a lot of pre-bend and a mainsail cut with much more luff round than was fashionable at the time. ‘We used the Ullmans as a start- ing point but developed from there. We ended up with a much fuller jib, more of a knuckle in the luff, and I think that jib really went on to influence the kind of designs you see in use today,’ says Willcox. They also went for straighter exits on
the jib and mainsail than was typical for the time, exchanging a bit of pointing for some speed forwards. ‘We weren’t point- ing the boat as high to the wind but actu- ally once we were up to speed we were making less leeway and actually making better ground to windward.’ Their self- adjusting rig was more akin to an auto- matic transmission that looked after itself most of the time, compared with Ben- jamin’s fussier five-speed manual. From those 1981 worlds for the rest of
the Olympic cycle leading up to the Los Angeles Games in 1984 Barnes and Willcox became the dominant force in 470 competi- tion. ‘We had a very successful test event at Long Beach, winning almost every race. We were finishing minutes ahead of the pack, to the point where the race committee won- dered if we were in the same fleet. The con-
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