Anna Willcox in Sochi for the 2014 Winter Olympics where she missed the final of the women’s slopestyle freestyle event by just 2pt. Sadly while training for the 2018 PyeongChang Games she suffered head and back injuries that forced her retirement from the sport. Anna is now one of New Zealand’s top TV presenters
ditions tended to be in our sweet spot, with the sea breeze around 12 to 16kt, and we were especially fast on the downwind legs.’ They were fast in the very light and fast in everything else too except for a narrow band of marginal trapezing between 7 and 9kt when they were noticeably slower than the other frontrunners in the fleet. But to Barnes and Willcox this small window of weakness was a price worth paying for their superiority in other conditions. So much of Barnes’ and Willcox’s
advantage came down to raw boatspeed and standout boathandling. But Willcox since went on to become recognised as one of the pre-eminent weather experts and strategists in the sport, both in the America’s Cup and on the Olympic circuit. This all started when the Cup was due to
take place in Auckland in 2000. It was Prada’s first campaign and Willcox was hired along with other local talent in Auck- land to help the Italians get to grips with the weather patterns and local influences in and around the Hauraki Gulf. In the era of the Version 5 keelboats the statistics pointed to the fact that whichever boat won the first cross would, on the vast majority of occasions, go on to win the match. Willcox was tasked with identifying which side of the course looked most likely to give first-cross advantage to the Italians. He grasped the opportunity and did a
good enough job to be hired again by the Italians and later by his childhood friend Russell Coutts when he took over the Oracle campaign from Chris Dickson after the 2007 event in Valencia. Funnily enough it was Coutts, Dickson and Willcox who had represented New Zealand at the IYRU
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Youth World Championship back in 1979. ‘It was in Livorno, Italy, and at the time the Youth Worlds was only two classes – singlehanded and doublehanded boys – no girls and no other fleets. ‘Russell was sailing the Europe and
Chris and I were sailing the 420. Neither of those boats were established classes in New Zealand so we had to learn them really quickly. The three of us came out 10 days early to get some training time in the boats. Chris and I had been sailing the 470 back home together but the 420 was new to us.’ Despite the lack of familiarity, Dickson and Willcox went on to win the Youth Worlds against the 420 specialists while Coutts finished runner-up in the Europe. ‘Russell had a shot at gold and might have won, but he was incredibly sick one day with some food poisoning so he did well to come away with the silver.’ Although Willcox was young enough to
come back another year and defend his Youth Worlds title, ‘For me it felt like I’d been there and done that, and I was keen to move into the open 470 class. ‘Dave Barnes had completed two years
in the youths crewing with Murray Jones and they had managed a bronze medal at one of the worlds and like me Dave was very keen to tackle the open programme. So it was just a good fit. It seemed to gel between us from the very start.’ As well as the good synergy between the
two, Willcox felt the timing was good in New Zealand generally. ‘I think success breeds success. And we could see, as nippers, that we had a lot of good talent coming through at the same time. So there was a lot of good talent arriving out of the
junior classes, all looking for opportunities in the big game.’ The other strong factor for Barnes and
Willcox was that both of them had enjoyed good success at both ends of the boat. ‘Dave was a really good crew and I had done a lot of helming in the junior classes so we had a good understanding of each other’s roles,’ says Willcox. ‘We’d be pretty much as fast if we had sailed the other way round in the boat. The same is true of Pete [Burling] and Blair [Tuke]. They can both do each other’s roles in the boat really well and if you had a crew’s race in the 49er fleet I think they’d beat everyone else by an even bigger margin.’ For Willcox mutual respect between
helm and crew is a non-negotiable. ‘Some- times I see two sailors in the boat park chatting, but one of them is talking down to the other. Whenever I hear that I know they’ve lost already. If you haven’t got that team mentality you’re never going to win.’ Willcox saw this problem frequently in Japan where the hierarchical nature of Japanese society tended to appear even in most 470 crews, the older more experienced helm typically giving orders to the crew. The opposite was true for Barnes and
Willcox, where there was complete respect for each other, and he sees the same with Burling and Tuke. ‘It’s very interesting coming from a doublehanded background myself to see times when you can have a huge amount of talent at one end of the boat, but if it’s not balanced at the other end of the boat with the same equal amount of talent then you are never going to get the 200 per cent that’s required.’ Aside from his great successes coaching
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