Brazil 1-2
James Boyd suffers for his craft, rarely more so than when he had to cope with a whole week stuck in Nassau in the Bahamas in order to get the full story of the 2018 Star Sailors League Finals
For the second consecutive year the magnificent Star Sailors League Finals in Nassau saw the Star boat’s ‘old guard’ having it handed to them by someone not from their own ranks. Hosted by Nassau Yacht Club, the
event, held annually each December, that seeks to determine the best sailor in the world – the ‘star’ of sailing – also involves a considerable amount of prizemoney. In 2018 the accolade (and much of the
money) was claimed by Brazilian former Finn Gold Cup winner Jorge Zarif and his friend and compatriot Pedro Trouche. Their names will soon be engraved on the trophy beneath that of 2017’s victors, Laser Olympic gold medallist and Moth World Champion Paul Goodison and his crew, Star veteran Frithjof Kleen. Compared to the line-up of 40 and 50-
year-old legends and Star boat A-listers, including Robert Scheidt, Freddy Lööf, Iain Percy, Paul Cayard, Mateusz Kusznierewicz, Lars Grael and Xavier Rohart, who between them have 15 Olympic medals in sailing, Zarif and Trouche are mere lambs, aged 26 and 27 respectively. Zarif’s route to this year’s Star Sailors League Finals was an odyssey. While he has
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competed in previous editions, following his Finn Gold Cup victory in 2013 (aged 21 and among the youngest ever winners), this year for the 2018 edition there had been no berth for him. Sure enough when Zarif looked down the entry list it appeared full, but wait… there was one berth that had yet to be taken, the spot reserved for the 2018 Star World Champions. They would only be determined in mid-October in Oxford, Maryland. At this point it needs to be pointed out
that while Zarif has considerable experi- ence in the Star boat, it is by no means his first boat since he is currently engaged full time in a Finn campaign for Tokyo 2020. Sure enough Zarif scraped an 11th-hour
entry into this year’s worlds and won one of the greatest prizes in sailing, ahead of past world champions Eivind Melleby, Paul Cayard, Diego Negri and George Szabo who filled the next four places. For the Star Sailors League Finals Zarif
was not even able to sail with his regular crew, Guilherme de Almeida with whom he had won the worlds. Instead onboard came another experienced Star boat crew, Pedro Trouche, who knew Zarif well – the pair having been Laser training partners in the Brazilian Laser squad more than a decade earlier, but with whom he had never sailed previously. Given Zarif’s Finn sailor size, Trouche
was forced to shed 19kg to slide in beneath the combined crew weight limit, based on a typically pragmatic formula: [(100-skipper’s weight)/1.5+100] measured in kilos. The 25 crews who were competing in
the Star Sailors League Finals for this sixth edition were chosen via the event’s usual
qualification matrix: 10 from the Star Sailors League Ranking; up to two ‘promising young sailors’; up to three intercontinental champions from develop- ing nations; with sailing legends, previous medallists, defending champions, current medallists and world champions making up the rest of an elite invited cast. For the 2018 edition there was also an
unprecedented number of young sailors. These included the male winners at August’s Sailing World Championships in Aarhus: Croatia’s 470 gold medallist Šime Fantela now in the 49er; Pavlos Kontides, Cyprus’s only ever Olympic medallist, who has since won two back-to-back Laser Worlds; Ruggero Tita, the young Italian who claimed Nacra 17 gold; Hungarian Zsombor Berecz who lifted the Finn Gold Cup; Kevin Peponnet following in his uncle Thierry’s footsteps by winning the 470 title. The two real youngsters were the Czech
Republic’s Ondrej Teplý, aged 23, the 2015 and 2018 Finn Youth World Cham- pion, plus a definite future sailing star in talented 17-year-old Italian Guido Galli- naro, the 2018 Laser Radial Youth World and European Champion. Each of the Olympic and youth champ -
ions is teamed up with an experienced Star sailor, Kontides, for example, sailing with towering German Markus Koy and Kevin Peponnet with Star boat and America’s Cup legend Mark Strube. In addition to the Olympic medallists,
other Star veterans entered included Paul Cayard, third at this year’s Star Worlds with Brazilian Arthur Lopez; Mark Mendelblatt and Brian Faith, the Star Sailors League Finals’ only two-time
GILLES MORELLE
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