Way to go
Ever since Ingo Buell’s routing system helped Jochen Schümann plot his route to Olympic victory in his Soling at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, Buell Software has been developing tactical technology to help sailors win
As its name implies, SailTokyo is a system aimed at those looking to win gold at the next Olympics in Enoshima less than two years from now. Among its clients Buell Software can count the Olympic sailing teams of Belgium, Germany, Switzerland (and some larger sailing nations who prefer to keep their anonymity) along with the host nation of Japan, whose sailors surely know the venue better than anyone. Yet SailTokyo’s application is much broader than Olympic sailing or the next Olympic venue. For any race venue in the world, SailTokyo creates the means for sailors, coaches and support staff to build a clearer picture of what the current and the wind are doing, and how the two forces are interacting with each other. The tool can be applied as much to the realms of big boat racing, and even the America’s Cup, as to the high-performance dinghy scene of the Olympic classes. And its scope is not just Tokyo but any racing venue in the world. Sales manager Yvette von der Burchard explains: ‘We designed SailTokyo as a cloud-based team solution to prepare your sailing team for the Olympic Games – Tokyo 2020, Marseille 2024 – and all the World Sailing events and Olympic class world championships. But we have been delighted to see the software so well adopted and appreciated by other high-level
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sailors and race campaigns.’ In the Etchells 22 fleet, for example, SailTokyo has established itself as a must-have for the top performers such as Olympic silver medallist and multiple champion Steve Benjamin from the USA: ‘We started working with SailTokyo at the Etchells Worlds in Cowes 2016. The app was crucially important there and since then has continued to get better and better, and easier to use. The app helped us win the Etchells Worlds in San Francisco last year and the beta model in Brisbane worked great, too.’ Indeed, Martin Hill’s winning team at the 2018 Brisbane Worlds also relied on SailTokyo to help plot their way around the racecourse.
Andrew ‘Dog’ Palfrey is one of the most sought-after coaches at the top end of the sport and has been using SailTokyo since the Dragon World Championships in La Rochelle three years ago. For him and his clients, running the routing software helps provide clarity and certainty when planning a strategy for an upcoming race. ‘I guess everyone's brain works in a different way, but for me the routing aspect of the software is very useful,’ he says. ‘We can all look at arrows overlaid on a chart, but can we really pinpoint which side's favoured all the time? I can’t honestly say I could do that. Sometimes it's obvious, you know, it's shallow water over there, but a lot of the time the
It’s not just for Olympic dinghy racers and it works in any location – the TP52 team Quantum Racing (above) is among the many grand prix sailing campaigns that use Buell Software’s SailTokyo routing
software to predict the interplay
between wind and current on various tracks for the next day’s racing and gain a competitive advantage on the water
potential gains or losses across the course are quite subtle, yet they’re still important.
‘When I’m running the software, I’m not too bothered about the result itself, but the result will certainly help quantify how important the current is on that day. When it’s start time and the pressure is on and you need to make clear decisions, just having that quantitative result logged in your mind is a real benefit.’ Grant Spanhake is another coach who numbers the TP52 Alegre amongst his high-profile clients. ‘Last season in the TP52 fleet I got together with a few coaches for other campaigns – people like Tony Rey, Cameron Dunn, Timmy Haynes, John Cutler – and we ended up using the app on our phones and our iPads out on the water. We were all committed to make two, three or four current measurements in different areas across the racecourse and then all the collated data would appear on each of our iPads. It’s a great collaborative tool, because it meant that three or four boats could cover the whole racecourse very quickly. It gave us the ability to generate an accurate current field around the racecourse that we could all share. It gives the tacticians a lot more information to make their calls on which way to go, which is particularly useful in a complex venue like Cascais, which can feature some
QUANTUMTP – JAMES LYNE
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