Opposite: Pete Burling and Blair Tuke are in anybody’s top three for the world’s greatest active sailors. And crucially for modern America’s Cup racing their background in the 49er class, with its instantly reactive style of sailing, gave them the perfect launchpad first to win in foiling AC50 cats and now in foiling AC75s. There is no escaping the fact that with equal technology the Burling/Tuke skillset is better suited to the foiling era of the Cup than most of their rivals with keelboat backgrounds. One who learned this early was American tactician, Olympic medallist and Volvo Race winner John Kostecki, seen (above) onboard Oracle USA’s AC72 in San Francisco in 2013. The US boat has just been passed at speed by Team New Zealand after Kostecki made a disastrous but no doubt carefully considered call to tack away in pursuit of tidal advantage, leaving the Kiwis to put the bow down, floor it and disappear into the distance… tide or no tide. By the next morning the quiet American had been stood down by no-nonsense team boss Larry Ellison
What happens when people make an
error or haven’t performed optimally is they automatically think about what they should have done or spend vital seconds looking backwards. You should always be looking forwards, starting from where you are; what you did five seconds ago doesn’t matter. It matters in the sense of it’s put you where you are, but it shouldn’t limit your capacity for moving on. The brain can take on no more than
three to four items at any one time. And when things are happening quickly that can go down to one or two items. So when people are likely to be under pressure then you should expect less from them and make every decision as simple as you can. There is a beautiful scene in the Apollo
13 movie where one of the astronauts places a handwritten sign that says ‘no’ over a vital button in the cockpit – and that is because he knows when the oxygen levels go down you’re likely to make silly decisions or forget simple things. If you think about the errors people
make in decisions it is the simple things they get wrong. I would say never take any- thing for granted in going over the funda- mentals. I’ll bet in 90 per cent of America’s Cup debriefs people will be saying ‘I can’t believe you did that’ or ‘I can’t believe I did that’. It was such a simple thing and some- times we take the basics for granted. High-
pressure expertise is about anticipation rather than memory. Under high pressure demanding people to remember more than one or two things is just asking too much. They must also be able to prioritise
successfully. You should be able to say ‘in situation X these are your priorities’. Thinking too hard and thinking of too many options is a deal-breaker and costs people dearly in these situations. So the less people have to think about the better. SH: An established fact about AC sailing is it’s almost impossible for a new team to win on their first attempt unless they buy in resources from another team. So knowl- edge and experience play a big role in a team planning a second or third chal- lenges. Most teams have vast computer power and collate great data sets of design and performance, but the human brain has also been trained to expand its memory capacity. [Research shows that in training, four years of driving around on a scooter learning 25,000 streets, London Taxi drivers expand their memory considerably.] VW: Yes… but taxi drivers are not under the same kind of pressure as Cup sailors and it’s a different kind of memory. The things you want people to remember in a racing situation are the skills that I can perform, what’s required of me and the boat and what other people are likely to do. These are much more complex skills
than those of the London Taxi driver. Also, the task is not as isolated and often happens at speed, sometimes demanding a decision based on what you think is right for you and your crew, or on what you think the other team are going to do, or how the conditions change. One of the things that is almost perfect
psychologically about sailing is it presents you with every possible problem you could think of. We shouldn’t be thinking about expanding competitors’ memory or accel- erating learning, but what are the funda- mentals and do we practise them enough. Every top musician will start the day by
practising their scales. They will do the fundamentals that things are built on. Conversely, in a team it can become a bit intimidating to say ‘I have forgotten’, ‘I don’t know’, ‘I’d like to run through that routine again’. Nothing is too basic to run through again. You have to create an atmosphere where people can ask ‘the silly question’. It’s not about expanding memory, it’s about embedding fundamentals. Language is also very important in
teams. When we talk about stress and deci- sion making and pressure, I think people often mean different things. You can hear them having these PG Wodehouse-type conversations where the coach means one thing by pressure, to the athlete it means another thing, and to another athlete it
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