Sydney 2000 and the British Star crew of Ian Walker and Mark Covell approach the finish of the final race in third behind runners-up Reynolds and Liljedahl, ceding gold to the US sailors by a single point. After the prizegiving a gracious Walker told his supporters that if they were to miss gold he and Covell preferred to be beaten by the Americans, who Walker gave credit to for helping Britain’s newcomers to the Star class to quickly get up to medal-winning speed, after they had been thrown together following the loss of their respective Olympic partners – Jonny Merricks (in a car accident in Punta Ala) and Glyn Charles (lost during the 1998 Sydney Hobart)
Dennis Conner, an important mentor,
suggested Mark talk to the ‘Sobstad guys’, because ‘they were doing some pretty cool stuff. So I went to the 1981 Star Worlds in Marblehead with Eddie Trevelyan’ – who’d win Soling gold three years later in LA, with Robbie Haines and Rod Davis. ‘Ed in turn knew Dave Curtis, so we
stopped by Curtis’s loft and got to learn a bit about what he was doing. And then we stopped by the Sobstad loft and met Peter Conrad and Tom Whidden.’ Mark and Ed Trevelyan finished 34th at
those worlds, while Brun and Hugo Schreiner finished 12th. ‘By the time I got back it was pretty clear I had to do my own thing. So I got a loan from my grandmother to buy a Star boat, and I got a loan from Conrad and Whidden for sewing machines and fabric, and I started building sails.’ He set up shop right around the corner from San Diego Yacht Club, and ‘by January of 1982 Snipes were our main business’. From a desk drawer Mark pulls out a
sheet of yellow legal paper; when he holds it up I can see it’s covered in a handwritten scrawl. ‘I still have this list that I started, where I’d write in the customer’s name and how much I sold the sail for.’ He reads off some names I recognise from Snipe history. ‘I only sold 13 suits of Star sails the first year, and 14 suits the next year. So at the time it was really the Snipe!’ DeAnn’s success selling commercial real
estate played a big part too, he admits. ‘She did support the family throughout the 1980s, and that really helped keep the whole thing flowing. If it had been just the
42 SEAHORSE
sail loft it might have been a little tougher to do everything that I did. That’s probably the only reason we have a house today…’ In 1984 ‘everything kind of changed’ at
the loft. ‘When I went to the Bacardi Cup Bill Buchan bought a suit of sails from me. And he won the Olympics!’ By the end of that year the loft had sold 150 Star suits.
How’d you manage to do so much sailing… Through the 1980s Mark sailed Snipes with DeAnn in the summer and with heavier crews for the windier winter regattas. He was also a regular on the Star circuit. ‘For close to 10 years I’d put the Snipe on top of the van and tow the Star across the coun- try… Miami was always very good to me.’ He wasn’t the only sailor pushing hard
in both classes. ‘Torben [Grael] and a bunch of other guys crossed over as well – though I never competed against Torben in the Snipe. Hard chines and whisker poles… I never really sailed spinnaker boats much at all.’ Mark also enjoyed tweaking boats in his
garage, and he says both the Snipe and the Star were great for that. ‘Earl Elms [a San Diego Snipe legend] always kept his boats really simple. Whereas Dennis, who I worked for on the Star, would keep every- thing really complicated – so you could adjust everything. I learned from both
I’m not superstitious myself but I do enjoy hearing of my competitors’ superstitions…
those guys and found my happy medium.’ From 1987 to 2002 Mark finished in
the top 10 at every single Star Worlds, sail- ing all but one with either Hal Haenel or Magnus Liljedahl. He won a gold Star with each of those legendary crews (1995 and 2000), and finished second three times and third twice in those 15 years. (He also finished third in 2013, with Haenel.) ‘I grew up in a place with the best Star
and Snipe sailors in the world,’ he explains, with a tiny shrug. ‘So you can’t help but learn and get good. Dennis used to say that it was difficult for a guy like Buddy to come out of a lake and be able to perform every- where else. Whereas San Diego is a perfect place for developing boat speed, because you can sail out in the ocean.’ All those miles and hours of sail testing
off Point Loma helped Mark develop speedy sails; he says they also helped per- fect his helming technique. ‘When you really got good at helming you could spend a little more time looking around and not keep so completely focused on the telltales. So it was a pretty good thing to be able to do all that sail testing, for two reasons.’
… while running a successful business? How did he keep track of the loft while away at regattas, I ask – especially over two decades of Olympic campaigning? ‘I didn’t do a whole lot of training,’ he
claims. ‘Back then it was pretty much just doing the regatta circuit. But that was more than the generations before me… ‘I once talked to the guy who won a
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