In between in 2000 he was in New
Zealand challenging for the Cup once again, now onboard Young America with Ed Baird and moving aft as main trimmer. At the same time Fuzz’s family was
expanding with the birth of a second daughter, Claire, and while this put pres- sure on long offshore commitments like the Volvo Race it did not stop him in the Cup, where in New Zealand in 2003 he raced again, this time with Peter Gilmour’s Seattle-based OneWorld Challenge.
Pivot towards full-time coaching With the long oceanic miles now behind him, Fuzz explored other avenues to use the performance analysis skills gained through 20 years of grand prix sailing. In 2002 he found it: Olympic sailing. The host team for the 2004 Games in Greece hired him as performance analyst for their women’s 470 team of Sofia Bekatorou and Emilia Tsoulfa, and for two years he worked closely with the pair, not just to improve but to excel: they won gold by such an outstanding margin that they could sit out the last race of the series. This success led to offers to help other
squads, including Team GBR in the 2008 cycle, with sail analysis and coaching, and in the highly successful London 2012 cycle, where he helped develop the coaches as well as the athletes. But ironically it was only in the next Olympic cycle heading to Rio 2016 that Fuzz was finally noticed in his adopted home in the US with an opportunity to help Team USA as technical director. Alongside Olympic coaching Fuzz has
also applied these skills to other competi- tive one-design programmes including Farr 40s, Melges 32s, J/70s and many others.
Change agent Junior and youth sailing is enormous in the US, initially with thousands of kids sailing in the Oppi, Laser and Club 420 as the primary classes, with the organisation and coaching managed through club or regional programmes. However, the next performance level, 29er, i420, Nacra and FX sailing, is a minute fraction of the total scene with numbers barely into the dozens. It’s no secret the US Olympic team needs
help. It’s become a well-worn and boring cliché to bemoan the fact that the pro- gramme is not generating the results seen in the Games of yesteryear. One reason is the change of equipment away from keelboats and traditional dinghies where US sailors are more comfortably competitive and part of the organic national sailing culture. But another – probably much more
significant – reason is the USA’s unfocused approach to serious training and selection of future Olympians when there are so many other forms of sailing available to young talent, such as more relaxed club junior programmes and the intentionally non-technical main and jib-only high school and collegiate sailing which has proved a poor feeder for Olympic success. While he has had a hand in mapping out
62 SEAHORSE
‘She’s buggered, mate…’ Spanhake reports back after diving down to check the damage to the rudder on Lion New Zealand after the boat hit a whale in the 1985 Whitbread Race. And (right) now for a quieter life in front of the whiteboard at a recent coaching clinic…
some new US Sailing youth pathways, Fuzz avoids political debates in committee rooms and on conference calls by simply developing the best tools he can to help potential future Olympians. And the materials he has been evolving are more than just chalkboard talks or analysis of videos taken on the water – he has incor- porated powerful digital sail analysis tools to teach nuances of rig and sail set-up that many of the larger international teams now regard as standard but which up until now the US sailors have lacked. ‘When I started in the youth training
programmes,’ he says, ‘I was shocked how many kids who are great performers on the racecourse had little or no idea what the most basic trimming tools did for sail shape and why they were effective. ‘They had all been trained to follow
recipes – like pull on the cunningham and outhaul when it’s windy – but without understanding what effect this has on sail shape and its influence on modes of powering up and de-powering.’ (Truth be told, not all adult sailors know this either, but that’s another matter…)
Leading to After his years and years of sail design and analysis Fuzz has developed one of the most effective tools to date called The Sail Cloud, which he is steadily making more widely available. As its name suggests, this is a cloud-based solution to sail perfor- mance analysis that replaces the older image-based methods with more powerful analysis tools to evaluate as either a trimmer or coach (or both). Photos gathered from onboard are
automatically processed to display head- sail and mainsail chord lines, draft posi- tions and twist, while from astern or alongside a coach boat imported photos highlight features such as the leech, mitre and luff curve profiles of the main and spinnaker downwind. Factors including rake and lateral and fore/aft mast bend can
also be shown, as well as many general performance features like heel angle. ‘One thing I’ve learnt over all these
years is the importance of religiously keep- ing track of your set-up to then reproduce what has proved to be fast,’ said Fuzz. ‘Being able to reliably quantify sail shapes and rig settings in great detail is the first step to this, and with the digital tools we have now this is not nearly as hard as it used to be, nor as expensive as having an in-house sail designer for every project.’ Working with McKenzie Wilson of
the Sailing Yacht Research Foundation (SYRF), Fuzz has developed the Sail Cloud to do all the data collection in a more easily accessible app format that can analyse and yield results faster and more conveniently than spending hours at a lap- top after a long day on the water. This can make team debriefs faster, easier and more productive, whether it’s an Olympic squad or with the afterguard on a superyacht. The first in an evolving series of the Sail
Cloud apps is SailScan, a tool that uploads photos from a phone, sizes them to a dimensional reference in the image, applies graphic overlays to show draft positions, depth and twist of the sails and bend characteristics of the spar, and then stores the images in a cloud account that can be accessed at any time from anywhere. Fuzz is constantly improving the app, which has already received positive reviews from some of the best-known programme managers and coaches. ‘Though I say it myself, the Sail Cloud
has been a great addition to my toolbox as both professional sailor and coach. It’s super-valuable being able to quantify sail shapes, sail trim and mast set-up quickly, accurately and easily whether onboard a yacht or in the coach boat. It’s helpful for repeatability of fast settings of a boat I’m sailing on, and comparative analysis of other fast boats when I’m coaching them. ‘And it helps me appear smarter than I q
am! Who wouldn’t want that…’
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