in 1995 during practice in San Diego against the team’s raceboat Mighty Mary – skippered by New Zealand 470 Olympic silver medallist Leslie Egnot; Dawn Riley (at left) with Tracy Edward’s (centre) all-women crew of Maiden in Southampton shortly before the start of the 1989/90 Whitbread Round the World Race. Sailing their ageing 1979 aluminium Farr design Disque d’Or, which had been sailed in the 1981 race by Swiss skipper Pierre Fehlmann, Edward’s crew shook the boys’ tree pretty hard, finishing 2nd in Class D, also winning their class on two of the race’s six legs, including the longest, 7,260nm stage across the Southern Ocean
1 January 2010 I drove to Oyster Bay expecting to stay for a brief period. Eleven years later…’
… and watch it grow Oakcliff offers apprenticeships, short training blocks in specialised sailing disci- plines, customised coaching, clinics and seasonal racing. Recently they’ve added Helix, a step-by-step pathway to Olympic excellence. Dawn says the Oakcliff board didn’t ever ‘envision doing anything with the Olympics, because we thought that US Sailing had that covered’. Instead they tried to assist sailors at arm’s length with direct grants and coaching programmes. Last autumn, full of pandemic what-
the-hell attitude, she went ahead and implemented Helix under the Oakcliff umbrella. The graphic maps out a non- linear course from a first sail on Olympic equipment all the way to international competition. The goal is to establish a clear path to success while providing support – not just financial, though that’s a piece of it – at every level. ‘Obviously there’s still a lot more work to do,’ Dawn says, ‘and we can just keep adding to how we get there.’ (Tagline: ‘Sailing Success is Never a Straight Line.’)
Life isn’t a straight line either Expanding Oakcliff’s reach while keeping it focused hasn’t all been easy, of course. In December 2019 a car ran into Dawn’s house and ‘almost killed me’. She has lin- gering memory issues, and says she was still in a ‘brain fog’ in February 2020 – but even so she recognised the threat of Covid weeks earlier than most Americans. ‘I started to see friends in the Canary
Islands and in Spain and Italy post about Covid. I realised immediately that this could be serious and started to formulate plans. ‘There was a day when everybody started
talking about testing, and Trump boldface lied. He said, “We’ve shipped this many tests, and we’re going to have that many by Friday.” It was Wednesday. And I’m like, if he’s lying that much about shipping tests,
what else is he lying about?’ Oakcliff went into lockdown on 5
March, over a week ahead of anyone else in the US: ‘I assumed the rest of the country would as well. That was my mistake.’ Oakcliff went virtual immediately, she continues. ‘We started figuring out how to do our programming and just used our collective brains.’ No one left campus, except Dawn and one other employee, who also lived alone. Dawn became the official grocery shopper; decked out in full foul- weather gear, reading glasses and a face covering, she said shopping for 11 hungry people once every two weeks earned her plenty of strange looks – especially early on. But, thanks to this aggressive lockdown, they created a Covid-free bubble where they could keep learning and moving ahead, even as other (larger) resident programmes sent students home in a panic. And when summer arrived they soon
figured out how to hold their usual racing series. ‘We had two 40ft Protectors that you could put a whole match racing team onboard in a team bubble up in the bow. So we used those for our launch service. You were dropped off on a sanitised boat to race. We didn’t do any rotations.’ After racing teams washed down their boats they then had a chance to socialise safely. ‘We have a donated boat we nicknamed
Hot Dog Stand, with a barbecue on the back. We would deliver trays of hot dogs and ginger beer, and everybody would party on their boats on the moorings. You could still trash talk each other and socialise, but you’re in your own bubble. So lots of fun.’ They made it work because ‘instead of
saying, “we can’t do this, we can’t do that”, we said, “How are we going to do this?” ‘That’s the whole thing with Covid and planning and crisis management,’ she con- cludes; first, ‘you have to think long range. Then when you get the facts… the decision and the immediate planning are easy.’ Turns out Dawn’s unique combination of big picture vision and attention to detail is great in a health crisis as well as deep in the Southern Ocean.
Left to right: after starting small, today Oakcliff Sailing offers a thought-provoking spread of educational courses covering every area of the sport and related marine industry disciplines – from business and boatyard management right through to elite-level match racing and most recently an Olympic pathway programme; Dawn Riley at the helm of the 1992 Cup defender America3
Filling the gaps Once their regular programmes were oper- ating smoothly Oakcliff looked at filling the pandemic’s educational gap. ‘All these kids kept thinking they were going back to in-person learning,’ she said, shaking her head, adding that every year there were children who just didn’t want to leave after the summer or planned to take a gap year. ‘And we said, “Everybody is going to end up virtual, why don’t we just open up the doors for people to do their studying here, and we’ll design a programme?”’ They connected with the US Performance Academy, a virtual high school designed for elite athletes, and five kids signed up for the autumn of 2020 ‘beta group’. For spring 2021 they had eight students… Sailing, of course, is wind and weather- dependent, but ‘we can study at any time of day. So, OK, this morning is good [for sailing]. Your school is going to be from 3pm to 7pm. Then the next day there’s no wind, so you have a long day. And then the next day, when there’s great wind, there’s no school – all sailing. Plus we have a learning coach permanently on site, like an all-purpose teacher.’ Also new this year is their first off-
campus Olympic training, an important piece of the Helix. ‘We’re moving down to Dolphin Island, Alabama for a month, with eight students and three staff.’ (The cost of living there is much cheaper than Miami.) Students will combine studying with training, joined by other Olympic hopefuls. ‘This is like a test balloon.’ Longer term Dawn envisions a year-
round training village for Olympic hope- fuls. As we sign off from our call I have no doubt it will happen. A few days later I follow up by email to
ask what’s still on her bucket list. Dawn’s quick reply inspires a coffee-spit of laughter: ‘Get back to 11 per cent body fat, bench- press my body weight and lick a stranger.’ Watch out, strangers – because whether that’s part of a longterm vision or just a dirty-hands detail Dawn Riley will make that dream happen too.
q SEAHORSE 57
ALAMY
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