BOB FISHER/PPL
Update
Rodney Pattisson and his 1972 gold medal crew Chris Davies rig their Flying Dutchman Superdoso (the Spanish variant) during the Kiel Olympic regatta. This boat was the outcome of a long process of hull development that gained mythical status in the class and involved Pattisson secretly spending long periods in Spain adding and removing filler on two test FDs in search of a faster shape. At the last minute it all went out of the window and legendary FD builder Bob Hoare threw another boat together after tweaking the old mould from Pattisson’s 1968 gold medal-winner. The 1972 Olympic champion boat started building three weeks before the UK trials
enters into new arrangements with ILCA and the remaining parties to the agreement. Any reapproval would be under the same terms as will apply to all other builders.’ However, after years of expensive legal action to protect its trademark and brand name this might be a bitter pill for LPE to swallow. Although it’s hard to see how ILCA did anything illegal by simply enforcing the terms of their agreement, further legal action would not surprise anyone. Through all this the Laser class has continued to prosper. The
class still holds the largest regattas in the world, still attracts the best sailors in all age categories and is still regarded by many as the only choice for the Olympic one-person dinghy events.
TELLING IT LIKE IT IS Superdocious! Three-time Olympic medallist Rodney Pattisson’s long-awaited autobiography has finally emerged from the lawyers (relatively) intact. A man not afraid to ruffle feathers… we would – and this rarely happens – thoroughly recommend a fascinating read. This revealing tome is packed with truisms about the best and
the darker sides of the highest levels of sailing, along with instructive material covering everything from the ‘interesting’ results of Pattisson’s own early psychometric testing to the blatant cheating that cost a maverick genius of our sport a third gold medal. The book should also be compulsory reading for every youth
sailor who aspires to greater things, encompassing the reality of how hard it is, the rocks along the road and how to survive them, as well as touching praise and informed insight into the success of other great sailors including Paul Elvstrøm and Sir Ben Ainslie, who has also written the forward. Worth every centime. – Ed
PATTISSON ON CHEATING There are some who are born with that instinct to win at all costs. Prisons are filled with those who learned to get one over on their schoolmates, become adept at hiding illegal moves on the playing fields, and then graduate to grown-up life without any moral compass
18 SEAHORSE
or scruples. Others start cheating in small ways, and because they get away with it convince themselves that they are either above the rules of the game or never consider that they might be caught. And then there are those who allow themselves to be manipulated by coaches and others into believing that there is nothing wrong in cheating because they are told ‘everyone else is doing it’. Cheating within sport has been rife ever since the Ancient Greeks
first came up with the Olympic ideal. The favoured performance enhancers at the early Games were sheep testicles, eaten to increase an athlete’s testosterone. Organisers attempted to halt more nefarious methods by forcing combatants to perform in the nude. It didn’t stop cheating then, and officials have been playing catch-up on increasingly sophisticated methods to gain an unfair advantage ever since Cheating happens at the top of every sport: athletics, boxing,
cricket, cycling, fencing, football, and certainly sailing – you name a game and there are examples of rule bending, cases of likely drug abuse and certainly tales of general advantage taking. For the sport of sailing, which relies more than any other on honesty, cheating is particularly difficult to police. Once over the horizon it is simply conscience that stops us from turning the engine on, taking on water ballast or missing out a mark. My first exposure to cheating at international level came during
the 1960 Cadet junior championship at Burnham-on-Crouch where crews from one nation were orchestrated by an overzealous team manager to ‘blanket’ leading rivals and give their top crew a clear shot at the title. A lack of wind at the 1968 Flying Dutchman pre-Olympic cham-
pionship in Montreal, which Iain Macdonald-Smith and I won prior to going to the Olympic Games in Acapulco, brought the worst out within too many crews. Some of our rivals became very adept at making exaggerated roll-tacks, pumping sails, ooching their boats forward and having the crew lie on the leeward side deck and paddle the boat with their arm between the hull and droopy foot of the genoa. After two days of this, American skipper Buddy Melges, the Wizard of Zenda, got so fed up with the blatant cheating that he and his
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