Above: Keith Musto and Tony Morgan return from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics with the silver medals they won in the still relatively new Flying Dutchman class. While Keith is perfect FD helm-size, by later standards Morgan is tiny to crew such a powerful dinghy with its enormous overlapping genoa. At the following Olympics in Acapulco a typical FD crew will stand perhaps 6ft 4in and weigh 95-100kg. Four years on in Kiel and to that you can add 20kg of sodden weight jacket. Practising (opposite) before Musto Sails were a thing…
Peter West, in his equally famous fawn mackintosh, interviewing Musto and Mor- gan in that moment when the disappoint- ment of not achieving the very thing you’d expended every last bit of your emotional, physical and financial energy on for nearly four years overrides the more considered thought, that an Olympic medal of any denomination is a wonderful achievement. Keith Musto was, and remains, a quietly
spoken person. The fires within aren’t for the wider world to see. Speaking to Peter West he was remarkably sanguine about not winning gold. An Olympic medal is like painting a large wall. ‘You’ve got to appreciate that the medal is a little spot in one part of your life. You mustn’t let it affect the rest of your life.’ This matter-of-factness sells short
Musto and Morgan’s against-the-odds path to Enoshima. Nothing about their Olympics was easy or straightforward. Both were Essex men from the north shore of the Thames estuary, Keith from Benfleet and Tony from Rochford, and neither came from families with money, let alone sailing running through their veins. Musto’s father was a civil servant when
World War II started. Having been seconded to the Admiralty, which was
largely relocated out of London, to Bath, the Musto family moved there too, but were bombed out on their second day dur- ing the German air raids on Bristol docks. Keith’s mother, who he was soon to lose
when he was only nine, was keen for him to learn to swim. ‘It was really odd looking back on it,’ he remembers. ‘The public baths had a pouffe that you sat on in the water, wearing a body belt attached to a derrick. You learned the strokes that way.’ Sailing didn’t happen until he was 15,
back in Benfleet after the war and now a member of the Sea Scouts. ‘The Scout Master told us there’d been complaints about boats being hit on the moorings,’ he remembers. ‘If you know Benfleet you’ll know the tide is in for five minutes and then it’s gone. So you didn’t have long. ‘We were told if we were caught gybing
we’d be thrown out of the Sea Scouts! At the time I didn’t know the difference between a tack and a gybe…’ But Keith Musto was hooked, enough
to buy an old, heavy, 10ft dinghy for £5 (sold for £10) which had war-time window blackout cloth for sails. With interest in sailing becoming serious, his father bought a pretty but leaky 12ft 6in dinghy from nearby Leigh-on-Sea.
A break came when Keith joined
Benfleet YC, but he soon got disenchanted with handicap racing. ‘It seemed to me that the big bullies who shouted the most got the best handicaps.’ It was an older dinghy sailor, Ken
Pearce, who was working with the Prout brothers (Roland and Francis) building a development of the Shearwater II cata - maran – the Endeavour – who took Keith under his wing and persuaded Musto’s father to buy an old-fashioned National 12 from Bill Citron, a stockbroker then sail- ing at Staines SC but still with links back to his time as a Benfleet YC member. Gill, who Keith was to marry, lived
three doors away in Benfleet and started to crew for Keith in the National 12, first in winter sailing at Benfleet YC and then Thames Estuary SC at Westcliff or Thorpe Bay SC for the summer. ‘Banana taught us a lot. We had to work very hard to compete against the newer 12s,’ remem- bers Keith. ‘But we did all right.’ Ken Pearce moved Keith into a much
better boat, a Proctor Mk IV built by Jack Chippendale which Cliff Norbury (later Proctor Masts, two-time Olympic com- petitor and holder of ‘statesman’ roles at the Royal Yachting Association and
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