Why team GBR is the hot prospect

We speak to RYA Olympic Manager Stephen Park

With eight serious medal prospects from the UK about to embark upon the Athens Olympics and an unprecidented haul of five gongs in Sydney, team GBR's sailing squad is the present envy of the world. While Britain has a wealth of Olympic sailing talent few, including the sailors themselves, would dispute that their prospects would be nowhere near as peachy if it weren't for the support infrastructure provided by the UK's governing body, the Royal Yachting Association.

So how has this come about? Ben Ainslie thinks that it is partly funding, but primarily good management by the RYA, the legacy of the work started by Rod Carr, handed on to John Derbyshire and now to Sparky (aka Stephen Park). "They kept that learning process going, like you do in sailing: it’s a learning process so you don’t make the same mistakes twice and they’ve worked on what has gone wrong in the past and they have a pretty good system now and for sure we will be the best prepared team in Athens. It’s just good management," says Ainslie.

In Athens recently thedailysail spoke to chief architect of the GBR sailing squad offensive on this year's Games, RYA Olympic Manager Stephen Park, about the Games and why the British sailing team shines so brightly.

TheDailySail: So is it true that the team GBR sailing squad is the most highly funded of all the sailing teams going to Athens?

Stephen Park: I’m sure we are in the top six or seven, but we’re not the top. I think Italy, Spain and France are pretty much up there. France have a huge number of staff. But how do you measure the funding? Is it the amount of money that comes into Olympic programs? Is it the amount that comes from government in the programs? Is it the amount that comes from government and yacht clubs ie non-commercial sponsorship? For example the US has traditionally been strong on club donations because they have such huge yacht clubs. But last year when I was speaking to their team manager their budget was less than ours but only by about £50,000. In the larger scale of things it wasn’t that big a deal.

TDS: What is the budget for the team GBR?

SP: It varies year on year. Between £1.2 and £1.5 generally. That is for everything - sailing, RIBs, etc.

TDS: Who are the most highly funded teams then?

SP: I don’t know. How do you judge? How many people they have in their program, the number of support staff, coaches, etc? To be fair we don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what they have got. A lot of people spend a lot of time speculating how much we have got. We've seen wildly varying claims from £10,000 to I think £50 million. All those are complete rubbish. So we know how hard it is to estimate.

TDS: the £1.2-1.5 million is that just the lottery funding?

SP: Yes, that is the lottery. We have some additional sponsorships, goods in kind, some cash and some not cash. Chris Nicholson said recently that he thought it wasn’t the amount of money we had, but that we spent it well. I think that is probably true. For example there are the spinning bikes - they’re like indoor cycle trainers, but they are made for longer duration - the sailors were keen to have them to help keeping body fat down. Decent ones are £800-1000 each and we needed four to six of them. And that was a huge amount of money to spend in the final months before the Games. So we looked for a solution and in the end Pete Cunningham found them on eBay for £40 each, brand new, boxed… So we had six for £240 plus delivery. So it is a case of thinking a little bit outside of the box, not just going to the nearest shop and buying everything, although there are times when you need to do that. So we try to spend our money wisely.

TDS: Is it fair to say that funding from the National Lottery has transformed team GBR?

SP: Yes. That came in 1997. What happened was that it allowed us to set up a frame work and provide enough funding and support for the sailors to have an opportunity to reach their potential and in particular for them to focus on it full time and train full time without them continually be wondering about how they were going to pay their gas bill.

TDS: How does the Lottery funding side work?

SP: We apply for an amount of money. We have to complete a plan. That is put together by the RYA Performance Directorate, which is myself, John Derbyshire and Gordon Stredwick and we are responsible for submitting the final submission of all World Class plans, because we also have a World Class potential plan and junior and youth level as well. So we have to make a four year plan and update it annually and we report on it quarterly.

For every pound that comes into the Lottery, the money is divided into five good causes and one of those is sport. UK Sport administer that and then divide it up into how it is spent. The program and activity side of that money goes to the governing body, in our case, the RYA. Then they have a living cost part where they deal directly with all the athletes in all sports. So theoretically if you were the same age and living in the same part of the country, with same status, ie student or married with five kids, then theoretically you should get the same allowance regardless of whether you are a sailor or a show jumper or a rower. So that is direct between UK Sport and the athletes. We just register that who we want to receive the payments.

There are different levels of payment - graded A, B and C - and they are performance based and we tell the Sport Council who should be at each of those levels. At the moment we have six on A status, a majority are B and the rest are Cs.

Then the sailors get programme funding - that is the money to actually go sailing and do the training. So the sailors work with their coaches and myself and submit their program of activity: what they are proposing to do for the year. Then I make them an award and they then have to report every quarter that they have either completed their program as specified or not and if not, why not. So if they have only done four events when they said they’d do six then they’d have to repay the money they’d had for the two events they didn’t go to unless it was transferred to two other events they were going to do in the next quarter that they didn’t have in their original plan.

TDS: How have you tried to improve team GBR since Sydney?

SP: We’ve looked to refine it. We had a good formula when we went into Sydney. I’ve obviously worked closely with John Derbyshire who was Olympic Manager in Sydney and clearly the strategy that he’d left behind was very successful. So on the basis that we’d come back with five medals, I didn’t think it would be that bright of me to try to revolutionise the Olympic program. So it has been a matter of refinement.

We have some good staff, plenty of experience within the team and John Derbyshire still works within the RYA. So I was able to keep a lot of things that we thought were good and change some of the things which weren’t.

There are also a lot things we did in Sydney we can’t do in Athens, and equally things we can do here that we couldn’t do in Sydney. For example we had the keelboats sailing in Sydney because we worked with a club to build a new dock and put in a crane. We tried to do it here but couldn't, so we had to look for an alternative. There are very few marinas with cranes or hoists here. We could fight with every other country at the two marinas which do have them, one of which is miles from the sailing areas or we could look at solving the problem in a different way. Slipway launching seemed difficult every day, so one of the sailors and I were discussing the option of a folklift truck. So I worked with Peter Bentley, our Technical Projects Coordinator, on looking at that and then we went out, got the knowledge on that and went and found one. That was tricky because we needed one that would be big enough to safely lift all the keelboats including the Sonar, but small enough so that it would fit inside a container so that we can ship it around the world.



Above: Iain Percy and Steve Mitchell play Tonka toys

Within two weeks we made the decision and bought the fork lift truck. Then we had to put half a dozen people on a training course to drive it, to make sure we didn’t have any safety issues. We were helped a lot by Nick Harrison, a Laser sailor from Stokes Bay. He knows a number of people who drive forklift trucks who were qualified to do some training.

TDS: The sailors seem to have some highly experienced coaches, most of them from the UK. Are you breeding coaches?

SP: They're all from the UK apart from 470 coach Hamish Wilcox who is a Kiwi. Otherwise we have a reasonable resource of good sailors and our resource of coaching talent is increasing as we spend more time on coach education programs, teaching sailors to be coaches - and coaches to be coaches. We don’t have an excess of high quality coaches. But then what is a coach? We could be here all day talking about that because that means different things to different people.

The old sailors are a great asset to the program. Adam May is a great example. An hour after I called him and said he wasn’t going to the Olympics on the night of the end of the World Championships [last year in Cadiz] he phoned me back and ‘said I’d like to put it on record that I’m available for anything you need to do to help anyone else get some medals in the Athens'. So he’s been involved with the Tornado and 2.4m program and put in a lot of time helping other sailors achieve their dreams.

And we’ve had a number of other sailors. Andrew Simpson is here training with Chris Brittle: Chris Brittle going on to the future, but Andrew Simpson finished third at the World Championship and any other country would be sending him to the Games but of course we have Ben Ainslie who pops in a Gold medal and steals it from him again [four years ago Iain Percy did the same to poor Bart]. All credit to him - he’s been pushing on, helping out and all credit to those guys for doing that. That is one of the strengths of the team that people do feel enough part of a team, rather than a group of individuals, that they are prepared to put in that time and effort in.

TDS: There seems to be a group philosophy within team GBR. You don't find many arrogant bastards...

SP: I don’t think that is a bad thing to be an arrogant bastard, if you expect to be successful in your sport. Ben could be and some people would say that is exactly the way he is when he’s on the water. The way I look at it is that normal people don’t often tend to win Olympic medals. There is some truism in that. People who have a normal philosophy about things don’t always deliver the performances at the time that they need them.

TDS: What's your view on the Olympic facilities in Athens? Are they finished? [At the time of thedailysail's visit they had been locked up prior to the Games]

SP: The Olympic facilities for sailing are finished and have been for some time. They are fantastic. Without doubt it will be a huge legacy for the sport in this country. The Hellenic Yachting Federation will move in and set up their headquarters there straight after the Olympic Games and I’m sure for the next 10 or 20 years it will be regarded as one of the best regatta facilities in the world.

It is about four times bigger than it is required to be for the Olympic Games, because by making it bigger they provide a fantastic legacy for the future. They will develop the marina side, but they have some fantastic launching ramps there, so they will be able to hold lots of regattas from there, run their national squads there and they will develop some of the building into restaurants and bars like they have in Barcelona. [The marina where the Agios Kosmas Olympic Sailing Centre is also intended as a new centre for superyachts post-Games].

We’ve run two test events and they’ve both been very successful. And I was there meeting the ATHOL technical staff a month ago and but for the flags and bunting the site was finished with all building materials removed. We have no doubt that the facility will be first class.

TDS: Surely not better than the new Weymouth & Portland Sailing Academy?

SP: We would like to think that the sailing is better at WPSA and the facilities are coming fully on stream there. The first event there using the new facilities are the Cadet Worlds. We’re very excited about that and this winter we’ll able to train not just our dinghy sailors as we have in the past but all our keelboats and Paraolympic classes as well, all in one place at one time, dry sailing our keel boats, plenty of dinghy park space, plenty of lecture areas, etc.

TDS: How does the set-up in Athens compare with Sydney?

SP: Sydney was a temporary facility that was put in at Rushcutters Bay specifically for the Olympic Games and they dropped in a few pontoons and they shut off Rushcutters Park, which is an entirely a grass-based area. Here they have built a purpose-built marina of not inconsiderable size. Go to Rushcutter’s Bay now and there is very little trace that the Olympics have ever been there. Here, there is a wacking great marina and it will still be a fantastic regatta centre, where they will be hosting major regattas and it will be a good venue to go to.

TDS: What do you think about the suitability of the Athens venue in terms of the conditions?

SP: I think the sailing conditions in Athens are extremely tricky. Ian Walker, David Howlett and Fiona Campbell have all said this is the trickiest sailing venue they’d ever sailed at or had involvement in. [To read more about the testing conditions the sailors will face - click here] It is certainly tricky but as they say 'the more you practise, the luckier you get'. It is certainly a different type of sailing venue to Sydney Harbour, for example, which is primarily topographically-based and it is more predictable what the conditions are doing. Sometimes it was shifty but at least you knew where it was likely to be shifty and where it wasn’t and you might choose to be able to avoid that. Here the patterns are fewer and further between.

My only reservations would be if we ended up with a week of extremely light winds and it looked like some of the events would struggle to get the races in and the Race Committee were forced to start races in conditions they considered less than ideal.

TDS: In Athens they have four courses all in pre-defined areas. Can they move them? How did they do it in Sydney?

SP: Yes, they can move it but not to a completely different weather system on a different side of the peninsula. In Sydney we had four harbour courses - A, B, C and D - inside and two courses outside Sydney Harbour. One harbour course was exclusively for match racing. Three of the inshore courses saw every other class race on them. And the Tornados, Finns, 470s and Solings could all sail on the outside courses. And they rotated the classes around the courses. Here in theory you will be sailing on the same race area from start to finish.

TDS: Going back to team GBR, there are some classes where we are very very strong and others where we're not. Why's that?

SP: There are a number of different reasons for that. The Europe for example, for the best part of 12 years other than Shirley Robertson there hasn’t been a huge number of Europe sailors and particularly pre-lottery there was so little funding available that the RYA were forced to focus the funding they did have on fewer sailors. And in years past that meant Shirley [Robertson]. So that is a big void to fill. We also have more drop-out from youth to Olympic in the women’s disciplines, so it is hard to keep the women all going.

But maybe we are not so bad in the women’s 470 - we did finish fifth in the World Championships. Fifth eight years ago would have been a fantastic result for Great Britain. It is only not so great now because unless you have won the Gold medal you are not in the top half of the squad. It makes those results which are very very good - and bear in mind there is a very small margin between winning a medal and finishing fifth or sixth - it overshadows those performances. Equally we’re the first to hold our hands up and say that in some of the classes we’ve just got to do better. We don’t say we’ve got all the answers or have it all sussed. We do what we do, put the programs into place, review, move forward, assess where we’re at.

TDS: How's the GBR squad shaping up for the future?

SP: If you go back to the Europe discussion, we have some fantastic talent coming out of the Youth program. We’ve just won a Youth Worlds medal in the women’s singlehander and there are a couple of other girls in that group who are not far behind. Three or four have been battling away for a while. They are looking to move into the Europe class and I’m sure in four years time we’ll have considerably more Europe sailors than we do right now. And hopefully the new team GBR World Class environment will help us support that talent better than we were able to do pre-lottery.

TDS: It must be very satisfying being able to nurture talent from such an early age?

SP: We try to work very hard from junior level through youth and into Olympic. We do actually try and make sure that we have what we call a ‘cradle to grave’ program, which means that we are looking to groom people through the junior youth programs, assess the talent and deliver the key skills that they’ll require so that it is in a progressive format into the Olympic development squads.

There would be nothing better than us taking a group of sailors through the revised program and come 2012 see them racing for gold medals on your home ground. You speak to those guys at the top end of the youth squad and they say ‘I want to win a medal in Weymouth’. Last year I was at a Downing St reception and Hannah Mills was there and Tessa Jowell asked what her ambition was and she replied ‘I’m going to win a gold medal in Weymouth in 2012. You’re going to make sure we have the Olympics in Weymouth in 2012.’ And that’s from someone who’s just come out of Optimist sailing into the 420! She's got ambitions to make medals and from our perspective that is great news and it is up to us to let her talent shine through and give her the opportunity for her to realise her dreams.

TDS: What are your predictions for GBR medal prospects in Athens?

SP: The goal is to win medals one of each colour. We went to Sydney with six realistic medal prospects and were lucky enough to win five. I think this time we have eight medal opportunities - people who have medalled in the last couple of years at European or World championship level and at a normal conversion rate of one third to a half - that is three or four, and if everything went well, then maybe more.

If we win three medals, I’ll be quite happy. Three medals out of 11 opportunities is a pretty high proportion in any sport. In Sydney we won more medals [for team GBR] than any other top Olympic sports. If we could replicate that it would be an incredible achievement. Obviously I’m hoping that we will win 11, but there are so many uncontrollable factors in our game that the chances of winning 11 are pretty slim. So as I say our realistic target is to win three and then I’ll be perfectly happy. Any more would be a bonus.