Third time round

We speak to Simon Hiscocks about his next Olympic campaign

While followers of Team GBR basked in the glorious and emphatic gold medal winning performances of Ben Ainslie and Shirley Robertson in Athens this summer, so a man with more mixed feelings about his 'only having achieved bronze' was 49er crew Simon Hiscocks.

Hiscocks won silver in Sydney on the wire for Ian Barker and with several key regatta wins in the build up to Athens he and helm Chris Draper were among the favourites for a gold at the Games. With a silver medal already on the mantlepiece, to follow this up with a bronze was not what Hiscocks had in mind.

"It was disappointing at the time," confirms Hiscocks. "It wasn’t so much straight afterwards, because one of the good things about the Olympics is the amount of time you get to celebrate. You go out to parties and if you have got a medal you’re in and if you haven’t you’re out. It is quite good fun to be in that. Since then it’s been a bit more disappointing. We have been going through a campaign evaluation and started to look at things and at how much we did. Then you think ‘that’s a cock up’. We were capable of winning a Gold Medal. We had opportunities to win it and at the end of the day we didn’t take them which is a lesson to learn. At the end of the day there were skills lacking we needed to work on. There were bits of our game that weren’t right or weren’t there."

The fickle conditions in Athens could so easily be an excuse but Hiscocks says the conditions they encountered were what they had been expecting. "We had one good wind day in the Meltemi which was pretty shifty. We won the first race that day and made a hash of the next two with two races to go. The other races were light and the very last race was the lightest we had. We could have raced on the first day which was windy and that would have been proper, exciting, full-on racing. And they didn’t send us out. But if the Olympics come to London and we have the sailing in Weymouth you could have two weeks of light winds there. So I am pretty sure we could have had better opportunities in more wind, but we got what we were expecting."

From here Hiscocks and Chris Draper plan to continue in the 49er and after a break since the Games are now back down in Palma carrying out their first training in the new Olympic cycle. "The idea is to put things right," says Hiscocks. "We haven’t sailed the boat since August so we’ll be pretty rusty. It’ll take a bit of getting back into. It is not like sailing a Finn or a 470 which has been developed for a long time and is relatively easy to sail in terms of handling. If we get back into the 49er having not sailed it for a while we are still going to capsize it every 20 minutes."

For Hiscocks this is the beginning of his third Olympic cycle in the same boat. While the likes of Shirley Robertson are taking a year out from Olympic sailing and in the last Olympic cycle we witnessed the crash and burn of Laser sailor Paul Goodison through 'over-sailing', Hiscocks doesn't feel they can afford to take a longer break.

"If you look at how particularly the handling side of the 49er has developed: in Sydney it was all new, between Sydney and Athens it moved on a hell of a long way. And people such as Chris Nicholson or Thomas Johanson, the Sydney gold medallist, who came back in with two years to go or slightly less - they really struggled. The handling had improved a lot. There were different techniques for sailing the boats. It hadn’t jumped it had just evolved. Although Chris challenged for a medal towards the end of the Games he was still never quite up to the top standard and Thomas never really got there. And I can’t see why that will change this time. The 49er is still very dynamic. It is still a very difficult boat to sail when it is windy."

Hiscocks says 49er crews have become more athletic in the way they sail and handle the boat and compares it to the developments in Laser sailing and the latest hiking posture and how they set the rig up. "You could set the rig up and initially it would feel really difficult to sail but there’s a technique to sailing it and you can sail it faster. Some people got on to that earlier and some didn’t."



A post last race swim in Athens

For their Athens campaign they started out with an advantage in terms of how they had their boat set-up and their handling was good because they'd trained hard. But Hiscocks maintains they improved most following the music chairs in the British 49er camp, that saw him pair up with Chris Draper. "It was the competitive area we put ourselves in. We were in this position where we really needed to beat Paul [Brotherton] and Mark [Asquith] and they really needed to beat us. And with that real need to win it pushes the standard up."

So who will be their Brotherton and Asquith this time round? Stevie Morrison and Ben Rhodes seem the most likely candidates having trained with them a lot prior to Athens. "They have been getting top ten positions in big regattas. John Pink and Alex Hopson are very very good when it is lighter. So there are people around. We trained with the Ukrainians a bit and were quite competitive. It knarks me a bit that we got beaten by those guys!"

Aside from this another reason to start training now is that the 49er itself has evolved with the lead corrector equalisation system removed as of this season. "Everyone now sails with the wings right out and no lead on the back. It is a bit lighter and from our experience it makes it a bit more skippy and a little bit more tricky to sail when it is windy."

The 49er season this year is quite short with the Worlds taking place in Moscow in May. The British 49er duo plan to compete in the Princess Sofia on 19-25 March before moving in quick succession to the French Nationals, Hyeres and then into the Worlds.

Once the Worlds are done and dusted Hiscocks says that he wants to try his hand at some big boat sailing. "I’ve never really done any sailing in anything more than 18ft long... I like boats that go quite fast and you don’t need a lot of people sitting on the rail to keep them upright. I’m quite intrigued by the Open 60s. To me you see these big yachts and there are loads of people on board and it seems quite boring because a lot of them are sat on the side of the boat and don’t have much to do. If you have a swing keel or water ballast the only people you need on board are the people who sail the boat. So everyone has got something to do all the time and they go faster and they’re more efficient."

While Hiscocks says he has met Alex Thomson, thedailysail have also let Hiscocks' desires be known to Mike Golding, who is wholly receptive to the idea of his sailing with him. And so Simon what about the Vendee Globe 2012? "I don’t know about that. It does look pretty cool. It is a pretty cool competition."