Where are all the medals?

We speak to Victor Kovalenko about the state of play in Australia

Australia is often considered to be one of the top sailing nations in the world. It was behind one of the biggest moments in sailing history, winning the America’s Cup from the Americans for the first time in 132 years. It is credited with inventing the modern skiff and has added new dimensions to modern dinghy design through designers like the Bethwaites. Throughout the 1990s it was one of the few countries were small boat sailing was sponsored in any real way and televised through the 18ft Skiff circuit.

Given this history, it is hard to imagine how the country managed to take home no medals and only one top five position at the recent Olympic Test Event in Qingdao.

At the Olympic Games in Sydney 2000 Australia did well in the sailing competition with two gold, one silver and one bronze medals. Then, in Athens 2004 as a nation they had a poor event leaving with no medals whatsoever. Following their performance at the test event Australia is looking like doing badly again for Beijing in 2008. So what is happening to their Olympic sailing and what is being done to stop the rot?

A man with the answers is the Australian Head Olympic Coach, Victor Kovalenko. Kovalenko moved to Australia from the Ukraine in October 1997 to work with Yachting Australia in the role of National Coach for the 470 Men’s and Women’s Olympic classes. Following some excellent results in 1999 and 2000 with Australia ultimately taking Gold Medals in both the classes at the 2000 Olympic Games he rose to his present position.

He is currently out at the 470 World Championships in Rizhao, Korea, coaching Nathan Wilmot and Malcolm Page (below, on their way to victory at the World Sailing Games) the 470 men’s duo many believe to be Australia’s biggest hope for a medal in 2008.



Kovalenko insists that Australia is particularly poor in small boats and that the standard of sailing in the Australian Olympic fleets has slipped significantly over the last six years. For the most part he believes it has been bad luck with venues not suiting the Australian team’s abilities. “Our sailors are better in windy weather. Australians are typically not very good in light winds. Finding places where we can go light wind sailing is difficult for us, because normally in Australia we get strong wind almost all the time,” he explains. This would certainly go some way to explaining the performance in both Qingdao and the surprisingly light Athens Olympic regatta.

This can be reflected in the results of many of the Australian sailing team. Darren Bundock and Glen Ashby for example are widely regarded as two of the best cat sailors in the world, their results reflect this, finishing mostly on the podium at the ISF Grade 1 events they have entered this year. As previously mentioned Nathan Wilmot and Malcom Page are also well respected and have won the 470 World Championships for the last two years running. Then in the Laser class are Michael Blackburn and Tom Slingsby, both of whom are very strong Laser sailors and Krystal Weir in the Laser Radial who has been improving steadily. With this strong set of members and others it seems likely the team has been unlucky with the light wind venues but something must be done.

Due to the difficulties of finding light wind venues in Australia to train for 2008, the Australian team is planning on spending a significant amount of time in Europe. Kovalenko believes they are more likely to find reliably light wind venues there than if they stayed at home. “However, I do not think all our training will be in Europe. I am sure we will find some places that are lighter in Australia too and use them to train for the Games in 2008,” he continues.

Although this is the plan for the team it is not something likely to take place around about this time next year. “The problem is our trials are in Cascais and the Olympic nominations are decided on that event too. This is the problem: all our sailors have to be ready for strong winds there so they can win that event, and qualify their country for the Olympics. Our plan is to focus on the light weather much more next year after Cascais because currently the most important thing has to be the trials,” says Kovalenko. The concern over Cascais and the predicted stronger Atlantic conditions on offer there is one mooted by many competitors and national teams.



As with most countries the primary problem in Australia for the Olympic squad is funding, or rather the lack of it. When compared to the larger significantly more mighty teams like Skandia Team GBR or the French Olympic Team, the size and weight of the Australian team pales into insignificance. This is easily demonstrated when comparing say Skandia team GBR members to the number of Australian Sailing Team members. Currently listed on the Team GBR website are 58 different teams under varying forms of support, from transitional squad funding through to full time high performance squad sailors. In contrast to this the Australian team consists of just 15 teams across the 11 disciplines. “We have very little support and our funding is very small indeed so we are able to only support the very top teams,” explains Kovalenko. “We are only able to support people who are either ranked inside the top ten in the world or who have won an ISAF Grade 1 regatta in the previous season. We would clearly like to support more people but we simply do not have the funding.”

Amazingly Kovalenko says even the sailors who fulfill this criteria are not necessarily able to live off the money given to them. “The support we can give our sailors is very limited and we cannot pay them to be full time sailing. We can buy some equipment and provide some money for campaign costs.”

The major problem for Olympic sailing in Australia, according to Kovalenko, is they have become a victim of their own success at Olympic level. The country as a whole was fourth highest medal scorer at the last Olympics with none coming from sailing. Conversely in many other sports, in which Australia has been very successful, involve many more medals than the 33 available in sailing. Olympic swimming, for example, offers many chances for medals and the opportunity for multiple medals per person, per Olympics. When looked at with from this perspective it is hardly surprising their sailing has little money, with only seven medals available even with a perfect event.

There are now efforts being made at getting the nation’s Olympic sailing programme back on its feet. Primarily, Kovalenko says, they need to make their goals for Qingdao attainable and so ensure they secure at the very least some funding for the next cycle, taking them to 2012. “In Athens we did not do as well as we thought we would. This is a big problem for us now when we try to get more money. We are certainly not as enthusiastic in our aims now as we were before Athens. We are much more modest,” he concedes.

Starting out with low goals and making sure you achieve them certainly seems the way to go in the Olympics. Again looking at Skandia Team GBR, they have always set a low benchmark figure and then surpassed this. Even now the team, who took eight medals at the Qingdao Test Event, are still only aiming for 30% of available medals which is about three to four (3.6 to be precise). This is a concept the Australians have now grabbed hold. The official Australian aim for Qingdao is one medal of any color in any class. “It is very important to try and get the one medal at the Olympics because if we get no medal, we get no more funding and that is that,” explains Kovalenko

This significantly more conservative approach to medal prediction is one side of the team’s attempt to turn their fortunes around. The other significant factor introduced recently is on the youth side of competitive sailing. Although sailing is popular with the youth of the country, perhaps more than other countries such as the USA, there is very little structure to the youth system. This leaves the kids who would always competitively race, whether there is a decent youth system or not (mostly those from sailing families, or those who discover it very early in life) practically the only youths out racing on the water. As a result of this the country has had very strong results at events such as the recent Youth Worlds where they walked away with four top five results and were third team overall but ultimately has no real strength in depth. As Kovalenko puts it “The problem with our youth is they are only successful at the very top level.”

The team behind the Australian Olympic sailors has begun to remedy this and are now implementing an Optimist programme, which should be able to introduce children to competitive international sailing from a much earlier age. From this they would like to develop a stronger youth system to act as a feeder into their Olympic programme, in a similar way to the RYA’s road to success

It seems Australia is likely to struggle with funding for the next few years. Certainly even if they achieve their single medal goal they will receive very little funding. It seems the country has at least another six more lean years ahead of them unless they manage to pull an en-expectedly good result out of the bag in Qingdao 2008.

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