Career pinnacle

Iain Percy looks back at his Gold medal win in the Star in Qingdao

As a Union Jack waiver, one of the top stories to come out of the recent sailing competition at the Beijing Games was that of Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson’s gold in the Star. Olympic sailing’s class for grown-ups, where most career Olympic sailors end up after they have ticked off the Laser or Finn or which America’s Cup afterguards return to to resharpen their skills, the Star can perhaps be considered the pinnacle of Olympic classes. So for Percy and his +39 strategist and long term Olympic sparring partner Simpson to win gold in this class represents the high point of their sailing careers.

Since returning from Qingdao the British sailing gold medallists have been all over the media. Percy reckons that this is partly down to the success of Team GBR but also due to people in the UK getting excited about the prospect of 2012 and the Games coming to these shores. The highlight, for us at least, was seeing Percy and Simpson on the popular TV show, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross where our man was spotted on camera deep in conversation with model and actress Kelly Brook.

“She was nice enough! I got caught there,” Percy admits. “We were only chatting for about 10 minutes unfortunately. We had a good laugh that night – we were out with [Olympic cyclist] Bradley Wiggins and he can keep up with the sailors. He descended quite hard, given he was doing the tour of Britain the next week. He definitely has natural fitness that man.”

While this is all quite jocular, to achieve Olympic Gold in the Star, Percy and Simpson had the fight of their lives on. As Percy puts it: “There were many gold medallists, everyone was going to be going 100%, no one was going to choke, no one was going to back down, you had to sail better to win against Scheidt, Mateusz [Kusznierewicz], Freddie [Loof] and people like that, because you aren’t going to beat them by them choking, so we had to absolutely go all out. At least then we knew we could feel we gave it our best shot.

“Over the previous year we tried a lot of different equipment and that was stressful because when it didn’t work you’d have a bad race, so a lot of pressure was added through that. Then there were really long hours out on the water out in China. We were doing five or six hours most days trying to catch up because we felt we were late on the race training having done a lot of equipment development. So we’d then be back into the gym and in bed by 10pm. There just wasn’t a second in a day and we didn’t have a day off and we went like that for about two and a half months. Myself and Andrew gave it everything, we spent every waking hour thinking about it or doing it, so there was a lot of satisfaction in that.”



Personally for Percy there was also an element of trying to put right his disappointing result in Athens. “I was four years older and I just felt that I really needed to perform after not performing in Athens, when I was probably too slack,” admits Percy candidly. “I had issues in 2004: I had split up with a long term girlfriend and I wasn’t in the right place. This time I was happy and confident in my life to put everything on this - no excuses, give it 100%. That was more of a different attitude. It was harder this time by a reasonable amount. But this time we were in the right place and we were old enough to say ‘let’s try our hardest all the time’.”

Following this monumental effort, since his return from China Percy has allowed himself to collapse slightly. “I was really knackered and a bit ill afterwards. This time we worked incredibly hard when we were out there, so I needed to have some time, sleeping a lot and trying to avoid doing too much stuff over in England for a while.”

Aside from the much publicised issues sailing off Qingdao, the biggest hurdle Percy and Simpson faced in their campaign this time was that technical development in the Star class has taken a quantum leap over the last four years, a much bigger step than was made prior to Athens - a slight surprise considering this is the oldest of Olympic classes.

“This time everyone was developing big time and when you are making changes you have got to really understand the game,” says Percy. The Star is a very tweaky boat, particularly with the rig set-up and for Percy this campaign has been a steep learning curve in terms of comprending the technical minutae of what makes a boat go fast.

“There were a lot of one-off boats and sail programs this time. The game has really ramped up. As soon as Mateusz and Hamish [Pepper] and Robert [Scheidt] joined, the three boats that were a little bit dominant before suddenly became six. That put a lot of pressure on everyone. Plus everyone was fully resourced. No one had issues with getting sponsors and all the top six had fully funded £500,000 campaigns. They are all medallists, gold medallists and they are all going for it and they were all ramped.”

While in the last Games almost all the Stars came from two manufacturers and used Quantum Sails, this time there was huge variety. This was partly spurred through Torben Grael raising the game in Athens when he pitched up with a Lillia Star with a milled keel. While this is nothing new in other classes, it just hadn’t been done before in the Star, says Percy, who admits that four years ago he wouldn’t have thought to have done this.

This time the leading boats came from three manufacturers - Lillia and neighbouring Foley in Italy and Mader in Germany, who built Percy and Simpson’s boat to a design by Juan Kouyoudmjian, himself a Star sailor. Behind them on the Olympic roster Scheidt followed Torben Grael’s example aboard a Lillia, while Loof sailed a Foley as did fourth placed Kusznierewicz while fifth placed Flavio Marazzi raced a one-off built in Switzerland. Even boats from the three ‘production’ manufacturers were being heavily customised .

While there were differences between the hulls, the majority of work was on the deck layout, rig set-up and in particular sail development. In terms of sails the Brits had their own design team including North Sails Buenos Aires’ Juan Garay (who also worked on Ben Ainslie’s Finn sail development), while Scheidt used a mix of North and Quantum, Loof had his own designs built at the VB loft in Sweden and Kusznierewicz was on Quantum.

“There is not a lot in it, but it is just the little things that you do that add up,” recounts Percy. “And it is just the quality of the competition: No one has got anything that is holding them back. Knowledge isn’t holding them back, resource isn’t holding them back and it is very very important for these guys to win and thy have got everything behind them to do it.

“We did a lot of work with sails over the period and made some big jumps at the end. Often we had actually made the jumps, but if parts of it were wrong, they were holding back the other good work. We had both upwind and downwind speed but never together over the time! We had a bit of a problem upwind under 8 which was a bit of an issue going to Qingdao, which we solved with some of the sail shapes. So we put the stuff together, we worked that out a little bit late for comfort, but then suddenly the sail program was really good.”

As to the deck layout they also carried out small but significant modifications such as moving the runners slightly further forwards due to the anticipated light airs at the Olympic venue.

“We were very happy with where we got to technically in the end. We felt we’d worked really hard on it. We had a great team. We were very lucky that Juan K was brilliant all the way through and we get on very well with him. So it was a nice working environment.”

While he cites the £500,000 figure for the top campaigns Percy reckons his campaign costs were less than people think - perhaps £350,000 over four years including four boats. “I am very in debt at the end of it.”






Another significant development for Percy’s Star campaign for China was a change in crew from Steve Mitchell to Andrew ‘Bart’ Simpson. “They are different sailors completely,” says Percy of the change. “One thing I have to say is that Stevie was a big part of our success and he remains a good friend. It must have been hard for him and I hope he got something out of our finally performing, because he set everything up. We are still using all his spreadsheets. He was the manager. But Bart is a very very talented light wind sailor and he is a strategist by profession in the Cup and he is able to make good calls on the run, whereas Stevie maybe would have asked for my approval on it. I count in this Olympics two runs where Andrew made the call to gybe and I had the confidence to flick it immediately - everyone tries to match you, but because I’ve just thrown it we are clear ahead - and we passed seven boats in two runs. They are big calls that I had the confidence in Bart to make and that was important, especially in a venue like that. When a shift turns, everyone’s on it, but if you have to chat about it you’ve lost your opportunity. So that communication is very important.”

We tell Percy about how we were standing up shouting at the television during the final medal race where he started out in second place, two points behind Freddie Loof overall, to finally, eventually after some very long tense painful minutes, securing Gold. It was exasperating for Percy too… “We could have won that race very easily. [On the first beat] if we had carried on on either of the two options we had rather than cutting our losses between the two sides. We had a good start and we are fast enough to hold the fleet on starboard off the line when you are the windward boat - it is hard to do that, but we had enough speed to climb off the fleet - we could have gone and waited for everyone to tack and then tack in front of them. But we got twitchy about Freddie and we were looking so hard for a left hander because he was going right - the tide was good to go right and the wind was in the right off the line – we wanted to carry on. And the reality was that Scheidt who just carried on [out to the left] until he got a big lefthander did well and the guys on the right did well on the tide. I think with our speed in that condition if we’d tacked at the committee boat or carried on all the way to the left we would have won race, but that’s life. If it had been the first race it would have been different, but it wasn’t. We had a bit more on…”

On board he remembers that Simpson was calm, while he was quite stressed. “I don’t tend to lose so much performance when I’m stressed, but we had had a week of frustration. We were sailing pretty well to be fair, we were starting well and half way up a lot of first beats we were actually in control of the race but the nature of that place with light airs and big shifts, one side was coming in and it was getting really frustrating. But Bart kept very calm all the way through it. We always knew a bit of breeze downwind doesn’t hurt us and we could catch up.”

It seems likely that Percy and Simpson will be back to defend their title in Weymouth in four years time, although he seems to be in denial about the ominous prospect of Ainslie joining in the fun in the Star. In the meantime they are keeping their fingers crossed that there is an America’s Cup to focus on with TeamOrigin beforehand.