Top flight foiler

Graham Vials fills us in on his past and his plans for the future

Two weeks ago the Bloody Mary Pursuit race in London come to a controversial conclusion when Graham Vials sailing his Bladerider foiling International Moth, appeared to win on the water, but was denied overall victory. The organisers deemed the class ineligible for the trophy due to no foiling specific handicap being in publication at the time, so they claimed

Last week Vials showed his victory in London was no one-off as he stormed to a win at an extremely windy and chilly Tiger Trophy at Rutland Sailing Club against another 248 boats of varying classes. With the second-placed Moth at the event finishing in 162nd position Vials has not only confirmed his position as one of the top sailors on the UK dinghy scene but as the strongest World Championship contender at present in the ever-developing foiling Moth class. So how did he come to be here?

Olympic Sailing

National and International recognition for Vials began early on in youth squad sailing. A product of the both the Jim Saltonstall generation and the RYA squad pathway, the start of his sailing career represented everything one expects from an Olympic hopeful. He cut his teeth in the Optimist before moving onto the 420 and finally ended up in the 470, an effective poster-boy for the RYA youth to Olympic route. “I had a really good youth career, if you can call it that,” Vials confirms. “I really enjoyed sailing back then. We were based in the northeast for the first 18 years and travelled around a lot.”

He moved into the 470 in 2001 at the age of 18 where international achievement came almost immediately with his crew Dan Newman. “We did well at our first Europeans, I think we were 12th overall. That shot us onto Olympic funding, but we did not really follow that through to the Olympic Trials,” Vials recalls. These Trials were held in Weymouth and were won by Chris Draper who just beat Nick Rogers and Joe Glanfield to victory with Vials coming in third. The RYA controversially chose to extend the trials with the top three boats going to the Worlds to prove who was best to go to the Sydney Games. Rogers and Glanfield eventually won out and although the first half of the championship went well for Vials, he admits they lacked the experience to produce a good result at the end.

Of course on the circuit there is always a gap in the Olympic year, so Vials did not get back into the 470 until 2001, again with crew Newman. However, the pair split in 2003, a decision he still clearly regrets: “It is something I look back on and wish I would have worked a bit harder to keep together,” he confesses. “We were neck and neck with Nick [Rogers] and Joe [Glanfield] at that stage and it definitely set me back having to start again with a new crew. That is not to put anything against Bevis [Field - Vials’ next 470 crew] he is a very good crew as well. Something I would say to any teams out there is it is easy to think the grass is greener on the other side, but actually you get so much more from working at your team, getting to know each other well and working on your weaknesses. I guess it is easy to see that sort of thing with hindsight.”

Perhaps it is this admission that shows this as the point you can begin to see the cracks appearing in Vials’ Olympic sailing career. He and Field continued together in the 470, just missing out on Olympic selection again in 2004, officially going to Athens as ‘reserve’ boat. “Effectively what that means is you are a training partner, not really a reserve,” Vials admits. “So we were a training partner for Nick [Rogers] and Joe [Glanfield] which meant that we kept our funding and shared a lot of information. We also improved on our weaknesses and Nick and Joe got a lot better in their weaknesses.”

At this point Vials had to sit down and make a decision about exactly where his 470 career was heading. “Basically I was pretty consistently average in the 470,” he modestly claims.” We hit the top ten in the world at one point. I think I finished in the top 12 at the Europeans for five years but we were always in the late top ten and never in the top three. At some point you have to look at where your strengths and weaknesses are and ask ‘where can we make improvements?’ I didn’t think I could make enough improvements in the right areas to be top three.” He also adds he is slightly too big for a 470 at 66kg, when the boat is actually more suited to a 63kg helm. Although he could squeeze down to 65kg at a push the thought of doing this for four years was not something that thrilled him.

Following his 470 sailing, Vials then tried out helming a 49er with Mark Asquith – now Paul Campbell-Jones’ crew. However, Asquith had a major motorbike accident and was out of action for a long while. Vials also felt the 49er in the UK was simply too competitive already to stand a chance of making much of an impact.

He then briefly excited headline writers the sailing world over by teaming up with Hugh Styles in the Tornado – ‘Styles and Vials win trials’ was surely on the tip of all their tongues – before dashing their hopes eight months later. “I was not keen on some of the aspects of Tornado crewing,” he comments. “It is a brute of a boat for the crews. There are massive main loads in max power conditions - as much as 50kg when the breeze is up - and you have very heavy kite loads downwind. Eventually I took the hard decision to say if I was not going to do it properly for four years, then just get out. That decision was made in 2005. So then I was looking at getting a real job.”



The Moth and life after the Olympics:

“Basically I stopped sailing at the Tornado Worlds in ’05 and I had just finished my degree at that stage,” Vials comments. “I managed to get a first in that which helped me get into Law College for two years and that opened a lot of doors for what I wanted to do as a career.”

Of course with a real job comes less sailing, but this is something Vials has learned to accept and is even enjoying. “It is hard to get across when you are Olympic sailing that it is a job. With anything, if you do it five days a week, it becomes a bit monotonous,” he admits. But he says that recently sailing has regained a great deal of its enjoyment, something he realised was not there when he was doing it full time. “It is really nice now that Friday comes and you get that Friday feeling normally followed by a few beers and then sailing at the weekend.”

Strictly speaking Vials’ Moth sailing career did not start after his Olympic sailing as the two overlapped a bit, but in many respects it represents the antithesis of his time in the 470. Where 470 sailing was always a job, Moth sailing has clearly always been a hobby - strictly for fun, sailing for sailing’s sake.

Although he only recently returned to the class Vials was actually one of the people who kick-started the foiling revolution in the UK. “Myself, Adam [May] and Linton [Jenkins] all looked at what Rohan was doing in Australia and liked the look of it,” he explains. “Linton was a good boat builder and we convinced him to get involved. We built some boats for the 2004 Europeans. That was the first proper foiling event really. We only had five or six foilers back then.”

In those early days of foiling - in 2003 – there was still a great deal of refinement to be done, particularly to the control mechanisms and foils being used. Vials says initially they had a very narrow wind window they were able to foil in and anything over 15 knots felt like a hurricane. “I had the biggest foil in the world at that stage. My centreboard was about 1200mm wide on the lifting foil - now they are running about 800-900mm. It would lift out really early, but it was pretty high drag once everyone else was foiling. At that stage it was just a bit of fun. Then more people saw it, more people wanted to get into it and the production levels went up to handle that.”

Following this European Championship Vials went back to the 470 day-job and was missing from the Mothing scene for a couple of years. It was following his decision to quit Olympic sailing again in 2005 that saw him return to the Moth once more, buying a Mistress 3 design from Linton Jenkins.



Interestingly for someone so involved in the early days of the foiling Moth, Vials has very little interest in the technical side of things preferring to spend his time out on the water as opposed to up to his elbows in epoxy and carbon. “I am a bit of a lazy bugger when it comes to that sort of thing,” he admits. “I am quite happy to just stick the cover on it and walk away.” It was perhaps partly this attitude and definitely his close friendship with Rohan Veal that led to Vials ordering the first Bladerider Moth in the UK.

Vials’ involvement, such as it is, with the Bladerider brand has caused some to wonder exactly what his position is with the company, but he is quite honest about this. “Because I was one of the first orders - boat number five - I got a good discount. They also have me down as an ‘A-Team Rider’. That does not really mean a great deal. You get a bit of support from Rohan, you get a bit of a discount on the bits and pieces - and that’s it. We are still buying our boats and we are still sailing as individuals. I have not signed any contract. I am not obliged to do anything, I am not an importer, I am not a re-seller and I am not even what they call ‘an ambassador’ for the brand.”

Vials also states he has always been more than happy to discuss his thoughts, both positive and negative about the boat. “My first boat, as many saw last year at the Worlds [where he was fifth] was fairly rubbish,” he confides. “My boat was number five out of the production moulds and it had a lot of issues. It was leaking like a sieve at the Worlds and eventually it just self destructed - the whole deck mould came apart. It was just built too light. There was just not enough glue and carbon on it. I think they have learned from that. The boats now are much better and there are less issues.”

The reasons Vials gives for buying a Bladerider are relatively simple “Rohan basically promised that it was going to be a very quick design. I think he and [Andrew MacDougall] did a very good job. You have to look at it in context and think that he and [MacDougall] designed this thing from scratch. Some ideas were quite revolutionary and some were borrowed off John Illet.” He adds that unless something radical comes along in foil design he can’t see the Bladerider being beaten for at least three or four years. but admits it is the nature of a development class to develop, so eventually the boats will not be as quick as the newest designs.

In part it is his reacquired enjoyment of the sport that led Vials to do the typically fun winter events such as the Bloody Mary and the Tiger Trophy this year. Of course these events being handicap races are never going to be fair, but selecting a handicap for the International Moth is now more difficult than ever. “The class is in a funny stage at the moment because the handicaps are not concrete,” he admits. “99% of the fleet are still learning the ropes and there is an element of just getting round the course. It is almost the case that when we are foiling in ideal conditions with the current handicaps we will win by a long way.”

But Vials adds that conditions at the both the Bloody Mary and the Tiger Trophy were not perfect, the wind being a bit light for the first part and slightly too windy for the second. This leads him to believe those handicaps are not correct. “I think windward-leeward courses we will be about 49er speed around a course, certainly against the top 49er squad boats.” He does add this is only the case for the top boats, but when speed differences are as big as they can be in the foiling Moth – in race one of the Tiger Trophy he lapped all the other Moths in a four lap race despite them all being good accomplished sailors – then you have to handicap to the top end of the fleet.

This year Vials will certainly be attending the Moth World Championships in Weymouth, provided he can get the time off work. He is typically modest about his chances of winning but clearly has his sights set on this goal. “If all goes well, if everything goes as it should, if I stay out of trouble, if I get the roll of the dice on a few occasions, if I am quick enough and if I get time off work then there is a possibility I could win the Worlds,” he says, sounding every bit the politician squirming under pressure. And if the Olympics were to be sailed in a foiling boat like the Moth in the future? “I try and not think about it,” he comments. “If they changed it tomorrow and wanted to do a trial for Beijing in the Moth, I would go for it. I remain unsure whether I would commit another four years to the Olympic dream.”