Gunning for Finn gold

Reigning world champion Sebastien Godefroid from Belgium tells Andy Rice about his plans for Athens

If ever you think you've got problems getting funding or dealing with your national authority, spare a thought for Sebastien Godefroid. You might have thought that after winning a silver medal at the 1996 Olympics and then the Finn Gold Cup last year, that life would be a bed of roses for the talented Belgian. But he is only now emerging from a mire of bureaucracy and red tape that seems to engulf the Federation Royale Belge du Yachting.

Godefroid has not been too impressed with the system, to put it mildly. "Belgium doesn't have too many sailors in the first place, but I have to work with one organisation at national level and another at international level." He explained that there is a French organisation and a Flemish organisation that feed into the national federation, but suffice it to say it seems an incredibly complex structure for such a small sailing nation. "Before you get anything happening, half of the money is gone already and a lot of the good ideas get stopped by people just playing the political game. It's hard to break through all the political shit and get something really positive going," he complains. Sometimes, he says, it seems there are more administrators than sailors in Belgium. He is not even sure what the organisation is officially called. "It has been changing names quite a bit recently."

That said, he does acknowledge recent attempts made to improve matters. "There has been a lot of effort going on in the last couple of years. They realised that it wasn't going so smoothly, and they were far off from something like the British system. They've been more of a hassle than a help to me in the past, but now they're giving me a budget that I'm free more or less to use it as I want, provided I stay with the Finn."

This explains one of the perennial questions that he and another long-term champion of singlehanded sailing - Robert Scheidt - are often asked. How do they maintain the motivation to keep on sailing the same boat when there are so many other things they could try? Other Finn champions such as Freddie Loof and Iain Percy appear to have taken to the Star keelboat like ducks to water, for example. This has not gone unnoticed by Godefroid. "The problem for me with the Star is that the federation works in such a way that you must first prove yourself in the class before you get the funding. Back in 1996 when he won his silver medal at Savannah, the federation was still going to withhold half of his funding for the following year until the dispute was settled. If that is how difficult it is to hang on to your funding when you've already proved yourself at the highest level, then you can understand Godefroid's reluctance to experiment with other classes.

What he has been doing is dabbling in big boats, though. In fact you could say he has gone from the sublime to the ridiculous - or vice versa, depending on your point of view. In any case, racing Jean -Luc Nelias' 60-foot trimaran Belgacom on the French professional ORMA circuit must be about as far as you can get from Finn sailing.

"I really love it," he grins. "It's so different you can't really compare it. It's team work, which is new for me. I get to work with a lot of really good sailors who all are expert in their own speciality - for example Jean-Luc Nelias and Mich Desj [Michel Desjoyeaux, winner of the Vendee Globe].

"The cool thing is that you're doing 25 knots easily. That's pretty attractive after doing the Finn. Actually that's what people warned me: 'You're never going to like the Finn any more because you get used to the speed.' But actually in a trimaran even when you're doing 25 knots, quite often you are 4 or 5 metres above the water, so you don't see it passing by that quickly. In the Finn, you are almost in the water, so it feels quite fast, even if you know really that it's bloody slow!"

In fact, far from hindering his Finn sailing, Godefroid feels it has enhanced it - not least in ridding him of any fear factor. "After 10 or 11 years sailing in the Finn, I still thought that racing in 25 knots was a lot of breeze, but after doing an offshore on the trimaran and doing 20 knots upwind in 40 knots of breeze, then you realise that sailing in 25 knots is pretty easy. You sail in the Finn afterwards and think, this is a piece of cake. It changes your view on things."

Godefroid talks about his plans for life after Athens, and what he thinks about Ben Ainslie, on page 2...