Getting ahead in the Yngling

Shirley Robertson discusses her progress in the new Olympic keelboat

2002 was a mixed year for Shirley Robertson's Yngling team. Compared to fellow Gold medallists Iain Percy and Ben Ainslie's World Championship wins in their new classes, Robertson and her crew of Inga Leask and Sarah Ayton came a disapointing 16th at their World Championship in Switzerland, yet put in a fifth place at SPA, a third at Hyeres and a fourth at the Miami Olympic Class regatta. Currently they are lying 11th in the Yngling rankings.

"New class, new crew, loads to learn, lots to do - we tried a few mad things which didn’t work," explains Robertson. "So to sum it up we were inconsistent. There were some occasions where we hit the spot randomly when it all kind of worked and other events when it all went horribly wrong. We came away from that with a bit more focus..."
With the Yngling taking over from the Soling for Athens, it has been back to the drawing board in terms of technology. "It’s a brand new class with no history. So you have to experiment at some point and we had to make some decisions and there are so many variables going on and sometimes it did and sometimes it didn’t quite happen. But three years away from the Games - that was the year to learn about the class, learn how the boat works and learn what makes it go fast and slow."

Robertson says that they learned loads last year and she feels their results were good considering they lacked boat speed.



While Percy has been getting to grips with sailing with a crew, Robertson has had experience of this running her match racing team, but she had other problems to contend with.

"At our level of match racing we weren’t so involved with how to make a small keelboat go fast because everything was fixed and that wasn’t a concern," she says. "So that’s been a major learning curve - learning what spreaders do and wires! And coming to terms with a boat that doesn’t sit on the water, it sits in the water…"

Primarily they have been working with Nigel Young at North Sails and Steve Mellors from Tropical Engineering in Cowes, where Robertson lives with husband Jamie Boeg. "We had input from lots of people and that might have been the problem last year because there were lots of people with lots of ideas and we believed everybody, because we didn’t know anything ourselves!"

While the Yngling keelboat, a Jan Linge design, has been around since 1968, until it was chosen - for some bizarre reason - as the Women's keelboat class, it never went under anything like the close scrutiny demanded of Olympic programs. "It was so underdeveloped," agrees Robertson. "The jib which everyone uses, a nipper in Denmark - it was his first project when he went to work for North Denmark 18 years ago and it’s still the same design!"

21ft long, and best described as a mini-Soling, the Yngling is a keelboat class where there is a degree of flexibility in the rules for sail, spar and deck gear development. As a result it is possible to spend large amounts of cash in development, which seems to be just what Robertson has done.

"We go through sails like you wouldn’t imagine," she says. "Even when we are training there will be a couple of jibs and a main per week. So it’s mad money. Equipment is a really big cost, just on-going equipment not necessarily new things. And we’ve just had a new boat which we’ve just fitted out."

Her new boat is from Børresens Bådebyggeri in Denmark, whose boats most of the serious European Yngling campaigns are using, while the Americans tend to get theirs from another former Soling builder - Abbott in Canada.



"The money is scarey. We had a bit of a wobble after the summer because we’d worked up a huge debt and in the foreseeable future there was no way of paying it off," she admits. "So we had certainly reached the point where we weren’t doing anymore sailing – we had two months with no sailing because we weren’t prepared to take on any more debt. And then something comes along and we’re off again."

Fortunately now that she, along with fellow Olympians Percy, Ainslie and Paul Goodison, are sponsored by Volvo as part of the Swedish car manufacturer's Team Volvo For Life, the pressure is off a little financially.

Aside from the develop expenditure, there is the cost of keeping three people plus a coach on the case and of getting them and boat to regattas. Her overall budget should be around £150-160,000 per annum, and Robertson says that they are still struggling to find a coach and money to pay a coach. "We need another £50k per year to pay for all that."

From here Robertson says that they will be spending most of their time trying not to do regattas. "Our main focus now is boat speed, so that is our main thing. I felt it wasn’t important to go racing - we’re not going to Miami - we’re are just really focussing on being able to change gears like mad. In my mind that is what keelboat sailing is about. It is precision sailing and you’ve got to know if the wind has dropped a knot what are the settings? How do you sail it in less? Or there’s a bit of chop coming up to instantly go to the setting and that takes time. So that’s what we’re doing this winter."

They have been training with World Championship winner Monica Azon's Spanish team in Spain and will be based out of Malaga or Cadiz this year. Racing-wise the focus is on the Worlds in Cadiz, but there are smaller regattas in Athens in February and Barcelona in March prior to the Princess Sofia regatta and Hyeres.

In terms of competition there are strong teams to contend with from Europe in particular the Spanish and Dorte Jensen's Danish team and some very powerful-looking opponents such as Melanie Dennison from Australia and in particular Betsy Alison from the States. "They have a strong history in women's keelboat sailing," says Robertson of the American form. "They’ve always had J/24s and J/22 and a lot of girls came through the America3 thing."

Robertson's crew Sarah Ayton believes that not a lot can be read into the Yngling results to date. "The pecking order will change. Last year people were finding their feet and were desperately inconsistent. Apart from the Spanish girls we train with no one won more than one event."

Remarkably, while Ainslie and Percy have left the respective Laser and Finn classes in good hands, this cannot be said of the Europes.

"It’s been very disappointing hasn’t it?" says Robertson. "I don’t really know why it has been like that. But it is absolutely the case that there is nobody you’d look at and say they had any potential. And we left everything because we did all the technical development and my coach Mark Littlejohn, he knew everything there was to know about Europes. So the information was still there and the knowledge."

Ayton, who has also been Europe sailing believes it to be a 'weird girl psyche thing'. "Not any two people are there pushing each other. There’s no relationship between anyone and I think everyone sees each other as a threat, so there’s no open book in any kind of training that they’re doing. If one is doing well, they seem to have like a tactical group to stop them…"

Robertson believes that the Europe sailors need to get out and start training against the foreign competition rather than against themselves. "If you’re really good, like in the Finns who have a really good group of people who are world class, then it is acceptable to stay at home and train together. But if you’re not at world class speed, you’ve got to get out there with people who are or you’re just not going to get it. And they don’t – they all stick together."

There is still some time left before Athens and it will be interesting to see if Robertson can work the same magic in the Yngling that she did in the Europe.

See the following pages for more photos...

Charlie's Angels or Shirley Robertson's Yngling team - with Inga Leask (left) and Sarah Ayton (right)