Chatting with the giants pt2

A pre-Colorcraft Gold Cup conversation with Victory Challenge's Magnus Holmberg and OneWorld's Peter Gilmour

Q: Certainly, we've learned this morning that some of the top teams among the seeds are stepping up the competition a notch here.
Q. Peter, you mentioned the value of having another skipper or helmsman on your team of four coming into the Gold Cup. Is there any difficulty that you can foresee in the communication and the dynamic between, say, you and Morgan? I know the two Japanese fellows have probably been with you several times. How will you handle that dynamic?

PG: Well, we've actually sailed together a lot more in the America's Cup boat either with myself as skipper and Morgan as tactician, or Morgan as skipper and myself as tactician. And we’ve had a mild degree of quite good success. So, we already do have quite a close working relationship.

I really don't foresee any problems in that regard. I just hope Morgan is brushing up on his Japanese, that's all.

Q. I wanted to ask Magnus what goes through his mind prior to the starting sequence when he's in the situation where he's facing an unknown -- a sailor that's unknown to him coming out of the unseeded ranks?

MH: Well, I think the important thing is to focus on your own performance and try not to think too much about who you are sailing against. Rather, try to focus on doing everything as well as possible and keep your . . . keep your level of sailing up there, because if you start to think about who you are sailing and maybe start thinking that this should be . . . you'll be . . . it could be a quick way out of the tournament. So I think that you have to just try to focus on what your own performance and do as well as possible.

Q. Magnus, your base has been right next door to the Alinghi (Swiss, Russell Coutts) team. Has there been much cooperation, racing, anything else going on between you?

MH: Well there isn’t any cooperation, but we have been doing a bit of racing against each other. That is something we both are doing, testing and crew training and so on, but then once in awhile, we get together and do some racing.

Q. And has that been of value?

MH: Yeah, sure, I think it's been a value to both of us because it's, first of all -- it's easy to get in to a very monotone sort of rhythm, if you spend months and months with just training and testing and things like that. So I think as far as motivation for the team, I think it has a fantastic value, even if it's not that often that we go racing. Of course, it's very important that to get forward with the project -- audible -- for the afterguard to to evaluate what sort of combinations that works best and several things that of course are of great value.