The Tall Guy - part two

In the second part of our interview with him GBR Challenge's George Skuodas looks at the competition and explains his role as mastman.

See part one of this interview here....

OneWorld, Oracle and Alinghi have to date been proving that they are the dominant force in the challenger series, but Skuodas thinks they are not infallible. For example Alinghi, the pre-race favourites, have already dropped a match to Team Dennis Conner.

"We went up against Alinghi in the lighter stuff the other day. They didn’t have anything really special to show us. We were in a yacht race for a long time. It was only when the breeze started to shut off quite significantly that they sneaked away from us. We were pushing them pretty hard. They didn’t have anything to intimidate us with. On the first beat we were pretty close to sticking the dagger in them. But the margins are so small if that we’d managed to advance another 10-15ft on them then we would have had them in the bag, but we couldn’t get our bow that far forward. So we’re not intimidated by those people. They’re strong, they’re fast, they’re well prepared, they’re slick, but they’re definitely beatable."

Of the competition Skuodas says that the highly variable, springtime in Auckland conditions where has blown old boots one day and not at all the next, has made it hard to judge who is fast and who is slow upwind or downwind in differing conditions. But there is one exception.

"Oracle is quicker uphill than everyone else she’s race: she’s made time upwind every leg and lost time downwind every leg, regardless of wind strength. Of the rest of them, it hasn’t quite been played out. I don’t think we’re going to get a true handle on that until we’ve all raced each other a couple of times."

Skuodas feels that there will be marked difference between how boats are sailed in the first Round Robin and how they are sailed in the second.

"The matches will really heat up when we get into the second round robin. There is still a bit of trepidation at the moment. People are still sailing reasonably tightly for now. That will change. As points become more critical, people will start to take more chances and we’ll start to see a bit more biffle on the water.

"It’s a bit like at the Olympics. You see people who are the most conservative sailors all year long, and will never do anything remotely radical. Then come the second race of the Olympics and they think they’re losing, they’ll be miles out into the corner. People behave very differently when they can see it slipping away from them."