Young blades

We look at how Torvar Mirsky and Adam Minoprio came to be on the World Match Racing Tour

One of the key strengths of the World Match Racing Tour is its ability to propel some of the top young talent up the match racing ladder. In recent years we have seen this with Bahrain Team Pindar’s Ian Williams. But the latest young blades of the Tour are both Antipodeans – Perth-based 23 year old Torvar Mirsky and Auckland’s Adam Minoprio, 24.

Even though they both come from Down Under there are significant differences in how they came to get on the Tour. In France for example there are at least three nationally or regionally funded match race centres that have spawned the likes of Sebastien Col and Mathieu Richard. In Australia, Mirsky says there is none of this.

“I think in Perth we just all have a good understanding of sailing as a community, so we all do windsurfing, surfing, sailing - all the watersports lifestyle is quite prominent there and there are a lot of sailors who develop there. It is not like we have the best building blocks for it – we don’t have the structure there with match racing centres and so on, but the actual people themselves get together and get really good at it - that is how our team came about.”

If you are wondering about Mirsky’s lineage, his mother is all-Australia but his father is half Swedish, half Russian He explains: “Torvar is Scandinavian-ish and Mirsky is Russian – so it shows my origins, except that I haven’t come across another Torvar anywhere and I have been to most of Scandinavia!”

Mirsky doesn’t come from a sailing family but living in Fremantlem near the sailing club it was inevitable that he would be exposed to it. He started sailing when he was 10 in the Fremantle Sailing Club Mirror fleet and was in that for five years culminating in his participation in the 2001 Mirror Worlds in Howth, Ireland.

“I did it and I never stopped. It was just a good bunch of people,” he recalls of what attracted him to the sport. Fortunately his family was accommodating and family holidays camping turned into family holidays carting junior around the country to regattas. “I guess I wouldn’t be here unless they had committed to that. In sailing you need to have the support network around you to make that work,” Mirsky admits.

After Howth he moved briefly into 420s and won the Aussie Youth Nationals but came second qualifying to go to the Youth Worlds behind Nathan Outteridge, subsequently the 49er World Champion. From the 420 Mirsky went on to 505s, Lasers and also dabbled in 49ers and he and his team still regularly sail dinghies when they are not match racing.

“We all try and get out on dinghies as much as possible. I am a really strong believer that if you have done well in dinghies, you are a complete sailor and you can apply that to everything. In a keel boat there is not the same feel that you can learn in a dinghy.” As a result on of his crew is doing the 49er Worlds this year, and another the 505 Worlds. Mirsky is considering also doing the 49er Worlds, although he is still waiting to see how the season pans out.”



Minoprio by comparison grew up on a farm up north in North Island and did come from a sailing family, albeit a cruising one, his initial sailing being out of Whangarei. Personally he started sailing in Optimists aged 7 and as he developed found himself travelling down to Auckland every weekend to compete, thanks once again to accommodating parents.

“I won the first Opti Nationals when I was 11 and I went off to the Worlds that year and that is where I got my first taste of international sailing and from there I kept doing more dinghy sailing and trying to do more international sailing.”

He got out of the Optimist when he was 12-13 and moved in the ubiquitous P Class that pretty much every top Kiwi pro sailor has passed through on their way up to fame and fortune.

However after the dinghy scene, Minoprio was fortunate in having the opportunity that Mirsky didn’t have in being able to sign up to the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron’s famous youth training program in Auckland. “They have ten Elliott 6s and they go out every weekend and it teaches you how to sail keelboats and it introduces you to the scene and so you meet all the keelboat sailors around Auckland and they get you out on all the 40 footers and 50 footers and you do all that racing. And they also introduced me to match racing…” Minoprio recalls. To get into the program is a case of applying to the RNZYS who accept 33 candidates each year with 11 generally staying on for an extra year.

Academically Minoprio completed his degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Auckland before moving into match racing full time. Interestingly both Russell Coutts and Chris Dickson did this course. “It fits in quite well with the sailing on the technical side,” Minoprio says. And guess what – Mirsky also studied mechanical engineering, only at the University of Western Australia (except he hasn’t yet finished it).

An added benefit of the RNZYS scheme was that they also sent crews to international youth match racing events and for Minoprio these included the Governor’s Cup in Long Beach as well as a number of events in Australia such as the Australian Youth Nationals and the Warren Jones regatta in Perth.



While he didn’t have the benefit of a RNZYS type scheme, Mirsky attributes the single most important thing to have propelled them to his present heights as being this youth match racing ‘circuit’ in Australia and New Zealand including events in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington and Auckland. This has been around for about 15 years and was the path that James Spithill and his now renowned crew took before they were able to jump on the America’s Cup bandwagon with Syd Fischer’s Youth Australia America’s Cup team.

Mirsky describes it: “All the same guys who are under 20 are going to all these events and everyone stays at each other’s houses in each respective place, so it makes it cheaper for you and you meet everyone, you get to make friends with them. We all have a competitive rivalry and friendship, so everyone worked their way to getting better and we didn’t realise it at the time but that scene that we had was of a very high standard, so when we went over to compete in an open event in Europe we realised we were really competitive. It was quite a shock at how quickly we rose up the rankings and were winning events.”

So how did Mirsky pay to go racing? “There are always little grants around which I took full advantage of, so I would do all the paperwork and apply for everything I could. The people that were around me, my friends into sailing and my family - they would help for everything but there is no program in particular that I was a part of.”

But essentially he says they were just broke all the time! “We made the decision. We all were studying or working. We had proper lives. We just figured out that we really wanted to have a go at sailing and we decided to leave and dedicate our time fully to that. We didn’t have all the backing and stuff, but it felt like the right thing to do.”

Mirsky and Minoprio obvious came up against one another on the local circuit down under, and both made the step on to the international match racing stage at much the same time, bringing with them crews they have sailed with since their teens.

Minoprio finished his degree in 2007 and joined the Tour in 2008. In 2007 he qualified for the Monsoon Cup and he says that because they did well in that they started to get noticed. “We managed to get Emirates Team NZ to support us which last year helped us to get a lot of entries into Tour events. And because we did alright at the Monsoon Cup we managed to get FedEx to sponsor us which helped us step it up and do it properly last year which helped us to earn our entry into all the events this year…”



Mirsky’s big hits were winning the Open de France Grade 1 event in Pornichet, France both in 2007 and last year. However in terms of the Tour, he got to go to the Bermuda Gold Cup in 2006 which in retrospect he says they weren’t ready for, but then when Peter Gilmour pulled out of Match Cup Sweden in 2007 the America’s Cup legend cajoled the organisers to invite his protégé. “We always pestering to get invites and our ranking was going up quite quickly because we were doing 20 events a year,” recalls Mirsky. “We did most of the events last year and because our ranking was high enough we got a Tour Card this year. So this year no worries! Everything is easier…”

Both now hold ‘Tour Cards’, newly introduced to the Tour this year guaranteeing that they get to race at all Tour events in 2009.

Growing up Fremantle/Perth, Mirsky obviously came into contact with Western Australia’s most famous match racing son, Peter Gilmour.

“Gillie is our number 1 insight, especially when we were younger into what a professional sailor’s life is like,” admits Mirsky. “It is not like we sat down with him every single day, but he has always been a support to us and he has always recommended us and given us advice and pointed us in the right direction. That has been a huge help. A lot of the way that our team runs is marked on small things he’s said about his team and what he’s done and they are fundamental basics that you have to use to get where you are going. It is mainly about team work and the ways you manage a team and look after it. So if someone is the bowman on the boat, you don’t tell him how to do the bow job, he is the bowman and you trust him to do that job. And we apply that to everything. At the bottom mark I don’t say ‘let’s drop the spinnaker now’ - the guys pull the spinnaker down and I worry about steering the boat and when everyone does their job perfect you get this really great click. And we do that for things off the boat as well: one of us will do logistics and another will do sponsorship and we trust each other to do that and in the end we end up with a better product. We are similar to a business in a way. We think that if a lot of people applied this type of structure to everything that they’d get a lot further.” Wise words.

Obviously both Minoprio and Mirsky are still relatively new to the Tour but like every budding match racer, their dream is the America’s Cup.

As Mirsky says: “We want to be the best professional sailors there are and the America’s Cup has always been the pinnacle of the professional sailor’s career. I don’t know what the AC is doing, but we still want to get involved with it. We are working on that.”

While Mirsky half jokes that the Aussie yachting community is still happy to dine out on Australia 2’s win, Minoprio is perhaps in a slightly better position of getting on the America’s Cup bandwagon with his present association with Emirates Team New Zealand. For example he is in a good position to take the B-boat driver spot should the America’s Cup machine grunt into action sometime in the future.

However given the hiatus in the America’s Cup, Minoprio is wisely taking precautions. While Mirsky and his crew spend any available time off dinghy sailing, Minoprio and his troupe have been gaining offshore experience. “At the start of this year we did the Caribbean 600 with Lee Overlay and I did the Sydney Hobart with Ragamuffin. So we are just trying to divide it up and with the way the Cup is, the Volvo looks pretty good with the next race having three under 30s on each boat. There is no sailors at Team NZ who are under 30!”

We suspect we'll be hearing a great deal more from this duo over the next years.