The reluctant hero

madforsailing talks to Neal McDonald about the Volvo and his plans thereafter

Britain has a new sailing hero in the making, but a more reluctant one is hard to imagine.

Neal McDonald was promoted to skipper of Assa Abloy when Roy Heiner was fired in Cape Town and since then he taken the Swedish team from strength to strength, to date winning two out of the five legs of the Volvo Ocean Race against illbruck's three. But one gets the impression that back in Cape Town he was dragged kicking and screaming into the top dog role, a little like Peter Pan losing his virginity.

McDonald explains his reluctance: "One of the funny things about this, as soon as you put your name on the board as skipper you close down an awful lot of opportunities. Whereas a year ago a lot of people would say "oh yeah, we'll get that McDonald bloke on, he can steer, he'd be alright, he’ll come and help us out" a lot of people will now go, "well he's a skipper, he's not going to do as he's told". So you do close down a lot of opportunities which is why in the past I haven't stuck my neck out too hard to search out those particular roles".

What is ironic about this is that McDonald is one of the most modest people in the world of professional sailing, while at the same time being one of the most talented and capable. Grant Dalton commented some time before the start of the Volvo Ocean Race that McDonald was worth two average mortal crewmen.

His sailing CV is impressive as it is diverse. In the late 1980s he was part of the British Olympic squad and put in a creditable sixth in the Flying Dutchman at Seoul. He moved into International 14s and won the USA and World Championships in 1989 and almost a decade later briefly campaigned a 49er, winning the Europeans in 1998.

In the interim he took part in the briefest of Whitbread campaigns with Lawrie Smith on board Fortuna and then with more success on board Silk Cut four years later. In between he joined up with the Sydney '95 America's Cup syndicate as mainsail trimmer.

However the professional side of his life also makes him an incredibly valuable asset in a sailing team. He is a trained naval architect and for a long time worked at Carbospars. These talents were particularly useful when he sailed with Grant Dalton on board Club Med in The Race, during which it was he who was largely responsible for keeping the boat together on the return journey up the Atlantic. Among all-rounders, few are as complete as he.

The end of the fifth leg of the Volvo Ocean Race was one of the most exciting to date. illbruck seemed to have it in the bag, but then Assa stole it from them in the closing stages. "We've got a great boat and great campaign and we have been playing catch up," explains McDonald of how they have got competitive. "It is difficult to compete with a campaign like illbruck who are so polished, so organised, so well funded and so well advanced. Basically on the start line in Southampton they were two years ahead of everyone else. We've been trying to compact those two years into the last three or four legs.

"We're more comfortable with our speed than we have been before. We've developed sails that have slowly brought us back up to the pace that illbruck's got and I think on the leg it was a crawling hard grind. One of the things was that the lads on the boat all kept going, they kept fighting all the way to the end. One of our saying is 'never, never, never give up' and it is like that. On a leg like that there are opportunities to gain or lose and you are bound to get some of those opportunities wrong and some right. The thing is to keep pushing and pushing".

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