History of Olympics (6)

History of Olympics (6) 8/6/04 5:09 pm Page 49 THE HISTORY OF WINDSURFING Continuing our occasional series looking at the history of our sport, Gregg Dunnett turns his attention to the biggest world sporting event of the coming summer, and its relevance to windsurfing as we know it... WINDSURFING IN THE OLYMPICS W indsurfing has been an Olympic sport since 1984 – this summer’s Games in Athens will be the 5th time that our sport has been represented at Olympic level. There will be fleets for men and women, and each country is only allowed to submit one athlete for inclusion. Great Britain will be represented by two superbly fit and meticulously prepared athletes with possibly the best chance of success this country has ever had. Believe me, if we’re going to win a medal for windsurfing in this glorious competition, this is the year it’s going to happen... But – take a look back through the windsurfing magazines and you’ll see that we’ve said much the same thing many times before. This year is our year. This time it’s gonna happen... Yet it’s always gone wrong – to the extent that we’ve never won a single medal, not even a solitary bronze. With all the wisdom that hindsight brings, we can look back and say that this sad state of affairs partially results from having perhaps chosen the wrong sailors, along with failures in the way they’ve trained, failures in the way they’ve been supported and failures in the heat of competition itself. It also demonstrates just how incredibly difficult it is to succeed at this event. I don’t intend to devote space in this article to a discussion of our current candidates – that can wait till next month. But it can certainly be said that, compared to all the previous Games, it does look as though the right lessons have been learned, and our brave British duo are indeed the best choices, with the most meticulous preparation and training, and do indeed represent the best hope we’ve ever had of getting an Olympic Windsurfing medal. And that will indeed be an awesome achievement. Indeed, arguably the ultimate achievement in windsurfing. While it lacks the glamour and drama of something like the Aloha Classic or the battle to become a PWA World Champion, it’s actually much harder to win an Olympic medal than a World Tour title. Olympic sailors get just one chance every 4 years to fulfil their destiny. In the intervening years they must battle through qualifiying events in relative obscurity, training themselves to the point where they are some of the fittest men and women on the planet, and practising day in day out on a board that Windglider racing, circa 1983 Penny Wilson (nee Way) aboard an IMCO in preparation for the ’96 Atlanta Games www.boards.co.uk 07/04<049 History of Olympics (6) 8/6/04 5:09 pm Page 50 THE HISTORY OF WINDSURFING World Champion, and had already been lured away from fleet longboard racing into the exciting (and professional) world of funboard racing by the time the first Olympic Windsurfing opportunity came along. But... the guy who won those Games, Dutchman Stephan Van Den Berg, then crossed into the pro racing fleet – and beat Robby in many races. As for Dunkerbeck, he was always too heavy to be in contention in the Olympic racing classes which, as I’ll be detailing in a minute, have to be able to function in nonplaning conditions, and thus naturally suit lighter sailors. As for the women’s fleet, many of the leading racers have crossed effortlessly to or from the funboarding scene, as is nicely demonstrated by our own Christine Johnston, who represented the UK at the 2000 Olympic Games, and then switched disciplines to become Formula Windsurfing World Champion last year. There is no doubt that anyone who does well in the Olympics will have all the necessary skills to switch into any other contest disciplines should they wish to do so; they will have excellent tactical abilities, a fantastically thorough understanding of all aspects of training, all the psychological requirements to hold it together through a competition or series, and of course be immensely fit. A point nicely illustrated by the UK’s Ben Proffitt, who was a contender for the 2000 Games but is now one of the top freestyle / wave competitors in the UK. However, on the other side of the coin, quite a few Olympic Windsurfing medal winners have disappeared into complete obscurity, as have many of the national representatives after the Games. Nevertheless, whether or not Olympic windsurfers are the best sailors, there is no getting away from the fact that Olympic Windsurfing plays very little part in the average windsurfer’s perception of the sport. Actually, it has been a similar state of affairs for most of the Olympic sailing scene; an arcane side of the sport that gets very little media coverage, and has until recently been seen as a sideshow to the main event. (Indeed, at the Seoul Olympics, the sailing courses were an eight hour drive away from the track and field events.) And despite our grand nautical traditions here in the UK, our medal tally has never been particularly dramatic. However, during the last twenty years, our national governing body for sailing (the RYA) has undergone a complete shift in philosophy, from a gentleman’s club where everything was done strictly according to the book, to a punchy, motivated organisation, hungry for success and ready to do whatever it takes (legally!) to bring home the medals. And boy did they ever; The Windglider, some time ago... Ben Proffitt, now a top freestyle wavesailor, in his previous incarnation as an Olympic hopeful they probably have little interest in sailing recreationally. Why do they do it? Because they are driven. Driven by a desire to be the best and to prove that point by winning Olympic Gold. If we do not fully realise that in this country it’s about time we did, and hopefully the point will be driven home this summer by one or both of our athletes taking home a gold medal. But what does Olympic Windsurfing really mean? It will be very interesting to see if, as a result of us getting a medal, the national perception of windsurfing undergoes any change. Because right now, 99% of the windsurfing populace don’t naturally consider the Olympic Games to be the pinnacle of this sport. It has over the last two decades diverged steadily from mainstream windsurfing, to the point where nowadays the equipment used is totally different from what the vast majority of us sail when we go windsurfing or see when we visit a windsurfing shop. In fact, the Olympic kit has never been so dissimilar to that used by recreational sailors (or indeed, pro racers). But in actual fact, every single Olympic board has been seen by the majority of windsurfers in much the same way. Outdated. Obsolete and unrepresentative. (Indeed, the choice of the Olympic board does seem to have been extraordinarily ill-fated, as this potted history will describe.) As a result of this, for any countries where there is not a flourishing Olympic racing circuit, the general perception that those who win Olympic Gold are not in fact the best sailors in the world, since the world’s best sailors do not choose to sail in this discipline. Where are the Naishes, the Dunkerbecks? Surely they are the best, so if they are not doing the Olympics, what’s the point of it? This argument is indeed an interesting one. Naish and Dunkerbeck undoubtedly deserve their places at the top of the sport due to both their longevity as champions, and their ability to dominate in a wide range of disciplines. And both were indeed world class racers as well as slalom and wavesailors. Robby Naish was a many times Windsurfer 050>07/04 www.boards.co.uk History of Olympics (6) 8/6/04 5:09 pm Page 51 Barrie Edgington holding his Lechner down at the ’92 Barcelona Games Sydney 2000 was the most successful sailing Olympics this country has ever seen, with the UK by far the most dominant nation in the sailing class, taking a clutch of gold (Shirley Robertson [Europe], Ben Ainslie [Laser], Iain Percy [Finn]) as well as silver medals (Ian Barker and Simon Hiscocks [49er], Ian Walker and Mark Covell [Star]). Going by the last round of World Championships in the sailing classes, we could well be in for a similarly decent clutch of medals from the Athens Olympics. And hopefully, just maybe, there will be a windsurfing one (or two) in there as well... So let’s have a look back at the history of Olympic Windsurfing from the UK’s point of view, and consider what went wrong and why... planing sailing. However, back in 1984 it shouldn’t have been an issue. All they had to do was choose a board... THE FIRST OLYMPIC BOARD Up until the very early eighties, windsurfing kit was pretty simple. Although there were many brands of board, they were all pretty similar in shape and size, and most racing took place in one-design classes – i.e; everyone raced on Windsurfer Class boards, or whatever. There were a couple of development classes; namely Division I (flat-hulled) and Division II (displacement hulled), which allowed different brands of board to race together under the same generic class rules. The decision therefore seemed fairly straightforward – the selectors simply had to decide whether to go for a one-design or development class, and if it was to be a one-design, which brand to choose. They did indeed opt for a one-design class, since going for a development class was thought likely to result in some countries spending huge sums of money in an attempt to win a medal and effectively out-spending the competition rather than their athletes out-sailing them. In the Cold War days of the 1980s it was particularly important to be seen to be equally fair to the communist East and capitalist West. However, rather than plumping for the ubiquitous Windsurfer class, they chose to go with the somewhat less popular Windglider class, which turned out to be a near-disastrous decision for a number of reasons. The Windglider was tested in the first ever issue of this magazine, back in 1982. It was summed up like this: “Too many problems to make it a good board. The basic shape is unfortunately wrong, and the rig and fittings aren’t that good.” The problems didn’t even end there. Hoyle Schweitzer, still the holder of various international patents for the concept of the windsurfer, refused to issue a licence for the board in the United States, and threatened to sue if the board was used there (which was particularly problematic EXCITING BEGINNINGS By the late seventies, windsurfing was establishing itself on the world scene, growing at a phenomenal rate. The sport was an ideal candidate for Olympic inclusion and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) saw fit to vote it into the 1984 USA Olympic Games. In those days everyone was sailing on similar boards, and racing was a huge part of the sport. As footstraps had yet to make any impact on the scene, it mattered not whether racing was held in light or strong winds, so windsurfing was brought into the Olympic fold as a discipline of yachting. A decision which has had serious ramifications for the development of the Olympic Windsurfing class ever since, as it has meant that the windsurfing event at the Olympic Games has to take place in the same location and at the same time as the other yachting events – and these are usually planned with calm waters and light to moderate winds in mind; the perfect conditions for tactical dinghy and yacht racing. This has undoubtedly played a major role in moving Olympic Windsurfing away from the mainstream, with every other form of windsurfing competition being so much more about since the Games were in Los Angeles!) The IYRU would probably have backed down and selected another board, but its own rules didn’t allow this as the Russian team helpfully pointed out (and it was probably no coincidence that Russia had its own Windglider production plant). Nope; either the 1984 Olympics were raced on the Windglider, or they were not raced at all – but they couldn’t be raced because one of the ‘inventors’ of the sport itself would then sue the Olympic Games! This seemingly intractable mess sorted itself out in the end, as Hoyle was busy losing the power of his patent in the courts with our very own Peter Chilvers and was unable to carry through his threat. But the choice of Windglider remained extremely unpopular, since the choice of board for that first Olympics came at almost exactly the time when the high wind aspect of windsurfing was just breaking out. So although the decision in 1980 seemed just about justifiable, by 1984 the Windglider was looking seriously anachronistic. By this time the Hawaiian hotshots were riding big waves and getting big jumps, and long boards for sale in the UK had progressive fittings such as footstraps, retracting daggerboards and sliding mast tracks – yet the Olympic class didn’t even allow sailors to use a harness! (The board also had a fixed daggerboard and to go downwind you had to pull it up and hang it over your shoulder.) There were only a few sailors still out on the Windglider through choice, and they were the Olympic hopefuls. Dave Hackford won the eventual trials, to become the first Olympic windsurfer from the UK. Dave is now, for those that don’t know him, the main man alongside Roger Tushingham (no stranger to Olympic sailing himself) in the Tushingham/ Starboard empire, still out there competing on the UKWA slalom circuit and therefore still about as into windsurfing as it’s possible to be. Back then in 1984 he was already a top name in UK racing and aged just 20. And when he narrowly beat Dave Perks (who went on to become World Funboard Champion) for the UK’s place in www.boards.co.uk 07/04<051 History of Olympics (6) 8/6/04 5:09 pm Page 52 Sydney 2000 THE HISTORY OF WINDSURFING the Games at a selection trail at Weymouth, speculation and hopes quickly built up that he might have a very good chance indeed. It looked as though our best racer had been chosen, and was sure to do well. However, in those early days the national support for our Olympic windsurfers was pretty ropey – Dave was not well prepared for the Olympic ordeal. The RYA, which supported the UK sailing team and took windsurfing under its wing, didn’t really have any idea of what windsurfing was all about. Dave’s ‘coach’ was also the 470 (a two man dinghy) coach, and devoted the majority of his energies to that. There was no financial support in those days, and certainly no hi-tech physiologists to plan the training and build-up to the event. Dave was living with his parents, on the dole, and basically doing his best to prepare himself for the Olympic Games. He was still incredibly fit – the sailors were not allowed harnesses remember, and since the races could go on for about 2 hours and be held regardless of wind strength, not being fit wasn’t an option. Nevertheless, in terms of preparation, things could not have been more different to how they are for our sailors today. Dave’s Olympics started poorly, with a disqualification from the first race for pumping. He says there were boats stationed all over the course watching the competitors like hawks to ensure this rule was strictly applied. After this desperately bad start he gradually improved and by the end of the event was putting in consistent results around 10th or 11th. He finished 21st overall, but reckons that he could and should have been at least top ten. Whatever the British outcome, those first windsurfing Olympics were a definite success. There is little doubt that the best sailors in the world rose to the top of the fleet and Stephan Van Den Berg of Holland goes down in history as the first Olympic Windsurfing gold medallist, and then went on to success in professional windsurfing. KOREA 1988 With the next Olympics in Korea just four years away, a decision had to be made pretty quickly about what board to race on. Nobody wanted anything more to do with the Windglider! A number of proposals were put to the IYRU committee in charge. The USA wanted the Olympics turned into a sort of fun event with slalom, triangle racing and a long distance race all combining to find an overall winner. The Dutch wanted an updated Windglider to be the choice, and the French wanted to turn up on their Div II boards. As Div II competition was seen as the cutting edge for pure racing in 1984, the IYRU opted for a one-design Div II board to reflect this – the hitherto little known Lechner. For all BOARDS readers who have got into windsurfing in the last ten years and thus have absolutely no idea what a Division II board might be, as mentioned earlier, race boards at this time were divided into Division I (flat hulled boards), and Div II, with round, or ‘displacement’ hulls. Many of the leading brands had a Div II board in their range, and there were also some specialist companies (such as Lechner) making designs. Div II boards were seriously tippy (if you’ve ever tried balancing on a floating log, you’ll have some idea as to what it’s like to sail a Div II board) and were thus brutally difficult to sail downwind, but they went upwind in light airs incredibly well, making them fast and tactical around a race course. Unfortunately, once again the selectors had managed to spectacularly mis-time their decision. The days of Div II had already peaked, and a new class of board was in the process of taking over the world – the funboard. The invention of the ‘pintail’ rather than the square tail featured on all boards up until then, made footsteering and the carve gybe possible, and everyone was getting into planing sailing. Indeed, 1985 probably represents the high point of windsurfing in terms of interest and participation. The manufacturers were selling thousands of boards a year and keen to splash a lot of cash about on sponsoring sailors. There was a thriving funboard racing fleet in most countries, the World Cup was going from strength to strength, and offering the best sailors the opportunity to become globetrotting professional windsurfers Dave Hackford, the UK’s first Olympic Windsurfing representative, aboard the Windglider, the first Olympic board PUMP AND PLAY... It’s impossible to over-state just how brutally fitness-orientated the Olympic Windsurfing discipline has become. If you’re picturing ‘pumping’ as the sort of half-hearted pumping of the sail that most sailors do occasionally to try and get their board planing, think again. Olympic-style pumping is a big, full-body manouevre, fanning the sail through its complete range of motion, and pushing as hard as possible with the legs. It’s exceptionally aerobic – there is nothing like it in any other Olympic discipline. On a light wind day, the sailors can be working at 70-80% of max heart rate for an entire 90 minute race. And then do it again twice more on that day. In the build-up to the Sydney event, comparing specific fitness measurements such as VO2 Max rates (which is a guide to how well the body takes up oxygen during hard exercise), revealed that Olympic windsurfers were the fittest athletes of the entire Games. Just stop and think about that for a moment. Fitter than the cyclists. Fitter than the marathon runners... Simon Bornhoft spent the day training with Nick before the 2000 Games and sent back this report: “Fitness matters in Olympic Windsurfing, more than anything else. It doesn’t matter how tactically masterful you may be, if you’re not fit enough to pump your way round that race course at full pelt, you’ll be finishing at the back of the fleet... I’ve done World Cup events indoor and outdoor, done the British racing series, wave events, freestyle contests, 100 miles downwind on the HiHo, numerous channel crossings, massive gun runs, held the 100 mile world record and sailed 100 miles non stop on a board, but there is nothing more tiring than racing an IMCO off the wind in marginal conditions. NOTHING!” 052>07/04 www.boards.co.uk History of Olympics (6) 8/6/04 5:09 pm Page 53 Seoul 1988 Top sailors therefore had a choice. They could become a funboarder, easily find a major sponsor or two (maybe a car brand and a drinks company, neatly eliminating transport and partying bills) take part in colourful, exciting and highly publicised racing in the UK and internationally; get their picture in all the magazines and basically lead the life they’d always dreamed off ... or they could sail a Lechner. In which case they’d have to dedicate their life to a displacement hull, and a racing style generally considered out of date and increasingly ignored by the magazines and sponsors. They would of course have to buy their own board(s), and would then have to train every day on this board without any real financial support, and set their sights on the one goal that mattered, Olympic Gold. But because only one sailor from each country would be sent, the actual chances of even getting a shot at this ultimate prize were very slim indeed. No surprise then that most opted for the glamorous funboard route! And by 1988 the Lechner was probably even more outdated than the Windglider had been in 1984. Sailors were allowed to use harnesses (and the daggerboards were retractable), but the 6.4 sail was just a triangle of Dacron with a couple of leech battens for support (everyone else was at least using fully-battened sails by this time). The British entrant, Simon Goody, was never a big name in UK windsurfing. He only ever made a mark in the Lechner class, and was never realistically in contention for any medals at the Games, so once he was selected there was little for the media to get its teeth into there. The excitement and tension that had built up in 1984, when we had a high profile sailor attending the first ever Olympics, never really materialised and the whole event passed pretty much un-noticed in the UK. Simon did as well as he might have expected, coming 15th overall, with his best results being a 7th and 8th. But even in the windsurfing press, his efforts only merited 2 paragraphs (149 words exactly, not counting the title) in BOARDS at the time, bolted onto the end of a 4 page article on the Round Hayling Island race. In hindsight, this seems pretty shocking, but it really does reflect just how little interest there was in the Olympic aspect of the sport at that time. We had actually tried to ‘big it up’ a bit in the previous issue, with quite a big report on the UK Olympic trials, which were indeed dramatic – it all went right to the wire, with three sailors tied on equal points going in to the very last race. But even though the racing was clearly as close and exciting as can be, the tone of the article was still very much ‘look – Division II racing is exciting after all’, and the sailors involved were not then the stars of the UK racing circuit that Dave Hackford (who’d gone down the funboard route) and Dave Perks were. Indeed, of those three contenders, Barrie Edgington is the only one who has gone on to anything further in windsurfing; the other two, Stephen Blake and Simon Goody, have since disappeared into complete obscurity. Barrie Edgington aboard a Lechner at the Weymouth trials in ’88 BARCELONA 1992 With recreational windsurfing now a million miles away from the Div II concept, you could be forgiven for assuming that the IYRU would be quick to drop the Lechner and sign up a more contemporary board. But it didn’t happen. The problem was simply that the Olympic board must be able to Howard Plumb in training on the IMCO before the ’96 Atlanta Games provide fair competition anywhere in the world, whatever the weather. Having the windsurfing event not run because of a lack of wind would be a disaster and would probably see the sport dropped from the next Olympic schedule, so a board designed for planing conditions only was never in the frame, and this ruled out most of the current ‘funboard’ designs. The IYRU therefore decided to play safe and keep things as they were. Fortunately for the sailors, they at least deigned to give the Lechner an updated rig, finally fully battened and with camber inducers, which at least saw it looking similar to a modern windsurfer to TV audiences. The IYRU also announced the inclusion of a women’s windsurfing class for the 1992 Games, also racing on the Lechner. Windsurfing, and more specifically funboarding, was beginning to make an impact on television screens around the world with its colour and glamour. The IYRU desperately wanted to see Olympic yachting gaining airtime and the Lechner board was the closest thing they had to a funboard. Running both a men’s and women’s event doubled the amount of windsurfing at the Games, www.boards.co.uk 07/04<053 History of Olympics (6) 8/6/04 5:09 pm Page 54 The 1996 Atlanta Games THE HISTORY OF WINDSURFING and would thus hopefully ensure more coverage. This Olympic cycle did indeed attract a little more attention from the media here in the UK, largely due to the efforts of Penny Way, probably the best women’s racer the UK has ever produced. In the years preceding the 1992 Games, Penny was completely dominant in the international women’s racing scene; World Champion for 2 years and looking a dead cert for a medal. And then Barrie Edgington, who had become a fearsomely skilled racer over the years since the 1988 trials, won the Lechner Worlds in January ’92, meaning that he was going to the Games as the reigning World Champion! So there was massive expectation and pressure on Penny and Barry to return with Spanish gold... By now there was more thought and attention to detail regarding the training process. Both Barrie and Penny spent a lot of time in Barcelona training on the course – they actually missed international events in order to maximise the time spent familiarising themselves with the conditions in the harbour at Barcelona. And the conditions there were indeed unusual enough to warrant this approach. The course was to be laid out as close as possible to the harbour wall where hundreds of spectators were expected to be sitting, and this meant wind shifts and choppy waves on the course. Specifically the harbour wall refracted the waves, creating extremely difficult conditions in the crucial startline area. Added to this was the difficulty in launching. The athletes had to launch over sharp rocks – all except for the Spanish team who were allowed exclusive access to the only beach! Ho-hum... But as it turned out, these pre-event preparations and expectations were not enough. Penny came closest, and she might indeed have got a medal had she not suffered from equipment failure. But it is fair to say that things went badly wrong for both of them. Barrie started the event with a 13th and things got worse from then on. Although he had trained in the difficult conditions of Barcelona Harbour, he hadn’t reckoned on the TV boats which buzzed around creating random and movable wind shadows, particularly on the top name sailors, which – as reigning world champion – he certainly was. And although he was one of the world’s best prior to the event, he found that others had raised their games considerably. And finally he was probably just too stressed out with too short a time to prepare for the Games. Speaking to him now, he is too modest to blame his results on anything other than a failure on his part to prepare adequately, but others are more outspoken and will say that Barrie was probably the finest Olympic racer we have ever had, which puts the 1992 Olympics up there as a real wasted opportunity. As for Penny, she started with a 4th, then a 3rd, then a 7th followed by another 3rd – with consistency like that she was definitely in with a chance of a medal. But a couple of races later she suffered a major setback – her daggerboard snapped off, and the rules specifically forbade any redress for equipment failure. After this she was always just too far back to challenge and she finished 6th. Gold went to Barbara Kendal of New Zealand with Franck David of France taking the men’s. (Barbara has remained a top competitor to this day, but Franck David has disappeared from the scene completely.) Christine Johnston crosses the finish line at the Sydney 2000 Games Howard Plumb ATLANTA 1996 So once again, it was time for a rethink as to the Olympic board. They simply couldn’t consider the Lechner for a third Games, could they? Fortunately not; it was dropped in favour of the Mistral IMCO raceboard. This was a widely popular choice, as IMCO racing was a successful and popular one-design fleet, and the boards were also fairly well in touch with the current funboard racing fleet designs. So for once, an Olympic sailor could also partake in other current racing. However, one other change to the Olympic class racing rules was much more controversial. After 12 years of hassle policing the anti-pumping rule, the organisers had bowed to the inevitable and decided to legalise it in the windsurfing classes. This changed the whole nature of the racing, pushing fitness right to the forefront for anything other than planing racing; ultimately, whatever their tactical abilities may be, the sailor who can pump hardest and most efficiently in non or marginal planing conditions will win. It is a dilemma for the Olympic Committee, if pumping is allowed then it almost seems inevitable that sailor skill and tactics take a back seat to overall fitness, yet if pumping is banned, they require a fleet of boats to police the course and run the risk of making windsurfing look ridiculous for disqualifying leading athletes for doing nothing more than moving an unstayed and fully mobile rig in some arbitrary, disallowed manner... Here in the UK, Penny Way, still smarting from her bad luck in Barcelona, had successfully made the switch from Lechner to IMCO, but now had a number of challengers who had been training really hard and were ready to give her a run for her money. However, Penny was up to the challenge, and packed her bags ready for her second crack at the Olympics with a point to prove. In the men’s fleet, the fact that the board was now of a type familiar to our top funboard racers meant that the UK Olympic trials attracted most of our top sailors, including the likes of Julian Anderson, Guy Cribb and many other ‘names’, who all lined up alongside the coterie of regular IMCO sailors who had been training specifically over the past four year for this event. Barrie Edgington, who had by now settled down into a proper job, was also coaxed out of racing retirement to give the trials a go, and it ended up being very much a two-horse race between Barrie and top IMCO sailor Howard Plumb. Howard just pipped Barrie to win the trials, and off he went to Atlanta... Race one in Wassaw Sound, Savanna, saw Howard down in 35th place, but Penny in 5th. Conditions were very fickle, with the tail end of Hurricane Berta tickling the race course during the first few days of competition with rumbles of thunder and lightning flashes. Race two, Howard is judged to be over the line at the start and is disqualified – and that was pretty much game over for him. Penny is doing well, but her slot flusher comes off, slowing her down and she finishes way down the fleet. However, this time she benefits from a rule change allowing her to claim redress for equipment failure (the equipment used is all supplied by the Olympic Committee so its failure is no reflection on Penny, and this very rule was adopted as a reaction to her snapped daggerboard incident 4 years earlier) and she is awarded 5th place. In the next races she bags two more 5ths, a 6th and a 4th. It’s enough to be in contention for the bronze medal with 4 more races to go – but then the race organisers decided to cut back the regatta to just nine races following the stormy conditions of the first few days. The next two races were make or break for Penny. Unfortunately it all goes wrong. Race 8 saw her on the wrong side of the beat as a huge wind shift came through and half the fleet sailed over the top of her. She finished 20th and that effectively ended it. She too recorded a premature start in the last race, but it hardly mattered now and she finished 7th overall. Howard Plumb fought back to finish 24th overall, but was never remotely in contention for the medals, with the men’s gold going to Nikos Kaklamanakis, while Singapore’s Lee Lai Shan took the women’s. (Both these sailors are still very much in contention in the IMCO fleet today.) Penny may not have quite made it into the medals, but her achievement was still considerable. Unlike most areas of windsurfing competition, the women’s event in the Olympics is every bit as competitive and tough as the men’s, and Penny is – so far – the best Olympic windsurfer this country has produced. Coming 6th and 7th at two consecutive Olympics is proof enough that she is a world class sailor. And this achievement was marked, quite imaginatively, by her (then) home town of Christchurch naming a road after her – Penny Way. At this point in our historical journey, it’s worth pausing to consider a few reasons that stand out clearly now as being factors in why we were just not getting the medals. The downfall of so many of our Olympic sailors, going right back to Dave Hackford’s days in 1984, was simply that they peaked too soon. To us non-athletes this might sound like a 054>07/04 www.boards.co.uk History of Olympics (6) 8/6/04 5:09 pm Page 55 Guess who?!? Olympic medal; he had not produced any top showings in international competition, whereas Barrie was totally at home in the intense pressure of world class competition and could almost certainly have done better. Barrie should have gone. But rules were rules, and couldn’t be broken. Fortunately, today things are very different. The selection process is now designed to ensure that the sailor most likely to win a medal gets selected, and the selection is made as early as possible to ensure the sailors can then plan their training to peak at exactly the right time for the Games. But it’s taken a long time to get this right... Dave Hackford in ’83 SYDNEY 2000 bit of an excuse, but it’s actually a really serious issue. Essentially, what was happening was our sailors were actually peaking for the trials, rather than the Games themselves. As only one sailor from each country can go to the Olympics, winning the trials becomes the most important goal and everything – all the training, both mental and physical – has to be directed towards peaking in time for the trials. This is bad news physically, as it simply isn’t possible to then maintain that peak for the actual Olympics themselves (which were usually fairly soon after the trials), but was also bad news mentally, as it screwed up the whole psychology of the preparations. If your biggest hurdle is seen as getting through the trials, then once you have done that, you relax – the pressure is off. NOT a way to ensure medals! It was a no win situation, either you peaked for the Olympics but didn’t go because you lost the trials, or you peaked for the trials and under-performed at the Olympics. The trials themselves were also flawed as a concept. While the organisers set them up as a scrupulously fair, unbiassed way of winning a place at the Olympic Games, it was actually a very anachronistic approach, harking back to the days of the true amateur, good sportsmanlike Olympic ideal. Sod that – we wanted medals! If, like the 1988 trials, it all comes down to one race deciding which of three candidates should go, then ultimately it’s introducing a ridiculous element of chance and luck. How can that be the best way of ensuring our best chances of bringing home a medal? Or, as at the 1996 trials where Barrie Edgington, reckoned by many to be the best racer Britain has ever produced and already with an Olympic Games under his belt, was out there with the briefest of preparation, yet was only just getting beaten by Howard Plumb who’d had four years to prepare. But realistically, Howie was never going to get an Close racing on the Windglider, circa 1983 From the way the world looked in 1996, the Olympic Committee decided that there wasn’t any significant need for different equipment to be used for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney and the Mistral One Design Class remained. Unfortunately though, once again the world of recreational windsurfing had just started moving away from the Olympic model, with pro racing all moving towards short boards and very different courses. The extreme levels of fitness now required in Olympic windsurfing due to the pumping had also created a massive gap between the full-time Olympic wannabes and the average (and indeed the pro) racers in the funboard fleet. They simply were not in the same league any more. So the choice for the UK representatives for the 2000 Olympics came down to just a few sailors, and this time, rather than running trials, a selection system was devised based on international results, resulting in Nick Dempsey and Christine Johnston being nominated. By now the entire UK sailing team has secured full funding through the Sports Lottery scheme so Nick and Christine were able to train full time for the Games without financial worries, and they were in theory the best prepared of any of our athletes... But again, despite all the training and preparations we ended up well outside the medals; Christine and Nick finished 18th and 16th respectively. Both were frustrated by the predominantly light wind conditions, although when the wind did pick up late (too late) in the regatta, both were able to prove their mettle by recording 2nd place finishes in individual races. But this once again underlines just how tough the Olympics are. Four years on, here we are, just weeks away from the 2004 Olympics which will once again be raced on the IMCO board, although almost certainly for the last time. So have the right lessons been learned? Have the right sailors been selected, and how will we fare this year? What is the future of Olympic Windsurfing for the 2008 Games in China? For the full story on all these issues you’ll just have to buy next month’s magazine... OLYMPIC MEDALISTS Los Angeles 1984 Raced on the Windglider. Total number of entrants 38 1 Stephan Van Den Berg (NED) 2 Randal Steele (USA) 3 Bruce Kendall (NZL) 21 Dave Hackford (GBR) Seoul 1988 Raced on the Lechner. Total number of entrants 45 1 Bruce Kendall (NZL) 2 Jan Boersma (AHO) 3 Michael Gebhardt (USA) 15 Simon Goody (GBR) Barcelona 1992 Raced on the updated Lechner A-390 Men (total number of entrants 44) 1 Franck David (FRA) 2 Michael Gebhardt (USA) 3 Lars Kleppich (AUS) 12 Barrie Edgington (GBR) Women (total number of entrants 24) 1 Barbara Kendall (NZL) 2 Xiaodong Zhang (CHN) 3 Dorien De Vries (NED) 6 Penny Way (GBR) Atlanta 1996 Raced on the Mistral IMCO Men (total number of entrants 46) 1 Nikolaos Kaklamanakis (GRE) 2 Carlos Espinola (ARG) 3 Gal Friedman (ISR) 24 Howard Plumb (GBR) Women (total number of entrants 27) 1 Lee Lai Shan (HKG) 2 Barbara Kendall (NZL) 3 Alessandra Sensini (ITA) 7 Penny Wilson (nee Way) (GBR) Sydney 2000 Raced on the Mistral IMCO Men 1 Christoph Sieber (AUS) 2 Carlos Espinola (ARG) 3 Aaron McIntosh (NZL) 16 Nick Dempsey (GBR) Women 1 Alessandra Sensini (ITA) 2 Amelie Lux (GER) 3 Barbara Kendall (NZL) 18 Christine Johnston (GBR) www.boards.co.uk 07/04<055