Sail with New Freebooters

The world of yachting has plenty of icons – men, and a few women – who stand head and shoulders above their peers. Yacht designers and builders like Nat Herreshoff, Charles Nicholson, Will Fife and Olin Stephens in previous generations, as well as Bruce Farr and his contemporaries. Amateur yachtsmen like Paul Elvström, Rodney Pattisson and Ben Ainslie in dinghies, and Harold Cudmore in keelboat match racing. Professional sailing masters like Owen Parker, and the modern breed of sponsored and professional ocean racing skippers, starting with Eric Tabarly and expanding to today’s amazingly large club that includes nearly half the competitors in the Vendée Globe and the Volvo Ocean race.

Author, journalist and public speaker Malcolm Gladwell, a Canadian citizen born in Britain and living in New York, Launched a new book yesterday: Outliers – the story of success. In this book, he traces the careers of exceptionally successful people in disciplines varying from classical and rock music through professional sports to industry and technology. Two strong themes emerge, apart from the need for basic talent in the chosen discipline: a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice, and being the right age at the right time.

10,000 hours appears to be about the time it takes the human brain to build the exceptional skill levels required, and being born at the right time exposes them to the opportunities that direct high fliers to the discipline in which they excel.

The 10,000 hour rule looks as if it would fit the ocean racing skippers. All learned to sail as children, and many of them have been sailing instructors – Johnny Malbon is one, and many of the French contestants have done a long stint at Les Glénans. Others, like Ellen MacArthur, were obsessed with sailing from a very early age, but were also encouraged or supported by their parents.

The opportunity window for today’s ocean racing breed came with technology advances. Several were needed:

- Foremost is communications technology, which provides the means for skippers in the middle of nowhere to send in not only short messages, but sometimes hair-raising video clips. Ocean races last a long time, which keeps viewers hooked day after day. That makes  ocean racing a superb medium for sponsorship.

- Hull and rig design and technology have produced boats that travel at the spectacular speeds previously associated with dinghies and skiffs. This made it exciting enough to appeal to a broad public, many of whom knew little or nothing about boating. That clinched the deal for big sponsorship, which provided the funds for accelerated development of the boats involved, and increased the number of vacancies for skippers.

To understand the jump in spectator value, compare these two videos, both recent:

Mike Golding sailing Francis Chichester’s Gypsy Moth IV peacefull around the Solent, and:

Corentin Douguet sailing Crazy Figaro – in what the video claims was a training session…

Which reminds me: I forgot to mention electronic autopilot technology as an essential development. There is no way that Douguet could have gone to the bows and set up a spinnaker for hoisting if Crazy Figaro had been in the  hands of a mechanical vane steering gear.