Giles Scott has come back to the Finn class exactly where he left off 18 months ago. Having dominated the Olympic regatta to win gold at Rio 2016, the British sailor went off to Land Rover BAR to serve as Sir Ben Ainslie’s tactician for Great Britain’s America’s Cup campaign in Bermuda last summer.
Boatspeed problems with Land Rover BAR’s foiling AC50 catamaran meant the Brits didn’t live up to pre-event expectations, although it was no reflection on Scott whose clear and concise instructions came over loud and clear on the on-board audio from the boat. It was an insight into one of the brightest minds in professional sailing who makes everything that he does look very, very easy.
At the beginning of 2018, having barely raced a Finn since Rio 2016, Scott stepped back into top flight Olympic competition and won Sailing’s World Cup Miami before the Medal Race had even been run. But of course, Scott won that too.
This season he will also be racing as strategist on board the TP52 Land Rover BAR Gladiator, helmed by owner Tony Langley with Sir Ben calling tactics. Scott also wants to get back to the Star Sailors League at the end of the season. “It’s been a few years since I did it, and I’d love to go back,” said Scott, who jumped into the Star for the first time in late 2014 for the SSL Finals in the Bahamas. Crewed by Irish Olympic representative Steven Milne, Scott made an impressive debut in the two-man keelboat, fighting his way through to the semi-final. “We were very green with no practice,” Scott recalls. “We approached it that we just wanted to have fun and do some good racing.”
One of Scott’s advantages that he brought to the Bahamas was his phenomenal fitness and downwind pumping technique from the Finn. “We made the most of the unlimited pumping rules, and we already had a good step up in the whole pumping dynamics and wave sailing downwind. The Star has a lot of similarities with the Finn downwind, which certainly helped. I was able to get up to speed with the Star pretty quickly.”
At the end of 2017 another British Olympic Champion, Paul Goodison, hit it out of the park when he made his debut at the Star Sailors League and - crewed by German veteran Frithjof Kleen - beat Robert Scheidt and Henry Boening in a photo finish in the closest of finals. “Goody did really well,” says Scott, “although I think he did a little bit of secret training in Garda. Even so, what he managed to do was pretty damn impressive. Obviously we’ve seen it’s possible to go there and beat Star sailors, but maybe a few of us Wild Cards should put in a bit more practice before we go next time.”
Meanwhile, Scott seems to require little practice to slot back in at the top of the Finn fleet once again. Another gold in Tokyo 2020 looks very likely, if his recent performance in Miami is anything to go by. The tall Briton, who at 194cm towers over almost everyone in the Olympic boat park, described getting back into the Finn as putting on a comfy old pair of slippers. Compared with the high adrenalin of racing on board an AC50 foiling catamaran at speeds closing on 50 knots, the slow-motion action in the Finn might seem a bit pedestrian, a bit boring even. Scott’s having none of it though. “It’s not boring at all. To be honest, you don’t really notice the whole slow motion thing either. It’s just a different end of the same sport. All the fundamentals of how you win races are pretty much the same…. just that one is at 4 knots and the other is 50 knots. They’re very different sides to the sport, and I think they are so radically different that you don’t really notice the difference in speeds, if you know what I mean.”
Scott argues that it’s not the speed of the boat itself that’s interesting, it’s the relative speeds of the boats in the race that’s what really matters. “It doesn’t matter how fast you go - the only thing you really care about is if you are going faster than the guy next to you. It’s the same in the 50s, it’s the same in any boat.”
Contrary to what you might expect, Scott says sailing similar kinds of boat can be more confusing than sailing very different types. “I find it’s when you sail boats that are actually quite similar to what you’re used to that you get a bit thrown out, sent out of whack.” To that extent, sailing the Star can present more of a challenge getting back into the Finn than sailing on a foiling catamaran. “I think it’s because there are a lot of crossovers in the technique; so the Finn and Star definitely complement one another in many ways, but they are actually so similar that the forces required for sailing downwind are so different that you kind of tune yourself into a Star then you jump back into a Finn and you are a little bit thrown out from where you were. I’m only talking about a day back in the Finn to get your feel back, but it’s interesting how racing similar boats can be more challenging in that respect.”
One of the longer-term aims of the Star Sailors League is to put together a world ranking for the sport that brings together the performances of all arms of sailing, from the short-course competition of the Olympic classes through to the inshore racing like the TP52 and America’s Cup circuits all the way through to the offshore competitions like the Figaro, Vendée Globe and Volvo Ocean Race. It’s such an outlandish goal, it would be easy to dismiss it altogether. “It would be a very challenging thing to get right because sailing is so broad and there’s all kinds of different types of sailing superstars,” says Scott. “It’s quite an interesting concept being able to compare offshore sailors with Cup sailors. It’d be a difficult equation to get right, but I think it’s an interesting one to look at nevertheless.”
Aside from being a successful yachtsman with European and National titles to his name in various types of racing boat, Andy Rice (pictured centre) started his career in yachting journalism in 1992 writing for Seahorse Magazine. SailingIntelligence.com