News

16

March 2018

The Stars of the Finn Fleet

Many of the competitors in the Star fleet cut their teeth in the singlehanded Finn class. The Men’s Heavyweight dinghy in the Olympic Games is arguably the toughest physical challenge in sailing. With a competitive racing weight of between 95kg and 110kg, Finn athletes are the giants of the dinghy park and ideally suited to the transition to the Star later in their careers. 

This week the Finn European Championships are taking place in Cadiz in the south of Spain, where a fleet of 91 international competitors are fighting it out in a range of conditions. It has been a tough, mentally and physically challenging week with the Netherlands Nicholas Heiner and Great Britain’s Ed Wright looking the most likely candidates for gold.

One of the driving forces behind the Star Sailors League is Xavier Rohart who represented France twice at the Olympic Games in the Finn, before moving over to the Star where he won two World Championships and a bronze at the Athens 2004 Games. Some have made a successful switch over to the Star very quickly from the Finn. Britain’s Iain Percy won Olympic gold in the Finn at Sydney 2000 and just two years later was standing on the top step of the podium at the Star World Championships in Los Angeles, alongside his crew Steve Mitchell. Percy would later team up with another Finn sailor, Andrew ‘Bart’ Simpson, who won bronze at a Finn Gold Cup [the class World Championship] but who never looked likely to topple his team mate Ben Ainslie from Olympic selection. So Bart jumped ship to crew for his best friend Percy and together they won Star gold at Beijing 2008 and were silver medallists in that nailbiting Medal Race where they lost out to eventual winners at London 2012, Sweden’s Freddie Loof and Max Salminen.

For Loof, victory over Percy on the Briton’s home waters must have felt like some kind of consolation after the Swede had so often finished off second or third best to Percy on a number of significant occasions. There was Sydney 2000, where Loof presented the only serious threat to Percy’s gold going into the final race. So a bit like the more notorious Sydney 2000 match race duel between Ben Ainslie and Robert Scheidt in the Laser, Percy sailed Loof down the fleet to protect gold. However, this left the way clear for Italian representative Luca Devoti to race to an unexpected silver while the unfortunate Loof was demoted to bronze. 

Percy and Loof’s careers mirrored each other, with both moving over the Finn to the Star; yet again, at Beijing 2008, the two rivals found themselves in a three-way fight for the medals, the other being Brazil’s Robert Scheidt who had graduated from the Laser four years earlier. This time there could be no straight match race, so it was a cleaner who-beats-who scenario than Sydney. But yet again it was Percy in gold and Loof in bronze, with Scheidt taking up the spot for silver in the middle of the other two. So finally at London 2012, Loof managed to turn the tables on Percy in yet another Medal Race photo finish. Loof’s gold medal winning crew Max Salminen has since moved into the Finn and has become one of those rare individuals to excel in two different roles in two different boats - Olympic Champion Star crew and World Champion Finn helmsman after winning the Finn Gold Cup on Lake Balaton in 2017.

Another multi-talented sailor who has won at both ends of the boat is none other than the Olympic legend, the late Paul Elvstrom. After winning four back-to-back Olympic gold medals from 1948 to 1960, with three of them won in the Finn, Denmark’s most famous sailor notched up some notable achievements in the Star class. The Great Dane crewed France’s Albert Debarge to a silver medal at the 1957 Star Worlds in Havana, behind America’s Lowell North and James Hill. A decade later, Elvstrom would twice get his revenge over North as the Dane steered his own Star to victory at two successive World Championships - Kiel 1966 and Copenhagen 1967. On both occasions the American team finished runner-up to Elvstrom, crewed by John Albrechtson in 1966 and Poul Mik-Meyer a year later.

There are many other examples of successful transitions from the singlehander to the Star, Hubert Raudaschl, Philippe Presti and Mateusz Kusnierewicz to name three notable others. However it’s not necessarily a straightforward progression; the Star is more technically challenging than the Finn and the learning curve is big. However, perhaps most demanding of all is learning to compete as a team, working as a unit after being able to run your own campaign on your own terms. The most successful Finn converts have been those that have worked in partnership with their crews. 

One thing that both classes share is a great spirit of camaraderie, a shared ethos of sportsmanship and a mutual respect that surely comes down to the fact that both classes have been around for a very long time. The Star was designed in 1910 and the Finn came along in 1949. The roll call of famous champions in both classes reads like a Who’s Who of world-class talent. That long heritage is what makes victory in either of these fleets a very special achievement in any sailor’s career.

Rachele Vitello

SSL Press Officer since 2015