Despite all your best-laid plans, sometimes you are struck down by something utterly beyond your control. Three days before the start of the Beijing Games, I wondered if I’d even get to the start line.
The immediate build-up to the Olympics hadn’t gone brilliantly for me. There were a few niggles. First the media interest. You expect a lot of attention in the weeks leading up to any Olympics; but, at a certain point, you try to switch to competition mode. It’s a difficult one, because you have a responsibility to talk to the press. But at the same time, all you’re interested in is competing and staying focussed. I think as a team we could have done a better job of cutting out any distractions in the final three to four days before racing started.
Also, a few days before the start of the Games, the GB sailing team flew to a holding camp in Shanghai, about 1,000 kilometres away from Qingdao. There was time for a little R&R, meetings about rules, the logistics of our events, and there was some team-building, with some motivational speeches from the team psychologist, Ben Chell.
His message was pretty basic stuff about having the confidence to succeed, but he was really trying to build us all up, as a group. I guess it was valuable to some of the younger members of the team, but it was really the wrong message for me personally. When it comes to psychology, we’re all different and I didn’t need that. To my mind, it’s all about getting my own preparation right.
At a big event like an Olympics, I’m highly focussed. I just concentrate on getting my head down and immersing myself in my own performance – so much so that, to some people, I possibly come across as being too self-centred, although that’s not the case.
There were certain team issues I wasn’t altogether happy with in terms of the way that things were set up. But I tried not to make too much of an issue out of it. As long as they didn’t impact too heavily on my preparations there was no point in creating a massive amount of friction by voicing my opinion on how things should be run. Doing that quickly snowballs, and doesn’t necessarily help you or the team in the long term.
As a competitor, I try not to get involved in the political side of the sport. But maybe when I’ve retired from Olympic sailing, who knows? I often feel guilty that I haven’t put more back into sailing because I’ve been so busy racing. I’d like to help with the future development of the sport.
Certainly from a youth perspective, I think that these days there is far too much pressure put on kids to compete at certain events and train in a certain way. It’s no surprise that we lose many of them when they reach burnout far too early. The focus must be on logistical support, financial support and coaching. Not trying to predetermine someone’s life from the age of 12.If a young person is truly determined to make it, then they will normally get there but they need to be allowed to make their own mistakes and learn from them. Anyway, in the future I hope I can help and put a little bit back.
At Qingdao, I worked closely with Jez Fanstone, my coach. Lymington-based, he used to sail Finns when he was younger, and then became a professional sailor. He did a couple of Whitbread races; one with Lawrie Smith on Silk Cut, back in 1994, and skippered News Corp, sponsored by Rupert Murdoch, in 1998. He had become involved with the RYA after Athens, and after 2006, came on board as the Finn coach. He’s a really good guy, and once I qualified in 2008, we worked very closely the whole way through.
My own pre-race preparation is all about getting my mind in gear. I have a pre-race plan, and if I haven’t ticked off all the key areas, both physically within myself, and technically, with the boat, I don’t feel comfortable. I can’t perform to my optimum. Psychologically, that’s vital. It’s about leaving nothing to chance. Going through the whole programme, seeing where the weaknesses are, and eliminating as many of them as you can.
When you actually reach the start, you change mode. You say to yourself, ‘Right, this is it. Switch on.’ You sweep everything that’s not to do with the race out of your mind. You must be one hundred per cent attuned to everything that is important within the race. In a way, that happens subconsciously, anyway, but I try to trigger that.
An Olympic race lasts for anything between an hour and two hours. It’s you against the conditions and the opposition for roughly the duration of a football match. And there’s no half-time managerial pep talk for us.
Of course, we all can be easily sidetracked. But one of my strengths, a factor which always gives me confidence, is that once I start racing, I find I very rarely get distracted. Even when I’ve been racing and maybe things have not been going that well on a personal level, I’ve always been pretty good at dealing with that and not letting it affect my performance.
Off the water, I worry about things as much as the next person. Things can prey on my mind if I’m not happy about something. But when I go racing, I’m very good at switching off from those issues. It’s amazing how the mind can do it. Once racing has finished, then you revert to your normal self, with the same weaknesses as everyone else.
As it was, the scheduling of that holding camp in Shanghai only just about gave me enough time to get back to Qingdao, and get properly prepared for my event, so it wasn’t ideal. But worse was to follow.
The morning we set out to fly back from Shanghai to Qingdao, I woke to find my face was a little swollen. Although it didn’t appear to be anything major, I was concerned. We arrived back at Qingdao and I had an early night. I got up in the morning to discover that my condition had worsened. My face had become swollen horribly on both sides, although more so on the right. It was weird looking at myself in the mirror. ‘Shit,’ I thought, ‘what’s happening? I look like the Elephant Man.’ This, I should stress, was three days before the start of my event, and could really have been an issue.
I called David Gorrod, the team doctor, who diagnosed it as mumps, which was a relief, of sorts. It is a viral disease, which tends to affect the salivary glands in the cheeks, and though it is most common in children, can be caught by older people. The immediate problem was that, in the first few days, it is contagious. We had to ensure that I did not pass it on to anyone else in the team, so I had to go into isolation. I had to eat on my own, and avoid contact with the rest of my teammates when I was down at the dinghy park. They all thought it was hilarious, of course. Just the sight of my puffed-out cheeks prompted them to start calling me ‘Alvin’, like the character in Alvin and the Chipmunks, the eighties’ TV series. I suppose it was quite amusing.
It wasn’t the first time I’d suffered from illness during my career. As I have mentioned before, I was stricken with glandular fever early in 2004. I was really quite sick, and things were really tough through to May the following year. That was a period in which I was trying to race and build up to the world championships in Rio in January, then the European championships, and also prepare for the Athens Olympics. I still suffer from it now if I push myself too hard or get run down. If I do get a relapse, I’m out of order for about a week. Obviously, it affects my preparations.
I had felt good this time in the build-up to the Games. Now, three days before I started racing, I didn’t need this. But make no mistake; I was going to get through it and race whatever. After all, it wasn’t like a broken arm or something. I admit, though, that I was worried. I knew that this condition could affect my chances of gold. There’s no remedy, other than time. You just have to get over it. David Gorrod advised me to spend the day in bed. ‘I don’t want you pushing yourself,’ he said.
Pretty ironic, when you consider that in a couple of days’ time I would have to ‘push myself’ to the ultimate . . .
Frankly, I was really wondering if I was going to make it. You’re almost laughing at the timing. It couldn’t have come at a worse time. But you have to deal with it in the best possible way, and carry on as though nothing has happened. I also had to keep it quiet. It would probably have been quite a big story if it had got out. Fortunately, it didn’t – despite the fact that being in isolation meant I had to use the hotel restaurant where many of the sailing journalists were staying, which was pretty comical!
The following day, I was able to take part in a practice race. That was important because I didn’t want my rivals becoming wise to my condition. It could have been damaging when all my preparation had been designed to convince my opponents that they were fighting for silver. If that sounds a bit arrogant, let me say this: I’ve always tried to let my sailing and my results do the talking. I’m not one for trying to play mind games or ‘bigging myself up’ in interviews.
I had not competed much since Athens – but had contested the world and European championships and a regatta in Palma in 2008, and won them all. That was important to me. While the results were close, it perhaps gave me a psychological advantage in that I had not been beaten in the four years since Athens.
The consequence, as I’ve said already, was everyone was declaring that I just had to turn up to secure a third Olympic gold medal in successive Games.
I didn’t mind that. Ultimately, I’d rather be the favourite than not. It was something I expected because of my record in the class. I’d won gold at Athens, and five world championships in the Finn. People were also aware that this was a venue that rewarded experience. So, the talk was inevitable.
Except it doesn’t work like that. It was ridiculous really; especially at a venue where conditions were so capricious. I knew it was going to be really hard to win. The wind and the tide were always of concern. That was why I spent as much time as possible training there. I also put a lot of effort into sail development for that venue.
Racing’s never as straightforward as people outside the sport imagine. There’s an appearance that it’s easy for me because of the results I’d had. It looks like I’m streets ahead. But it’s not like that all. People don’t realise how close these other guys are in ability. It’s the same in most sports at the elite level. Remember, everyone assumed, ahead of Sydney, that Steve Redgrave would win his final race, to secure his fifth gold. Steve managed it, but he won by what? A few millimetres. It’s nothing at the end of two kilometres. The same with Matthew Pinsent at the Athens Games, when he claimed his fourth gold.
I knew what a difficult task lay ahead. And I was also aware that, by fair means or otherwise, nobody was going to make things easy for me. The thing about the Olympics is that everyone’s demeanour changes massively.
Suddenly no one is your mate any more. The slightest little infringement of the rules on the water and someone’s going to try and nail you with a protest. There’s lots of little psychological wind-ups going on. I knew the other guys were targeting me. They saw that as the only way they were going to beat me, through the protest room, claiming rule infringements, to try and get a cheap disqualification.
The first couple of days were the worst. Anyone I went near, I had to be ultra-cautious. It was clear again that a lot of the guys were intent on giving me a hard time. And so it proved. On the second day, in the first race, I crossed in front of the American Zach Railey. It was a fair manoeuvre and I avoided tacking across in front of him and fouling him. But he went round the mark and shouted ‘I could have hit you. I’m going to protest.’ I shouted back: ‘What are you talking about? I was never going to foul you and, in fact, I crossed you and let you go in front of me.’ He said: ‘No, no. This is the Olympics; I’m protesting.’
In those circumstances you do two full penalty turns. I could have got angry and ignored him, but though it may sound ridiculous, you have to be pragmatic. It exonerates you from any further disciplinary action, so that’s what I did. It felt like he was playing a card but I played it safe. It will be recalled from that incident involving the Frenchman, Guillaume Florent, in Athens that if you do nothing and it ends up in the protest room the onus is on you to prove to the jury that nothing happened, with the possibility of disqualification. Better to lose a placing, or two, than that. Sailing is a real mental game. Some make an analogy with chess, and that’s very true. You’ve got to think ahead about every move you and your opponents might make.
Yes, it was really annoying, but I drew on my experience. I used it in the right way to not get too wound up. I put my frustration back into the sailing. I had to be conservative. It cost me a few places earlier on in the regatta, but it prevented me getting a cheap disqualification. It was really hard. Part of me wanted to lose my temper and get stuck into him; to try to take him out in the next race. But I knew that I couldn’t get involved in those little games.
Meanwhile I was still worried about how my illness was affecting me. My event started on the first Saturday of the Games and, in fact, I was fine for the first two days. But as I got into the week, I became increasingly tired. There were a couple of days when we were hanging around in the intense heat, waiting to race because there was no wind, and I was really struggling. I felt low and lacked energy. Though sailing is what the Aussies mockingly call one of the ‘sitting down’ sports at which the British excel, it requires an incredible amount of fitness. Fortunately, though I felt rough, it never got so bad that I felt it was impeding my performance. I can only think that the adrenalin of racing got my body through it, to some extent.
The wind at the beginning of the week was really light and patchy which can result in quirky scores. For example, in the first race of the series, I was well in the lead, then, down the last leg, the wind turned inside out and I went from first to tenth. That was crazy and seriously frustrating. But it was always going to be like that at that venue, the way that the wind and currents were. But because I was aware of that, it became a positive thing for me rather than a negative. My experience meant I was able to deal with it, and not get flustered. I went out and won the next race, and built a series from then on in.
After that first race my results, with one exception, were consistently good. By the end of Monday, after six of the nine races, I was the overall leader; a position I maintained until the penultimate day, Friday. On the Saturday, the medal race was scheduled to take place. That carries double points. I would go into that twelve points ahead of my nearest challenger, Zach Railey, the American. It meant I didn’t have to win. I just had to finish within six places of him.
By then I felt really good, both competitively and health-wise, even though the race was postponed for twenty-four hours, until the Sunday, because of the light wind.
The following morning – having ‘fuelled up’ on a double portion of lasagne the evening before – I looked out of my window to see grey clouds. As one writer said of me: ‘These were his kind of conditions, a whiff of home.’ In fact, they were the exact opposite to what we’d experienced earlier in the week: it was windy, with big waves. That’s what I love. I could sail my own race. Not place my fortunes in the lap of the gods.
In these conditions, sailing is much more about boat-handling and fitness. I sailed out to the course early to prepare and watch ‘The Yngling Girls’ completely nail their medal race and win gold. I was impressed and it motivated me. But then the rain came down, the visibility was virtually nil, and we had to go back in again. It was incredibly frustrating.
I thought ‘When are we ever going to do this race?’ Finally, it cleared. Jez Fanstone, my coach, saw they’d dropped the postponement flag. He rushed over and said ‘You’re on.’ His words were like music to the ears. I ran to the boat. In those conditions, I was very confident about my speed and my fitness was fine.