COACHING - RESEARCHING DISASTER - Julian Bridges

Most serious coaching stuff is all about ‘reinforcing success’ and ‘accentuating the positive’ and so forth. But, bereft of any degrees in psychobabble, I’m going to start from the other end and look at the grim bits.

One of my favourite pictures of a race follows, can't remember where it came from, doesn't matter. Imagine if you will, a wide shallow set of stairs, front of a large public building, bank of England or something. This is the racecourse. We start in a row at the bottom and walk up it to the top. Because we are blindfolded we are bound to stumble occasionally. Each time we stumble, we fall behind a little. Because we can all only walk so fast, we can never catch up with those who stumble less often than we do. If we all walk at the same speed then the one who stumbles least gets to the top first. In fact of course some can walk slightly faster than others, but all that gives them is the ability to recover from a couple of minor stumbles. The important thing is to stumble as few times as you can in the first place, then it becomes less important if you are not quite walking as fast as the fastest.

Lets look at some stumbles. I was going to look through the last few newsletters and pull out the juiciest ones but I cant be bothered, so lets have a look in the sordid mess that remains of my memory, guilty and innocent alike are protected by anonymity, but not by the mists of time

we were late for the start

we couldn't find the venue

we havn't signed on or off

our rudder fell off and we capsized

that is the next mark over there isn't it

our jib head fell down

we had a domestic

there was a huge lump of weed on the centreboard

we forgot the tide and hit the mark, three times

we got the spinnaker sheet under the boat

we ripped the kite on an untaped clevis pin

we got so involved in a covering battle the third boat passed us both

we lost the course card overboard

we wrote the course on our hand and the sheets rubbed it off

we hit our head on the spi pole spiro ball fitting and went to casualty

the main halyard broke

we were so hungover we wanted to throw up til the end, then we did

our mast fell down

we had an awful start

we taped the two parts of the jib furler together and it wouldn't unroll

we hurt our back

someone stole the spinnaker halyard cleat and we didnt realise it wasnt there until after we had hoisted - true, really! (Lymington, 1979)

the tiller broke in the middle of a gentle run to run gybe ‘I felt it going down my leg and I thought I’d cowing pissed myself’ (Shoreham 1982)

Before we start discussing the effect of commodores daughters on racing ability we better get back to a point, which is that none of the above stumbles have anything to do with sailing the boat round the course, and they could all have been so easily avoided. Without those ridiculous stumbles the finishing positions would all have been so much better, and none of them had anything to do with how long the spreaders were, the mast rake or where the jib sheet lifters were.

Do we always get things right? No. Do we always correctly analyse what went wrong? No. Lets start by eliminating these stupid stumbles, and then there is more chance of being near the top of the stairs at the end. More stuff next time..................