UKLA Chair blog #60

Written By Mark Lyttle

40 years ago this month I went to the World Championships in Gulfport, Mississippi and it was only after this regatta that I would learn some important lessons for my future sailing and more broadly in life.

Firstly, a little bit of background. In 1983, I was a 20-year-old University student heading into a summer of non-stop sailing (and some instructing to help pay for it). As well as lots of domestic competitions, I went to the Europeans in Norway. I also won most of the big Irish regional regattas that summer and in the lead up to the Irish National championships in August, I felt I was in a good position to win that event for the first time. 

As often happens in sailing, the weather didn't play ball and we had a very light wind regatta and in fact only had three races sailed up until the last day. But going into the fourth and final race I still had a good chance of becoming National Champion by finishing the race in first place with my nearest competitor in eighth place. The winds were very light and I led around the first triangle (as it was then) and on the final beat the wind started to die to nothing as a sea breeze filled slowly from behind. I drifted across the line in first place as did the next ten boats, however by then a couple of knots of wind had filled in in the opposite direction and the rest of the fleet ended up crossing the finishing line in a big bunch making it difficult for the race committee to record numbers. Having already taken the winning gun, the race committee abandoned the race. It meant that a few minutes earlier I had been National Champion and now this had been taken away. 

I sought redress from the Protest Committee on the grounds that my finishing position had been materially prejudiced through no fault of my own and the Protest Committee found as fact that this was the case however they did not award any redress and the results stood. As you can imagine I was not happy with this, to put it lightly!

My subsequent appeal to the National Authority was unsuccessful and I then decided to write to Gerald Sambrooke Sturgess who was perhaps the leading rules authority at the time. He very kindly wrote back to me (sadly I can’t find the letter) and said that he thought I had been unfairly treated but that I needed to accept the result as a “rub of the green”, in other words sport sometimes throws up these unfair results.

Luckily fom me, the World Championships was taking place two months after this and I was able to spend the six weeks training in Dun Laoghaire with a great group of sailors including Frank Glynn (a future commodore of the California Yacht Club), Marshall King (a future Soling Olympian and team-mate who was racing last week at Queen Mary) and Bill O'Hara, who at the time was a real mentor for me as he had finished second in the 1982 European Championships (he then finished 13th in the Finn at the 1984 LA Games). It was first time perhaps that I could see the purity of a training camp, sailing daily, with few other distractions (in those days there wasn’t even a coach insight).

Those Worlds in Mississippi produced excellent sailing conditions with 12 to 15 knots of wind in the Gulf of Mexico and I sailed my boots off finishing 19th out of the fleet of 250.

After this regatta, I was able to reflect on the setback at the Irish Nationals in August. Firstly, it provided me with massive amount of motivation to do well at the World Championships. I learnt that it's not enough to turn up at a regatta even if you've done the training if you're not highly motivated to achieve your objectives (whatever they are). I know other people may be different but that's what I learned about myself at that regatta. The second thing was about building resilience. Two months before I was rock bottom and now I felt almost on top of the world. Sport has a habit of producing highlights and lowlights, often very close to each other and often out of your control and it’s something we need to accept and be able to rebound from the lowlights. Boucing back from setbacks is an important skill in sport and life.

Snippets:

Mark Lyttle
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