UKLA Chair Blog #71

Happy New Year to all of you! It is tremendous the amount of ILCA sailing going on over the holidays in club racing but also the recent Youth Open at Draycote and in the various Sailjuice events. I guess the reasonably mild weather helps with that. Many of you will be turning your attention to the year ahead - why not consider coming to UKLA Nationals in Weymouth in August? It has become a highly attractive event for sailors of all experience around the concept of a “festival of sailing” with a lot of onshore activities.

 I decided just before Christmas to go to the Master Worlds in Adelaide in February on the basis if not now, when? 28 years ago today I started racing the Asia-Pacific Championships in the “Fremantle doctor” where the sea breeze regularly gets over 20 knots which, combined with big waves and warm weather, makes for super sailing. It was of course an iconic venue after the 1987 America’s Cup. A trip to Adelaide was hard to resist,  hoping for more decent winds and having sailed a reasonable amount into the early winter.  I am hoping that my preparation will be enough. Avid readers of this blog will know that I believe “time on the water” and training is the way to improve performance.

While I did lots of sailing as a youth, it wasn’t until I was 15 that I sailed outside the summer school holidays. My formative Laser years were really between 18 and 22 while at university with more time to commit and several “European tours” and that context made me believe there is lots of time to develop skills. Three decades later I got the chance to do some critical analysis on “early specialisation” (which I mentioned in my last blog) when doing a MSc in Sport Performance Analysis. It is a fascinating area which I have touched on before (blog #36).  If you are interested in more reading here is a paper on early specialisation in sport in general (there may be more recent papers on this now). I also tried to apply this to sailing - Sailing – an Early Specialisation Sport? (I don’t think it is).

But it is not just youth sailors, as I have seen Guy Noble (our hard-working UKLA media officer, who is nearly a Great Grand Master) consistently put in many hours of training and racing at local, national and international events over recent years and it is tremendous to see the improvement in his performances. So it is never too late for any of us!