Monday, September 25, 2000
News Online

Splashing out for silver

Captain Splash did not disappoint. In a nail-bitingly close final race in the 49er class on a grey Sydney Harbour today, Ian Barker and his crewman Simon Hiscocks did just enough to capture the silver medal - Great Britain’s first sailing medal of the Games.

The Britons went into the sixteenth and final race of the series knowing they had to finish within five places of Jonathan and Charlie McKee, of the United States, to secure second place, the gold already having been awarded to the Finns on Saturday. In a shifty and moderating breeze, the Americans won the race but the Britons were fourth, and Barker and Hiscocks were swigging the champagne within minutes of crossing the line.

Ian Barker and Simon Hiscocks win silver © AP

Barker, whose nickname reflects his tendency for capsizing in the fast but highly unstable 49er in his early days, is not your conventional Olympic athlete by a long way. He likes a smoke - in fact, he often has a quick one between races - and he likes to wind down with at least a few pints each night, whether or not it is the Olympics. But the Welshman with a voice like a cinder path, is also a wizard on the water and he has shown over the past ten days that his focus and application is second to none.

The Royal Yachting Association coaches all refer to him and Hiscocks as being "a little bit different" or "unconventional". To their credit they have accepted Barker’s way of doing things, recognising that this is the right way to get the best out of him on the water; that flexibility has paid off handsomely in Sydney.

Barker is an accomplished sailor with world championships to his name in 505s and Enterprises but he came to Australia with no public expection of winning a medal. Although Britain has five or six top-class crews in the 49er, the feeling was that the home fleet had slipped slightly in the international rankings earlier this year.

After winning the trials in April, Barker and Hiscocks kept a low profile in the run-up to the Games but worked hard, training in Weymouth and Hayling Island and also out in the United States with the McKees. In an early indication that the Captain might be preparing something special, a friend confided several weeks before the Games that Barker "could think or talk about nothing else except winning the Olympics".

From the very first race, it was clear he and Hiscocks had improved their speed in their new boat and they were capable of doing just that. In what turned out to be a testing light-air series, they sailed consistently with astute tactics and good boat-handling. They kept their cool to the very end, while around them, some of their main rivals lost their heads.

This was all the more remarkable given the cruel reversal of fortune they suffered in the first race. Barker was leading by a mile only to fall into an invisible hole in the wind which dropped him from first to thirteenth, something which, in retrospect, perhaps cost him the gold. But to his and Hiscocks’s credit they did not dwell on it and carried on. In 16 starts they finished inside the top five 11 times and won one race.

When it was all over, Barker was pleased but not ecstatic; he meant to leave Sydney with the gold medal and one suspects he may return to the fray in Athens for another go, perhaps in another class. So was this the greatest moment in his career? "It’s up there," he answered, "but it’s second place isn’t it? It’s not first and I do like to come first."

Reflecting on the final race when at one point on the second circuit he fell far enough behind the Americans to drop into bronze-medal territory, he said he never panicked and just concentrated on making good the deficit. "I made myself calm," he said. "It’s so shifty here that you just have to take it as it comes and make the best of the next shift. If you get upset, you miss these things."

John Derbyshire, the RYA Olympic team manager, was delighted with what could be the first of four sailing medals for Britain this week. "They did exactly what they did at the [Olympic] trials," he said. "They were under pressure and they had a job to do and they did all that was needed."

Elsewhere today, Iain Percy returned to the racetrack after a day off in the Finn class and put in an important recovery in race three, finishing ninth after coming back from twentieth at the third mark. His main rival for gold, Mateusz Kusnierewicz, of Poland, was eleventh. In the second race Percy was back to top form finishing second, leaviong Kusnierewicz in eighth. This left the Englishman still in the lead overall after four races, ten points ahead of the Pole.

In the men’s 470s Nick Rogers and Joe Glanfield are in fourth position with just one race to come, while in the Star class Ian Walker and Mark Covell had a mixed day finishing twelfth in race three and seventh in race four. They are now in sixth place overall.

EDWARD GORMAN
Sailing Correspondent
The Times