By Alexander Smith
MARSEILLE, France (Reuters) – Future Olympic sailors are likely to train on simulators and use cloud data to hone their skills, Finn gold medallist and America’s Cup winner Russell Coutts forecast this week.
Coutts, who won gold for New Zealand in 1984, now runs the SailGP league backed by Oracle’s Larry Ellison and has pushed new technologies as he works to establish a commercially viable top-flight professional sailing circuit.
“The simulator is really good for learning the mechanics of the boat. It still doesn’t replace the physical training, but it’s definitely a first step, and I think we’ll see it in all forms of the sport eventually,” Coutts told Reuters on Tuesday.
“I can imagine Olympic sailors having a simulator for all sorts of reasons, not just the physical practising,” he said during a brief visit to the Games, adding that simulators can fill the gaps when weather-dependent sailing is not possible.
As well as staying dry, warm or cool — or avoiding wasted time on the water waiting for wind — simulators can also be used to recreate actual scenarios and allow sailors to work through what they could have done differently.
“If you take a real race situation and say: ‘okay, that’s where I made one mistake, stop the race there, now I’m going to take control of it, and I’m going to manage that whole situation differently, now let’s see how it works out’,” he said.
Given the potential to run these scenarios many times, with athletes wearing goggles, the learning can increase dramatically, said Coutts, whose SailGP plans to make more use of simulators in dedicated training centres around the world.
“I see the next step of the Olympic pathway … is to introduce things like that and have a more data-led approach to allow athletes to really up-skill themselves in a much more structured way,” the 62-year-old added.
Spanish skiff sailors Diego Botin and Florian Trittel, who have benefited from simulators in SailGP, secured gold in Marseille only weeks after returning from San Francisco where they won the event’s $2 million Grand Final.
‘NEW TALENT’
Coutts said simulators could give more opportunities for the emerging nations which World Sailing has been promoting, with a record number of athletes at this Games.
Using data from previous races, these teams might lease facilities to be able to compare themselves to the top teams and establish what they are doing differently.
Coutts said part of SailGP’s mission is to promote awareness of the sport, as well as ways to funnel new generations to the top. And as its teams develop they will start talent hunting.
“You’ll almost have scouts going out, identifying new talent, bringing them in, training them,” he said.
Coutts says tech can also help encourage people into a boat.
“Before a kid even steps into an Optimist dinghy, they might do a full simulation on shore so that they don’t get freaked out when they go in the water,” he said.
(Reporting by Alexander Smith; Editing by Christian Radnedge)
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