Santander Worlds 2014 Mat Belcher (Part II)

by Sail-World.com on 13 Sep 2014 So you have won four world championships in a row so far, So you are confident about this one?

We have to say yes. We have been sailing really well and our preparation is really good and we are in good spirits and in good health and we are looking forward to racing. We have always focussed on our performance and we have been really happy with how we are sailing and communicating in the boat and our speed. Fingers crossed we are in as a good preparation as we have ever been. We couldn’t ask for any more coming into it. I am sure the run has got to end at some point but there is no reason that it has to end here for sure.

What coaching does Victor give you these days? There must be a limit on how much he can teach you.

We are learning every day, all of us. The relationship between the three of us, myself and Will and Victor, is getting stronger and stronger. We are a relatively new team. We have spent less than two years together. There are so many things that we want to work on and Wills age and physical ability opens up a lot more drawers with this campaign, and his hunger and motivation. That is really keeping Victor and I motivated and pushing ourselves. Victor has always got that global picture of wanting to teach directions to make sure we are heading in the right direction. Will and I are more hands on the program on a day to day basis in logistics and general management but Victor is always that guiding influence to slowly guide us in the direction that we need to go. He just gives you so much confidence having the world’s best coach following you around. If he doesn’t say anything for five minutes you know you are doing a pretty good job.

I first met Will three years ago and he was quite a slender lad. He is still quite skinny. Is he putting on any condition? Is he getting stronger and physically bigger?

Yes. It’s hard to say. Every skipper thinks his crew is the best but Will is for sure one of the fittest athletes out there. He has done some pumping and he is amazing and I really fortunate. He is a tall guy and he is always trying to lose a bit of weight. For sure he is on the heavier side compared to a lot of the other crew but he certainly makes up for it.

The guys who gave you a bit of a dust up during the year. I guess you are involved a little in the AC45 campaigns and you didn’t get the results you were looking for in a couple of regattas. Who were the guys who beat you then during the year?

Yes we had the Croatian guys in Miami. I think the young French team won Miami. Then the Greek team beat us at Kiel Week. That was an amazing experience for myself and for our team because we had just come off a two year winning streak. Every event having to perform is a lot of pressure and I think a lot of our team mates, in 470 or any class, will appreciate how difficult it is to be able to perform in every regatta. You are managing your performance and you have got the big events each year that you are trying to target and it’s really hard to balance that. We learned so much through that period. When you have got other things which are a distraction from your Olympic program but obviously a massive opportunity for my career and a whole new project with the AC. I learned so much from the tight management point of view to be able to try and make both work. Obviously the consequences of that is that you can’t invest time that you wold like. The sleep catches up. It was an amazing experience for us as a team to be able to cope with that mentally and to be satisfied and happy. I can’t talk on behalf of Nathan but Nathans is saying the same sort of thing. Having got so many good results and be the leader in your class, everyone is using you as the target and want to beat you and if you can’t put the work in that you need to at certain periods that’s where it gets difficult. I guess the eye on the prize is what matters and you get more focussed on the end goal, the Games, the Worlds and the bigger events.

So you felt that being beaten a few times was good for you?

Yes I think so. You know a lot more when you get beaten than you do when you are constantly at the front and there was a lot of experience for us. We could explain every event. With Miami we were negotiating AC contracts pretty much throughout the event which was an exciting opportunity but was also hard mentally to be able to focus on the regatta on hand. Palma we were coming off two weeks with the AC45. We had just launched the program and came straight into the event and our preparation was very minimum. I think we were more than a month out of the boat which is also very difficult. The same sort of thing for Kiel Week. The whole of May I was in Australia training on the AC45 and camped in Austria on the GC32. We did a camp in Lake Garda on the GC32. I learned a lot. We just couldn’t prepare as soon as we would normally. We also not naive enough to see we were expecting to win because if you don’t put the work in as you would normally you also better except that you might not do as well as you wanted.

Tom and Nathan leading up to 2012 sailed a lot of different classes and they felt that it helped them when they came back to their core boat because they had learned to make decisions at a faster pace etc. Does any of that come back to you?

Not really. The difference between our 470 program, we do a lot of events, we do a lot of training. We are fully immersed into the program so I guess the intensity of the program is pretty high. That’s something that Victor has always been, I have always grown up with, you have to do the work. You have to invest all your time, your money and your resources, everything to get the result. That’s something he has always been there and supported and 12 years coming into London we were used to that pace. If you are not from that background and you don’t have that opportunity it is very hard to be motivated into one particular class to do the volume and the training and to keep motivating yourself, sailing other classes and also open the doors for a lot of other things for them. It worked out really well for them. I guess with the 470 class we kept it interesting and we were just at a high dynamic and a high intensity to be able to keep that. Been able to stay on top and to have us stay motivated for so long is a credit to Victor. It’s pretty hard to keep pushing yourself over the years and you have got all the results, you have won everything but you are still hungry to learn more.

The name of your latest boat?

Far and Away. We name all our boats after Nicole Kidman movies.

Have you got the hots for Nicole Kidman?

No, Mal (Page) and Nathan Wilmot (Australia's Beijing 470 Gold Medallists) started it and it has been a tradition and it has continued. I took over when Mal and I teamed up and I guess I got used to it and it has done us pretty well so I thought yes why not. We had another boat late last year and we called it Happy Feet which is also another Nicole Kidman movie. My son was born and we called it Happy Feet which is a kids movie so that suited pretty well and I guess this year with the whole AC program and the Olympic program, trying to juggle everything Far and Away was as good story of my travels, being away so much and still kept that Nicole Kidman theme. Yes so far so good.

When are you expecting to switch to a new boat?

I am very fortunate that my father in law is a boat builder so it is a little bit easier than some to get a new boat but we haven’t got that far with the equipment yet. We will look to get a new boat mid next year. Whether that’s our game plan I am not sure. With travelling around so much we are still trying to work out exactly what we need and where and with the whole new World Cup final and everything else things logistically quite complicated.

Dubai?

We saw the Notice of Race got released a week ago. We have been told we will probably have to take our own boat which is something we weren’t expecting. I am sure the event is going to be great. Any of the teams and any of the sailors in the Worlds having won the World Cup every year and doing almost every World Cup event for the last five years we are probably one of the biggest supporters of the series and understand how important it is for sailing. I really hope they can make this work because I am not sure how many chances we are going to get. We were a little bit disappointed the last couple of years. Having won the series but no prizes, no recognition for the money or the time we invested in the series. It was still optimistic that this will work but a lot of it has just got to come down, I think, to communication between the organisers and sailors and just try to make the logistics work.

Supplied equipment?

It is for some classes but not for 470s. Having a regatta at the end of November in Abu Dhabi and then having another one beginning of December in Melbourne and then having another one end of January in Miami, to do those three events you can’t use the same boat. It’s very difficult. You could have the Abu Dhabi boat in Miami if you did that and then you can’t start off the beginning of the next season in Europe without having another European boat and if you wanted it in Melbourne you would need another one as well. It’s a pretty expensive exercise and the importance of this Grand Final is critical to not only to be able to promote our sport as it should but also to be able to motivate the sailors to invest the time and the money outside of…Is what they are really competing against.

To read part one of the interview, click here