Craig Monk - Muscle and management

by ACM Media on 25 Oct 2005 In another life, BMW ORACLE grinder Craig Monk could have taken one of the glamour jobs in America’s Cup racing, perhaps as a helmsman or a tactician. Back in Barcelona 1992, the young Kiwi achieved what many Cup helmsmen have failed to do, when Monk won a Bronze medal in the Finn singlehanded class.

That success led to a chance meeting on a beach back in New Zealand a year later. ‘It feels like a time ago now,’ Monk recalls. ‘I was just helping a fellow Finn sailor out – Russell Coutts was his name – and he asked me to come and try out in the Cup boat. I thought, ‘OK, I’ll give it a go,’ and I’ve been a grinder ever since.’

For a Finn sailor, where Monk would have run his own campaign – been his own helmsman, tactician and sail trimmer – to becoming a grinder – a job all about strength, power and stamina but where there is little opportunity to display one’s tactical abilities – might seem a little frustrating. But Monk is happy with his lot in life.

Leadership
‘I’ve learned to become a team player, and I’ve made a real career out of grinding. I’ve turned it into something that works as a career. It wasn’t like that when I was working for Team New Zealand back then, when we won the Cup the first time. It was hard then [earning a living]. As the years have gone on, though, these teams have doubled in size, so I’ve got quite a big role on shore as sailing team manager. Now part of my job is looking after 34 guys, and I enjoy that side of it as much as the sailing.’

Unlike the multi-faceted nature of sailing a small singlehanded boat like the Finn, where the sailor must be skilled in many areas and look around the race track constantly for windshifts and other competitors, the role of the America’s Cup grinder is a very heads-down job. ‘When we’re racing, I try to focus on my own role,’ says Monk. ‘As soon as I look around a lot, I find my grinding goes downhill.’

Now 38 years old, Monk has learned to take good care of himself in a job that takes a huge physical toll. ‘You clock up about 12,000 handle rotations in a race. You’re going the whole time during an hour-and-a-half race. You’re going through all the gears like a Formula One driver. We’ve got six speeds, we’re working through them – change, change, change, keeping those sheets moving as fast as you can.’

Body maintenance
Monk says it’s almost as important what you do on the shore as what you do on the boat. ‘Good grinding is all about recovery, really, being ready for the next day. It’s about eating the right food, getting enough sleep, body maintenance, looking after your equipment and working well with your trimmers. I can’t drink any beers during a regatta. I used to be the young guy on the crew, but not anymore. I really feel it now, if I drink a beer. You can’t function properly the next day. The mainsail hoist is one of the hardest things to do and it’s a bad way to start the day on a bad mainsail hoist, especially when you’re looking down the barrel at four hours of grinding. I don’t mind a few beers at the end of a regatta though!’

While Monk has being doing this job for a long time, he is far from getting tired or bored of the life of an America’s Cup grinder. ‘Every Cup I seem to enjoy it more and more. The event’s changing, getting bigger, and I enjoy these regattas. I’ve done it the other way where we sailed from 1995 through to 2000 and we just did five years of testing, for five races in the Cup. Those were hard yards.’

After the years of secrecy and two-boat testing, Monk welcomes the Louis Vuitton Acts as a breath of fresh air. ‘These are definitely high quality regattas. There’s a lot of planning, a lot of shore work, a lot of logistics involved, we’ve got to bring 25 sailors to these events. It’s a two-week package, and you’ve got to put everything together. Training can’t simulate that in-house. It tests everyone right across the board, the shore crew management, sail makers, sailors, boatbuilders – the whole lot. You’ve got to be on top of your game, it lifts the team to a new level.’