'Storms Ahead – Rick Dodson: America's Cup champion to Paralympian' - Book Excerpt
by Rebecca Hayter 19 Jun 2023 07:11 PDT
America's Cup Champion, Rick Dodson on the handlebars - 2016 Paralympics - Day 3, September 15, 2016 © Richard Langdon/World Sailing
A new biography, 'Storms Ahead – Rick Dodson: America’s Cup champion to Paralympian', follows the highly unusual career of Rick Dodson who was diagnosed with MS (multiple sclerosis) at the height of his career.
With Rick as strategist, Team New Zealand had won the America’s Cup in 1995 and would defend it in 2000. He was the epitome of physical fitness, a two-time world champion, a national champion; he had been a skipper on the winning Admirals Cup team of 1987 and won the One Ton Cup the following year.
By keeping his disease secret from nearly everyone except his close family and friend/crewmate Jeremy Scantlebury, Rick preserved his career for as long as possible. But by 2012, he had reluctantly retired from professional sailing and was selling his share in North Sails. He thought his sailing days were over, until he was approached by former America’s Cup skipper David Barnes, who had also been diagnosed with MS, to do a campaign in the Sonar at the Rio Paralympics in 2016.
The following excerpt from Storms Ahead begins with Rick’s diagnosis, two years after Team New Zealand won the America’s Cup for the first time.
In late August 1997, in the week that Princess Diana’s death would rock the world, America’s Cup strategist Rick Dodson walked into an appointment with neurologist Dr Ernest Willoughby. Rick had brought his wife Sally and his brother Tom, with whom he and Tom Schnackenberg owned North Sails New Zealand, as reinforcements. They were there to hear the verdict of recent test results. Rick was hoping for a reprieve, but more likely he would receive the diagnosis of an incurable, debilitating disease: multiple sclerosis (MS).
He was 38 years old, happily married with two children and on a career high, halfway between winning the America’s Cup and defending it, but disease is fickle where it falls.
The first symptoms had appeared two years earlier when Rick was racing on Black Magic as it stormed through the Louis Vuitton Challenger Series of 1995 in San Diego.
Occasionally as he looked up the course to check the wind, he saw double: two top marks instead of just one. He closed one eye, effectively deleting the phantom mark, and got on with his job.
Rick was racing professionally throughout the world with North Sails, but the symptoms had persisted, and eventually he consulted his GP. ‘The doctor holds up his finger and takes it around the side of your face and back to your nose,’ Rick says. ‘Then he goes low and high and back to your nose. The doctor watches your eyes and how they move. I had a little bit of double vision, but I could close one eye and see perfectly.’
But the way Rick’s eyes followed the doctor’s finger was typical of MS, and the GP sent him to a neurologist for more tests. Now, the results were in.
‘I chose Tom to come with me to the appointment because we are close,’ says Rick. ‘Tom is the older brother and he is very clever. He has a good mind, so you know that when something is serious like that, he will give you good guidance.’
‘It was pretty emotional for them,’ Tom says. ‘The three of us rocked in there a week or so after the last tests, and the doctor spelled it all out. Rick was quiet and it was all fairly matter-of-fact, but the doctor took quite a bit of time to explain what had happened and what may happen.
‘So we talked about it going home in the car. I said to Rick: “You might have to break the news to Peter Blake.” Rick said, “No, I don’t want to do that. I want to just carry on as if there’s nothing wrong.”’
For more than a decade, MS followed the script; so did Rick. As Team New Zealand prepared to defend the America’s Cup, he told no one except his family and close friend Jeremy Scantlebury of his diagnosis. To some extent, he even kept it secret from himself.
‘I didn’t even think about the MS,’ Rick says. ‘I was still very strong, very fit. I didn’t talk about it, because I didn’t know anything about it. I don’t know if it would have been better to have discussed it with Sally. But it was always in the background.’
In hindsight, Russell Coutts says, Rick wasn’t the best trainer. ‘That was probably because of his MS. I remember him struggling like hell in a fitness test, going into 2000. Thinking back, I wonder if that was MS. We did a test where you run 8 metres and then you hit the end and you run back. You start off walking and it gets faster and faster until you’re sprinting, and he was just hopeless. Well, he was out of it when we were still walking. I remember thinking that he’s got to do something about his fitness. He wasn’t one of the grinders, so it wasn’t particularly critical, but I remember being surprised. When he was a Finn sailor, he was pretty fit.’
Even if Coutts had known about Rick’s diagnosis, he says, ‘I’m not sure it would have changed too much, because either you’re performing or you’re not. I respect his right to privacy, really. As a sportsperson you are judged on your performance and it’s pretty black and white. Either you get the results or you don’t – that’s the way I think of it. I definitely wouldn’t have changed the selection.’
Brad Butterworth acknowledges Rick’s input and sailing skills in Team New Zealand’s success in the America’s Cup, but he says, ‘I had figured out he had a problem with his sight.’
‘Going into 2000, we kept that special chemistry [of 1995],’ says Coutts. ‘In a team like that, that’s pretty valuable. We were more of a sailing team in 2000 than we were in 1995. In ’95 there were still some definite weaknesses. In 2000 we were a pretty formidable team all round.’
Apart from being strategist for the team that held a nation’s hopes, Rick had plenty of distractions from MS. Internationally, the sailing world was awash with sponsorship dollars. The Around Alone Race had a stopover in Auckland’s shiny new Viaduct Harbour. There was a strong fleet developing in the Volvo Ocean Race and a boom in superyacht construction in New Zealand.
It was all good news for North Sails. With more orders for bigger sails, it needed more room and left the Mackelvie Street loft to move in next door to Southern Spars on Pakenham Street near Viaduct Harbour.
‘I remember the day we shifted down there,’ says Rick. ‘Tom went to Southern Spars next door and met a guy with a superyacht who had bought the mast from them, so then he bought the sails from us. I thought: “This is great.” There were many mast and sail packages after that. We thought the building in Pakenham Street would be too big for us, but we filled it up so fast with sailmakers and new sails, it ended up being too small.’
With business booming, the Dodsons moved into a new house in Parnell. In the garage, Sally had a 4WD Porsche and Rick had a silver Porsche 911 Carrera 4.
Towards the end of 1999, Team New Zealand launched its first new boat, NZL57. Its second boat, NZL60, was still under construction. But after months of anticipation, NZL57 was greeted with a muted roar. Her topsides were coated in matt paint, rather than gloss, because it minimised friction, and it didn’t sparkle like a winning yacht should. But the real confusion was around what became known as the Davidson Bow, also the Millennium Bow.
‘Everybody said it was wrong,’ said Laurie Davidson; ‘not everybody, but a lot of people who thought they knew what they were talking about. They said it wasn’t right, but it just walked away from the opposition. In my version of it, the double-knuckle bow lengthens the waterline and eases the initial entry of the boat into the water while still retaining the extra buoyancy features of what you might call the normal bow.
‘It’s largely brought about by the restrictions of the America’s Cup class rule. If you were designing a flat-out boat, you’d probably have what most of them have got these days, just a plumb stem. And if you were sure you were going to race just in smooth water then I think the plumb bow would be the best way to go; but in waves, the overhanging bow increases the length of the boat and helps it through the water.’
To opinions that the double-knuckle bow was ugly, Davidson replied, ‘They all look pretty when they’re out in front.’
In the America’s Cup Village, the 11 challengers had set up their bases like miniature sailing embassies. The Italians buzzed around Auckland on their fleet of Vespas; the Americans were loud in The Loaded Hog on the Viaduct Harbour and there was European glamour in the Soul Bar.
Away from the parties, in a modest corner of the marina, was Young Australia, funded by Australian businessman Syd Fischer to give young Aussies experience in the America’s Cup, and sometimes nourished with bacon and egg pies delivered by Kiwi mums. Fischer’s foresight would be rewarded: Young Australia’s helmsman was a 19-year-old skipper named Jimmy Spithill.
Finally, the Louis Vuitton series was underway on the Hauraki Gulf. It delivered on drama, notably on 9 November 1999, when Young America gave a demonstration of finite element analysis in boat construction: what can go wrong in the margin between building a boat light enough to be fast and strong enough to withstand the impact of choppy seas.
Ed Baird, skipper of Young America: ‘We were up near the windward mark and literally on the layline to turn for our last tack. We were fairly close to rounding and we were starting into a tack. There were just a couple of very, very big waves, very close together, and as we started turning we started going off one wave and hit the next, and that’s when we stopped being able to race.’ His boat had bent it like Beckham, although unlike oneAustralia in 1995, it didn’t sink.
The blustery breezes and constantly changing leader board of the Louis Vuitton did its job in honing the skills of the winning challenger. Luna Rossa prevailed, helmed by Francesco de Angelis, who was as polite and handsome as he was tall.
Dockyard rumours were rife, but no one knew what to expect for the America’s Cup in March. Team New Zealand had played its cards close to its chest. The sailing public rarely got to see Coutts. Usually Blake fronted the media briefings. New Zealand was only the second country to wrest the America’s Cup from America, but even Australia had failed to defend it successfully in 1987.
There was a sense, too, that Team New Zealand was losing engagement with its adoring public.
Boating New Zealand, March 1999: ‘There’s a growing perception out there that Team New Zealand is forgetting the people who put their cheques in the cockpit last time around. Not arrogance exactly, but they might have trouble fitting the red socks they made so famous in San Diego.’ – Rebecca Hayter
As it had in San Diego, Team New Zealand did its talking on the water. It won the America’s Cup against the Italians in a clean, five–nil sweep. The country that was the last bus stop before the penguins had become the first country to win and defend the America’s Cup.
For Rick’s son, William, then a small boy, memories are hazy: ‘I don’t really remember the America’s Cup back in New Zealand, but I have glimpses of being on those boats and them coming back in to dock and in one of those photos, you can see me, my mum and my sister standing down at the front on the dock, and then Dad took me on to the boat to celebrate while they were all popping champagne.’
By then, New Zealand had fallen hopelessly in love with the Italians, and both teams made a victory-lap tour of New Zealand cities. True to Blake’s vision, it was the epitome of friendly competition between nations, just like it said in the America’s Cup Deed of Gift.
Storms Ahead – Rick Dodson: America’s Cup strategist to Paralympian, by Rebecca Hayter.
Available from Oceanspirit Publishing, 220pp, 60 colour photos, RRP NZ$39.95 plus postage. Available from www.rebeccahayter.co.nz in print and e-book editions from 6 July 2023.