Harold Cudmore: Sailor Supreme

Selwyn Parker profiles Ireland's international champion

IT HAS GONE largely unnoticed iii Ireeland that one of the country's most successful sportsmen isn't a golfer, soccer-player, snooker wizard, or rugby star. Instead he belongs to a sport which is still mistakenly regarded as a preserve of the rich upper crust: sailing. His name? Harry Cudmore, scion of a welllknown Cork sailing family.

Within the last few years Cudmore, sailing yachts that have been designed and built in Cork, has pushed Ireland to the top of one of the most competitive, intricate and demanding - both mentally and physically - of modern sports. Probbably because yachting isn't a highly visible sport like, say, athletics or golf, most of the successes notched up by CUdmore et alia have been virtually anonymous. For all that, the size of the achievement isn't diminished.

In 1976 he won the world Half-Ton Cup in Silver Shamrock II, beating the best British, American and European crews. A year later, this time in Sydney, Australia, he finished second in the new, faster version of Silver Shamrock. In April, switching to a faster tempo, he won the British match-racing championnships at Lymington, Britain, where he comprehensively out-foxed a host of sailing's luminaries, including Sweden's Olympic gold medallist, Pelle Petterson, in split-second, highly tactical racing that has been accurately likened to chess on water.

In between these successes Cudmore and his crews have, by winning various individual races at, for instance, Cowes Week, put a stamp of permanence on Ireland's. international yachting image. It's now acknowledged that the CUdmore team, in whatever event, is The One To Beat. And it's all happened from Cork.

Since 1974 that highly independent province has become the inspirational centre of Ireland's abrupt resurgence in yachting (keelboats, not dinghies).

Masterminded by a wealthy quantity surveyor, Hugh Coveney, who put toogether the ingredients of the winning formula, the team's .principals are Cudmore - the tactician/skipper, New Zealander Ron Holland - the designer (about whom more later), South Coast Boatyards - the builders, and Hugh McWilliams - the sailmaker.

It all adds up to a closely-knit, dyynamic organisation for which the main motivations are love of the sporting life, the accumulation of money, and a burnning desire to stay at the top of the heap.

For all of the principals, events have happened quickly. Take Cudmore, for instance. Now 34, Cudmore was in 1973 just another promising sailor who had earned a useful reputation in highformance dinghies but had failed to fullfil completely an early promise. Probabbly his best achievement was a second place in the world 505 dinghy chammpionships.

He was also afflicted by a problem of temperament which ever. his father, Harold Senior, acknowledges. The Cudmore's outburst was a frequent topic of conversation in Ireland's essenntially reserved sailing circles. Clashes with the senior personalities of the sport's administrative body, the Irish Yachting Association, further strained relations, whatever the rights or wrongs of the disputes. '

"I was temperamental", Cudmore now readily admits, blaming it on a lack of logic in his approach to both' sailing and life. It took him years, he says, to shed the mental impedimenta that were holding him up. He's only successful now, he believes, because he has acceptted t111~t, broadly, one is only as successsful as one deserves.

"There's an enormous gap between coming second and being a winner. Some people will take the lead in a yacht race, deliberately make a few mistakes, drop to fourth and then brillianttly rescue the situation and finish second. Everybody will then console him and say how unlucky he was." That might have defined the old-model Cudmore. The style of the winning version is to devil-advocate everything by immensely thorough preparation, to predict where things may go wrong - and then make sure they don't, as far as possible in a sport where the vagaries of wind form part of the winning equation:

"You even have to consider, if you don't know the protest committee, whether you can afford to get involved in a protest." Partly to simplify things but also partly to establish the kind of goodwill that could flow the Irish way in a difficult protest, Cudmore's crew takes pains to facilitate measurers and all the other officials that are essential to the complex organisation of a major international yacht race.

The new Cudmore doesn't make exxcuses. In a key inshore race of the world Half-Ton Cup in Sydney in January, the mast slowly subsided, rigging and all, over the side just a few hundred yards from the finishing line when Silver Shamrock was comfortably second. In the time it took the crew, sweating mightily, to haul the mess back on board and, incredibly sail across the line actually holding the mast upright, anoother rival slipped through for second. "That wasn't bad luck", recalls Cudmore. "It was our own fault".

"Coming second still bores me", says Cudmore but adds that the victories of the last few years have made the need to win less urgent. A powerful motivation now is the pleasant life, an almost hedonistic amalgam of sun-drenched yacht clubs in exotic places, the satissfaction of controlling a £50,000 racing machine that. has almost the same degree of complexity as a Grand Prix car, and constant travel - Cudmore spends hardly three months a year in Cork.

Since December his schedule has inncluded three major international regattas in Sydney, plus the SydneyyHobart deep water classic, more rounddthe-coast races in Australia, seminars in Western Australia and elsewhere, a day spell as tactician aboard Treaty of Rome, the EEC entry in the Whitbred Round the World Race, on the last leg from Rio to Portsmouth, the matchhracing triumph at Lymington (third last year). Another busy summer awaits, but before then he went sailing in the Mediterranean with clients of South Coast Boatyard.

It is, says Cudmore, a marvellous life and he knows he's lucky. Even now, he sometimes appears hardly able to beelieve it's happening to him. How does he earn a living? Although the business of putting money aside for the future needn't worry a bachelor, Cudmore flatly refuses to say how he makes ends meet. But it's a fair guess that his skills justify a retainer from the rich men who can afford to day's level-rating yachts, with their sophisticated equipment, exxtensive "wardrobes" of sails and all the other high-technology paraphernalia of top-level sailing.

An excellent mathematician, Cudmore sees his major role as skipper/ tactician. It requires an ability to make good decisions quickly, often under pressure, and a thorough knowledge of exactly what combinations of tension on rig and sail make the boat go fastest in constantly changing conditions of wind and sea. It's a skill that sometimes defies analysis, according to a sailing companion of Cudmore, "Harry has a flair. He just knows what makes a yacht go fast".

Unusually, he hardly bothers at all about physical fitness - "Although I do like to ensure that my crew are fit. Anyyway, it's not a fitness sport. It's a temmperament sport". (However, most top crews pursue gymnasium and jogging programmes.)

Is he frightened of the sea? "Not frightened, but tense sometimes. 1 have a healthy respect for the sea. As reesearch has found, there is such a thing as a rogue wave and our type of boat is vulnerable to that kind of wave. We know we take a slight risk, but the statistical probability is one wave in about 300,000."

Uncharacteristically, CUdmore, who P9Jnts out that, in the final analysis, he is. responsible for the safety of his crew, withdrew from the Sydney-Hobart in common with nearly half the total fleet when he judged conditions to be too dangerous to continue. Bashing down the east coast of New South Wales into a classic 50-knot southerly buster, with another front of high winds forecast, Silver Shamrock kept on pounding over the top of breaking crests and plummetting up to ten feet into the trough behind. "It's a horrible feeling," recalls Cudmore.

Sailing back to harbour under threeereefed main, the Half-Tonner was surffing down the front of the waves at over 14 knots, which is roughly equivalent to driving a small family saloon at over 80 mph on a pot-holed dirt road. One gust hit Silver Shamrock so hard that boat and crew were knocked flat, below hori-

zontal in fact. When they scraped themmselves off the bulk-heads, they discoverred that the dipstick had fallen out of the engine!

In level-rating regattas (Half-Ton, One.-Ton .. Two-Ton etc. classifications) the competition is intense to the point of absurdity. Although the original Silver Shamrock only came off Ron Holland's drawing board in 1976, the Mark Four version is already being built at South Coast Boatyards along with a number of other major commissions. All previous versions are virtually inoperaative, as they say. "Development is so rapid in this game", says Holland, "that you have to take positive steps to immprove with every design."

Because he is forced to pass much of each working day dealing with an avallanche of international phone calls, usually with prestige clients at the other end, and spend several days of each month abroad, Holland can only take those steps at night, without interrupption. When others in his office have gone home, he wrestles with numbingly complex formulae which, cleverly jugglled, may give a client that vital extra edge in boat speed which he confidently expects from one of the world's top three designers.

Holland, 31, comes from Auckland. Discovered by Coveney, he set up inndependently in Cork in 1974 and steadiily won an international reputation for successful smaller yachts. Now his headdquarters at Currabinny, about 20 miles from Cork City, are the focal point of one of Ireland's quainter export indusstries, yacht designs. From a converted barn in which the top floor is reached by a ships-type ladder, Holland's small team deals with a virtual Who's Who of clients: Ted Heath, shipping magnates, Heads of State, industrialists. All of them have one thing in common 8money, plus the desire to come first in sailing as in everything else.

Although Holland has a safely interrnational business and is therefore probbably less dependent on the other Cork principals, he remains a key member of a team which relies on each other's continued high performance. If Holland designs keep winning, South Coast Boatyards has an assured Europe-wide clientele for the yachts they produce. That means McWilliams, who makes high-quality sails all week and flies them to customers in his twin-engined plane at weekends, has a reliable of flow of business.

And, with Harry Cudmore relentlesssly calling the tactics and winning showwcase regattas aboard Holland-designed, South Coast-built, McWilliams-powered yachts, everybody's happy .•