Sailing Magazine
by Richard Crockett
Olympic sailing is all about success and failure – or is it really that simple and harsh? Judging from the opening few paragraphs in the SA Yachting Magazine report, it is certainly much more – despite us all wanting our teams to medal.
This is what was written:
Apart from David Butler’s dogged and fine fourth in the Flying Dutchmen Class, in the sailing Olympics, the result fell short of our secret expectation. After the ability, shown in the preliminary campaigning in Europe before the Games by both Hellmut Stauch and Butler, we were all confident that one or the other would surprise the world with a medal for Southern Africa.
In the upshot Hellmut was down the list, in 15th place, and Gordon Burn Wood tailed the Finns, 33rd out of 35 boats.
But it cannot be emphasised too often that Olympic sailing is a sporting occasion, one of whose chief functions is to strengthen again the true sporting spirit among nations and to raise the world standard of excellence in performance.
Looked at in this spirit, the Olympic sailing has still been a more than worthwhile experience and will give rewards commensurate with the great expenditure of time, money and effort that went into the sailing side of the project. In terms of goodwill and respect, Southern Africa was always right up in front among the participants. The skippers, crews and managers have left behind them with all the other competing nations happy memories, and have brought back with them a great store of technical know-how and finesse with which to enrich yachting in South Africa and the Federation.
Comments and feedback would be appreciated.
READ IT ALL HERE: Pages from 1960 09-10 – SA Yachting – OCR
