Entitled racing and how to avoid it

It’s been years and years – around half a century in fact – since I spent any amount of time involved in sailing. And even then it was absolutely the bottom of the range in sailing – dinghies, with no deck, where your feet are a plank’s thickness away from the water. Nothing to do with yachts and large crews and state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology or anything like that.

Funnily enough, even a half century on, it’s left me with a yearning to have another go one of these days. I did like that feeling of being so close to the water and whipping along on its surface. I liked the playing with the sails and the tiller and feeling the boat react and race, and I’d be delighted to enjoy those sensations again.

But not yachts or large crews or any of that state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology sort of stuff. Oh, no.

Now there’s an organisation known as Internations that operates in a number of cities across Europe. It brings together locals and foreigners who enjoy meeting each other and maybe speaking a little of the others’ language. Usually it’s quite fun.

Danielle and I have joined the local branch, here in Valencia. She’s been to more events than I have, but I have to say that the ones I’ve attended have been good. So when she said ‘there’s an Internations event to watch a sailing race’, the association between an organisation I find fun and an activity for which I still have a hankering felt too good to pass up. So we went.

Now this wasn’t dinghy sailing. It was the ’52 Super Series Valencia Sailing Week’. The crews represented each of eleven nations. And it was absolutely one of those state-of-the-art-cutting-edge-technology competitions. At least, as far as I can tell, though I have to admit that to me most of the boats looked pretty much the same as each other.

Now, I’m not denying that there’s skill in this kind of sailing. My own experience of sailing those dinghies back in the sixties left me with a clear picture of just what lack of skill looks like, so I have a vague idea of what it must be like to sail with real intelligence and aptitude.

On the other hand, when I see the ludicrous figures people spend on their boats, I can’t help feeling that the cash register must weigh heavily on the outcome. At a different, much more recent epoch of my life I spent some time rowing and one of the things I like about that sport is that, in competition (and I was never at competition level) there are strict limits on what one can do to boats. They have to be at least so heavy, the hull has to be a certain shape, etc. So it isn’t the technology that determines winners, it’s entirely the skill and strength of the individual rower or crew.

It’s not like that in sailing. As far as I can tell. Though I admit that to my untrained eye, it looked as though the state-of-the-art technology stuff was all under water...

Anyway, when I got down to the port I was rather dreading being a spectator at a sport for which I was finding it hard to work up much enthusiasm. It felt too much like money racing money. But I needn’t have worried.

The meeting place was in a bar. Or a restaurant. It depends on how you look at it, I suppose. Most bars out here serve food and most restaurants serve drinks. 

It wasn’t obvious which bar was meant, since each successive email gave a different name from each of two alternatives. In one email it would be the Arribar, in another the Marina. Fortunately, those were the only two mentioned and they’re right next door to each other, so it wasn’t difficult to go to one for a while and then check out the other.

Eventually we found the group, and it was as with all Internations events. A lot of interesting people speaking any of four or five languages at different times (though predominantly English: Europe is becoming very English, even if England refuses to be European). We got chatting over drinks and it all went well, as it usually does at these gatherings.

Eventually, Danielle asked ‘what about the race? When do we see the boats?’

‘Oh, they’ve been coming in for the last hour or so,’ the organiser assured us, ‘I’ve seen a couple. But you’d have had to turn around to see them yourself.’

I asked how the race had been going. She didn’t know exactly, but said she’d been pleased to see that there was at least one female participant.

‘In the South African boat. One – only one, but still one – of the crew was a woman.’

‘Good for them,’ I said, ‘and how many were black?’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘It’s true that while they may have taken a small step forward against sexism, they’ve taken none against racism. They were all blond.’

Then she smiled. ‘Good looking, though,’ she said and grinned at her husband.

An hour or so later we left the place. As we walked to the bus stop, we came past the line of boats all carefully docked and waiting the next day’s competition.

All lined up and raring to go for the next day’s racing
But they all look pretty much the same to the unpractised eye

We didn’t see any of the actual racing. But then, with a sport of wealth and privilege, maybe that was just what suited us best. We enjoyed the company of pleasant people from Internations, and left the entitled to race against the entitled.