Marathon combined with chess: Sailor Sarah Douglas on how she aims to navigate her boat to Olympic podium
Burlington, Ont., resident narrowly missed a medal in Tokyo
Sarah Douglas guided her small sailboat through the waters off Melbourne, Australia on a sunny morning in January 2020, intent on maximizing one of her final practice sessions ahead of the ILCA Laser Radial Women's World Championships.
Conditions weren't too different from the ones she figures she'll face in Marseille, France, when the women's laser radial class, which involves one sailor in one small boat, begins Olympic competition. Fairly calm water on a hot day, and no apparent reason to worry whether either of those variables would shift. Sailing teams employ meteorologists to handle those details, but a lifetime on the water endows sailors like Douglas, who began sailing at age seven, a sixth sense about the weather.
The temperature dipped and the wind picked up, and Douglas, the 2019 Pan Am Games gold medallist, knew it was her versus the conditions.
Wind gusts zoomed past 55 km/h while the mercury nosedived, from 30 C to 20 C, and headed even lower. This practice session, Douglas knew, was about to get tougher.
Then the sky darkened, and the wind blew even harder. When it topped 80 km/h, Douglas' focus shifted from salvaging her workout to keeping her boat, which is roughly four metres long and weighs about 60 kilograms, upright. Douglas, who stands 6 feet tall, has the strength and ballast to steady her small boat in a wide range of conditions, but this sudden storm forced her to abandon that plan, too.
When her coach, Vaughn Harrison, pulled alongside in his motorboat, Douglas leapt into it, leaving her brand new sailboat to drift and somersault in the turbulent water. The boat rolled again, becoming ensnared in the ropes, called sheets in sailing, that tether the sail to the mast and the boom.
Then, just as quickly as the storm had appeared, it dissipated, allowing Douglas to swim back to her sailboat and cut the tangled cords with Harrison's rusty Leatherman knife before a team of Dutch competitors showed up to help guide the Canadian crew back to shore.
WATCH: A day on the water with Sarah Douglas:
Douglas, a 30-year-old from Burlington, Ont., shares this story in a dry moment between downpours at the Ashbridges Bay Yacht Club in Toronto, as the remnants of Hurricane Beryl pass through southern Ontario, dumping rain across the whole region. If she could regroup and return to the water after battling those boat-flipping winds in Melbourne, today's dreary weather barely qualifies as an obstacle. With the Olympics approaching quickly — the women's laser radial class is set to begin competition Aug. 1 — Douglas doesn't have the luxury of wasting days. This session is crucial, and won't stop for a little rain.
Or a lot.
According to Environment Canada, 46.1 millimetres of rain fell at Pearson Airport that day, setting a new record.
Douglas is also a record-setter. She came within spitting distance of the podium three years ago in Tokyo, finishing sixth among 44 competitors. That result was the best ever by a Canadian woman in the Olympics, but she's heading into Paris with three years more experience and tactical savvy, and with confidence that she can break through old plateaus. Last fall she won silver at the Pan Am Games, but this summer she thinks she can achieve more.
Her objective for Paris is straightforward.
"I'm gonna be honest: a medal," says Douglas, whose older brother, Greg, is a two-time Olympian as a sailor. "I came really close in Tokyo. It's not an easy goal."
Challenges abound.
Anne-Marie Rindom, the Danish sailor who won the Laser Radial class in Tokyo is scheduled to compete in Paris, as is 2020 silver medallist Josefin Olsson of Sweden. But Douglas has improved since 2021. In 2022 she won her class at the Trofeo Princesa Sofia, a World Cup event that attracted elite competitors. This past April, Douglas won an Olympic test event in France, topping a world class field that included Rindom.
On this rainy training day, Douglas will hit the water with a group of Canada's junior sailors, a mix of men and women, in town to gain experience training with an Olympic-level senior competitor. They'll line up for a series of starts — minute-long sprints into the wind in Lake Ontario, a few hundred metres south of the shore. After that, a simulated race.
But before all that, there's a pre-practice meeting to discuss each athlete's goals for the session. It's outdoors but under a tent, thankfully. The forecast calls for more rain. Soon.
♦ ♦ ♦
The first lesson Douglas learned from that near-miss in Melbourne: it pays to keep a sharp Leatherman knife on you. She bought Harrison a brand new one to thank him for his help in rescuing her capsized boat.
And the second takeaway?
A new perspective on adversity. You never know which challenges you can handle … until you handle them. After that, you know what's possible.
"I was a little bit nervous moving forward for windy days," says Douglas, who was born in Barbados, and learned to sail during her childhood on the Caribbean island. "When you've had that bad day, any day after that is easier. You go through it once, and the next day you're like, 'This is so much easier.'"
Minutes later, she's seated at a long table under the tent, along with the other sailors, as Harrison convenes the planning session. Before everyone heads out, he wants them to define tactical, technical, and character goals for today's workout.
Outside the tent, the wind blows and small birds chirp. A solitary swan floats in a marina nearby. Sporadic bursts of rainfall pelt the tent's canopy.
"Be happy," says one of the junior sailors when asked about his goal for today.
"Attacking," another athlete says.
"Staying calm."
Rain pelts the plastic tent. Intensity builds by the minute. It's Douglas' turn now.
"Balance upwind," she said. "I haven't sailed upwind in two weeks.
The rain continues, even heavier now.
Douglas continues.
"Be more cognizant."
"Patience."
"Stay locked in."
Over in the marina, the swan floats in still water, highlighting the real weather dilemma. As the downpour strengthens, the wind diminishes. You can train in the rain, but you can't sail without wind.
And that 2 p.m. departure time?
It's in jeopardy.
♦ ♦ ♦
Asked to describe her sport in a way that makes sense to someone who has never watched it, Douglas offers a mixed metaphor. Laser radial, she says, is both a marathon and a chess match.
The marathon analogy deals with big-picture details. Both sports feature mass starts, dozens of competitors, racing without defined lanes, jockeying for space, each trying to find the line that works best for them. And it's a chess match, Douglas says, because tactics are crucial, within each race, and across the 10 races that will compose the Olympic regatta.
After each race, sailors are assigned a score corresponding with their finishing position. The winner of the heat receives one point, runner-up gets two points, and so on, all the way to the last-place finisher.
After nine rounds, each racer's worst result is tossed out, and the 10 athletes with the lowest scores qualify for the medal race, where points are doubled – winner gets two points, second place receives four. Lowest score after 10 rounds wins, so in that sense sailing is also like golf.
WATCH | How sailing works at the Olympics:
Races tend to last roughly 45 minutes, but Harrison says those first 60 seconds are crucial. The start helps determine positioning as racers enter the first turn in a closed course. A good start means a clear path to a low score, while a poor start means battling for position for three quarters of an hour.
"It has the highest gains, the highest rewards to be very sharp in starts. It can account for so much of the race," Harrison says. "Probably in the next few days… we'll sit here and just do starting all day, practically."
Douglas knew she could erase those points, provided she had no more last-place finishes in the following eight heats. But the false start also eliminated any room for error in the rest of the competition. Olympic qualification hinged on a string of low scores.
In situations like that, Douglas says, tactical changes help, but so does a shift in mindset. When circumstances push her to the bottom of the scoreboard, Douglas focuses on her execution, and enters what she calls Pac Man Mode, gobbling up as many competitors as possible.
"Starting off with that and then knowing that Olympic qualification's on the line, and thinking I have to fight for every single race, that was really tough," says Douglas, who graduated from Lakefield College School, an exclusive private school about two hours northeast of Toronto. "I literally write it in my journal almost every single day. 'Race by race. Finish with quality.'"
♦ ♦ ♦
Departure time arrives and the water surrounding the yacht club is rippling under a barrage of heavy raindrops. This current downpour will relent, eventually. But until wind resumes, the sailors remain marooned on land, on chairs, idling under the plastic canopy, waiting for a sustained breeze.
Conditions may never be ideal today, but Harrison, the veteran coach, stresses that perfect sailing conditions don't really exist. Each location has its tendencies. Marseille, the city on the Mediterranean that will host Olympic sailing, is known for hot weather. But conditions can also shift in minutes, as Douglas learned three years ago in Melbourne.
"You have to be prepared for a super strong wind, while Marseille, typically, is a lighter sea breeze," she says. "You kind of need a full range.
Marseille's heat, like the wind, is a factor. Temperatures are expected to peak at 34 C on the opening day of Laser Radial competition. Like Douglas, her competitors have spent time in Marseille, learning the course and adjusting to the climate.
"It was just super hot," Rindom, who has a bronze medal from Rio along with her gold medal in Tokyo, told Olympic.com. "We are preparing some heat training before we go. The place is just amazing. It's one of the most beautiful places in Europe when you're out sailing."
In sailing, the weather, no matter how much it changes, is a constant, in that every competitor has to deal with it at the same time, using essentially the same equipment. Boats are all built to the same specifications. There's no Laser Radial equivalent of a Nike Vaporfly running shoe, or Speedo LZR swimsuit.
The main variable is a sailor's skill, and their ability to produce more speed or tighter turns than competitors in near identical boats, racing in the same conditions. All world-class sailors can read wind conditions and calculate how to angle their boats to capitalize on the fly, in the way that all NBA guards can sink three-pointers. Harrison says Douglas is even better at that aspect of sailing than many of her competitors. Think Steph Curry versus a normal guard from long range.
In a field of strong competitors, working the angles is Douglas' super power.
"The angle in which she sails determines the speed she goes," says Harrison, who was named Sail Canada's Coach of the Year in 2021. "The closer you get to the wind, the more the boat starts to slow down.
"It's not about going as fast as the boat can go. It's about trying to combine good direction to the mark … It's all geometry."
The sport is also highly physical. If Laser Radial racing is a mix of marathoning, chess and golf, it's also a test of strength. Douglas says world-class sailors need a sturdy lower body and core, to keep themselves anchored while they steer their boat. They also need a strong posterior chain for all the time spent playing tug-o'-war with the ropes and cables that control the sails. Height helps too, to generate the leverage to counterbalance a boat that's leaning too far in one direction. Douglas, at six feet, has the length to right almost any ship.
And if you've watched a competitive sailor scoot from one side of the boat to the other at high speed, you know spatial awareness is key. That horizontal pole that meets the mast at a right angle is called a boom, and in a strong wind it swings low and fast. Darting beneath it takes reflexes and dexterity, otherwise you can imagine what happens if an aluminum boom meets an unwitting sailor. "Decapitate" might be too strong a word, but not by much.
Then there's pain tolerance. Ten races total, 45 minutes each, and nearly everyone is a scramble from start to finish. At some point, depending on how the race unfolds, it'll make your muscles burn.
"Lactic acid really builds up in your legs," she says. "Day five, six, if it's been windy … it's tough to walk up stairs."
♦ ♦ ♦
Finally, some co-operation from the weather.
The rain stops, a brisk wind picks up. Metre-high swells in Lake Ontario, where Harrison has placed a series of buoys to form a starting line. Clouds still shroud the tall buildings in the distance, but the sun brightens a patch of sky above downtown Toronto. The training group moves heads out onto the water to begin the training session, at last.
In just over two weeks, the Olympics will begin. In two days Douglas will head to Paris. From there, another trip south to Marseille, for some on site training ahead of the games. After that, 10 races between Douglas and the first ever Olympic medal for a Canadian Laser Radial competitor.
"I really strongly believe in speaking things into existence. Manifesting," she says. "That's something I've said all the time, whether I get there or not. I think it's important to strive for that."
The sailors steer their way to the start line and await Harrison's command.
Harrison raises a whistle to his lips, and warns the passengers in his motorboat to brace themselves for an eardrum-piercing shriek.
"Three, two, one, ears…"
One high-pitched blast from his whistle and the sailors take off.
Douglas scrambles to one side of her sail boat, grabs a pair of sheets and leans all the way back. Her legs remain inside the craft, her upper body out over the ledge, suspended above Lake Ontario. She cranks until she finds the direction she wants, meets the wind at the perfect angle, then rides the breeze at full speed toward a marker in the distance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
