Conducting an Olympic campaign


Think about it. If you are a runner, you can run just about anywhere. All you need is shoes, shorts, a T-shirt, a set of sweats, and a stopwatch. You can keep your "day job," because you can run in the morning and you can run in the evening, and you can work in between.
If you throw a javelin or put a shot, I guess you have to buy one of those so you can throw them around and make craters in your back yard. And, of course, you have to belong to the local health club so you can work on your muscles.
If you are training for the Olympics as a swimmer, all you need is a bathing suit and a pool, and you don't have to BUY the pool -- you can probably find one to use free, because any pool, public or private, would probably be happy to have a potential Olympic swimmer setting records in their pool.
If you are a gymnast, you have to invest in leotards and a coach -- EXPENSIVE! But most gymnasts are very young and are still being financed mostly by their parents. If the parents cannot afford it, they do whatever fundraising is necessary to keep their child in training. The gymnast usually does not have to worry about the financial stuff -- he or she is free to concentrate fully on training.
Basketball? Those guys are all professionals who are getting paid all the time just to play, and that IS their "training."

Sailing is the only Olympic event I can think of where every individual competing has to shell out a huge chunk of money for the equipment required for the event -- i.e., a boat and then the endless numbers of sails and rigging and parts necessary to stay at or near the top of the heap. And yet it is the most difficult event to get sponsorship for because it is one of the least publicized events. And when is the last time you saw a sailor on TV advertising a pair of Harken boat shoes? When is the last time you saw a sailor on the side of a box of Wheaties advertising the "Breakfast of Champions"? Sailors just do not have recognizable faces.

Do Tornado sailors campaigning for the Olympics get any funding from the United States Olympic Committee? Well, the five top-ranked teams, based on the Tornado Association ranking system, do get some assistance to cover expenses for going to Olympic training regattas. And we were told that the top four Tornado teams got funding to cover part of their expenses to go to the Tornado Worlds in Australia in January.



If you see a homeless person near the water with an expensive-looking boat parked beside his or her cardboard lean-to, you may just be looking at a sailor who is doing an Olympic campaign. Actually, they don't use cardboard -- usually it's something more high-tech, like a tent made out of the sail they don't want any more because it was too slow.in the last regatta.

They are all over the place right now in the southern parts of the United States, begging for places to set up camp -- or at least to launch their boats. If they don't sleep in their vans or tents, they are cramming as many athletic bodies as possible into one apartment or motel room to save money.

It bears a striking resemblance to a political presidential campaign. In the early stages all the sailors of a given Olympic class in the United States are all sharing ideas and tuning tips and are training together as much as possible. They are helping each other to get better so the whole group can get better, because they all know that the important thing in the end is to be better than the opponents from the other countries.

But when it begins to get close to the U.S. Olympic trials, where only one regatta determines which boat will represent the United States in the Olympics, the pressure is on, and there is less camaraderie and more isolationism, more secrecy, more animosity. It is no longer a team effort -- it is every team for itself. Egos soar, tempers flare, and protests fly.

The Olympic trials is like the political convention where a party will choose its candidate. The potential candidates all have their supporters and they all talk about what is wrong with their opponents. And after the dust has settled from the battle, and after the final candidate has been chosen, all the other candidates rally to support the person who will represent their party and they say, "Let bygones be bygones." The important thing now is to win the BIG election.

They eat cereal and yogurt for breakfast and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. At dinnertime you might see them sitting in their vehicles heating up a cup of water with one of those coil things you plug into your cigarette lighter, so they can make a cup of dehydrated soup.

During the days, if they are not out sailing, they are abusing their boats with rivet guns and electric drills and, as a last resort, hammers. The area around them is usually littered with torn-off pieces of duct tape and silicone sealant and and wet-dry sandpaper and tiny plastic nuts and bolts bags.

At night, if they are not fortunate enough to be in a room with a TV, they are in their tents, with a flashlight clamped in their teeth, reading articles and books on sailboat racing and on mind control, so they can keep focused on their goals.

And what exactly are these goals. Near as I can figure out, the primary goal is to have a way to avoid working for at least a year and maybe two, depending upon how dedicated they are to avoiding work. No, just kidding, folks. Actually, all of them have the same goal -- they want to represent the United States in the Olympics. Now, none of them seem to be REALLY sure exactly WHY they want to do this. It seems to be sort of like that movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," where the guy built a mud mountain in his house and didn't know why he was doing it, but he knew it was important. He was obsessed.







You need a porta potti, pee bottle, backpack tent, sleeping bag, van, non-electric sewing machine, small, portable workbench, fiberglass repair materials, rivet gun, nicropress, wire cutters, propane torch, phone numbers of the 100 richest people in America, directory of all the foundations that have money available for sports-related activities, cellular phone, one of those water-heating coils that you plug into your cigarette lighter, flashlights, someone who can forward mail to a variety of locations, understanding employer who is willing to give you two years paid vacation, someone to send press releases out about what you are doing and to try to get sponsors' names mentioned.

Gas stove
tent
really good air mattress
Starbucks coffee
two favorite pillows
battery-operated TV (some guys have TV's with VCR's.)
cooler
hot-water coil
sleeping bag
flashlight for reading
mosquito repellent
sense of humor
sense of adventure
portable, battery-operated air conditioner to use in your tent.
books
canned tuna, tomato juice, wheaties, orange juice, cups and plastic utensils, fresh fruit, one pan to boil water in, dehydrated soups,
sailing gear and equipment
boxes of lines and parts -- everything to fix any part on the boat
clothing,
T-shirts to sell
laundry detergent
towels
Sailing articles to read
Phone calling card
Cellular would be nice, but it's expensive.
Display rack for all the things you are selling to help pay your way -- T-shirts, Olympic squeeze-balls (to strengthen your hands for sheeting),

pliers, screw drivers, extra line, rivet gun, spare shackles, spare blocks, spare battens, wet-dry sandpaper, cordless electric drill, sponge, bucket,

How do you get your mail sent to you?

After observing how sailors live when they are conducting an Olympic campaign, I have begun to wonder why it is so terribly expensive. These sailors are among the homeless. They are nomads, wandering form place to place and living in vans and tents and lean-tos hidden in the high grass at the edges of yacht clubs and sailing centers or wherever they can get someone to let them hang out. They live on cereal, milk, yogurt, sprouts, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and dehydrated soup packages.
Everyone says the cost of the boat is only a small part of the cost of the total campaign, which can easily be $100,000.

They use other people's bathrooms and showers and other people's hoses to rinse off their boats. They stay until their hosts have been cited by the local government for having vagrants camping on their property, and then they move on, like a flock of locusts, in search of another site.

Do you pity them or envy them? Is it glamorous or just another kind of grind?