"I trained with the Great Britain Sail team - they can produce when it counts"

Daily Mirror

5 hours ago

I had the chance to train with the Emirates Great Britain SailGP team ahead of their home race in Portsmouth come July and their power and endurance is something you just don't grasp when watching on TV
For a lot of sports you can make your own, relatively successful, prediction of how fit their competitors are. Rugby players for example speak for themselves, as would say a cyclist or a long distance runner. Their shape and size somewhat giving them away.
When it comes to sailing though, me included, to tend to go in slightly blind. When you watch footage of them competing you see as much of the boat as you do the sailors themselves.
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So when I was invited to train with the Emirates Great Britain SailGP team I wasn't sure what to expect. Alongside myself, a relatively active individual but far from professional athlete, was England rugby great Danny Care and ex-Harlequins and Red Roses star, Shaunagh Brown.
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We were tasked with five exercises. Some a bit more tailored to sailing, others perhaps favouring rugby and some pretty neutral. Overseeing the action was Professor Greg Whyte OBE - a world renowned sport scientist and the human performance coach to the SailGP Emirates Great Britain team.
It is safe to say it only took the first exercise to be complete for me to realise that, yes, these sailors had it. Neil Hunter had all the top tier physical characteristics you'd expect and Nick Hutton was absolutely shredded. Ellie Aldridge, the reserve sailor, was also in top condition.
We embarked on a 30 second effort on the grinder. 30 seconds, not long right? Think again. The key here was maximising your output but making sure there wasn't a mammoth drop off. This movement is what trims the sails on the boats when the sailors are competing - in simple terms "the engine of the boat".
They can be on these for minutes at a time when competing, but their max efforts had Hutton and Hunter well ahead of the pack. The final five to ten seconds really do take you to a dark place, so I can't fathom what minutes would be like. The SailGP athletes spend around 15 hours a week on that grinder machine.
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Base endurance is the core of what they are trying to achieve. The boats they compete in are only accessible for events so everything the athletes are doing is simulating race day. Imagine an F1 driver not jumping into the car until the first lap of qualifying.
A simple exercise of who can smash out the most chin ups saw sailing edge out rugby with Hutton getting the better of Care - any mself, although that was no great surprise. Efforts on the Wattbike came next with the sailors needing less than ten seconds to produce their max efforts, hitting it hard when they got the go ahead from Whyte.
Perhaps a personal highlight, and an entertaining show of competitiveness, was on the sled push. We were all timed and it was a race across eight metres.
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Pride was clearly at stake and, with one person still left to go, the SailGP Emirates Great Britain team were not top of the leaderboard. Hutton had the final say was told by his colleague Hunter that their reputation rested on him producing on his one and only run.
If being out on the water is about relishing the concept of "your time to shine" and producing when its most needed, then boy did the man from Scotland come up trumps. A mega show of power saw him top the time charts to the delight of his team-mates.
I think whenever you train with anyone your respect for them goes up and what took me back the most was the sheer power output they were capable of. The Emirates Great Britain team have already claimed victory at one of the events this year, coming out on top in Australia. Ahead of their home race in Portsmouth they look primed to close in on championship leaders Spain.