Robert Dickson wasn’t offended. Neither was Seán Waddilove, who’d have done the same himself.
The two Olympic sailors were milling around Áras an Uachtaráin along with the rest of the Irish team, there to meet Michael D Higgins and his wife Sabina and generally just to hang out. It was September now and they were decompressing. This was the last official function of the Paris Olympic cycle.
A politician – they genuinely can’t remember who – came over to tap Rob on the shoulder at one stage. He had his phone in his hand and wanted a picture. Rob said of course, only to quickly realise that Deputy Loves-A-Star was positioning himself beside Daniel Wiffen. Dickson was being asked to capture the moment.
Such is life when you come fourth in the Olympics.
James O’Callaghan saw it happening and intervened, his dudgeon rising slightly. O’Callaghan is Sailing Ireland’s performance director. Outside of the two lads themselves, nobody in the room knew better how much they’d put into the previous four years or how close they’d come to being national heroes.
“Here, let me take it,” he said, grabbing the phone.
“I didn’t mind at all!” Dickson says now. “I think James was offended on my behalf but I would have happily taken it.”
“Sure I got a picture with Daniel Wiffen too!” laughs Waddilove.
We’re sitting in Dún Laoghaire, almost three months on from the Olympics. Their medal race in the men’s 49ers class happened on Friday, August 2nd – pretty much as soon as Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy were finished singing Amhrán na bhFiann. So it was understandable that they got lost in the mix somewhat.
But what happened to them is agonising. They started the medal race in second place overall, only to drop to fourth by the end of it because of a false start. Worse, it was a false start they didn’t actually make.
Ireland finished the Olympics with three fourth places – Rhasidat Adeleke, the women’s 4x400m relay and Dickson and Waddilove. They saw the rain-dirty valley. No Brigadoon.
As it happened, Dickson and Waddilove were both in the Stade de France for Adeleke’s fourth-place finish a week later. Dickson was there the following night for the relay. He remembers putting his head in his hands after Sharlene Mawdsley wasn’t able to pass Amber Anning down the home straight.
“It was devastating,” he says. “I was just thinking about how I knew what they were going through. I was like, ‘I know exactly how they feel right now’.”
There was a slight difference though. Any cold analysis of both fourth places on the track told you Adeleke and the relay team couldn’t have done any better. They were both in position to win a medal but, when it came right down to it, others were stronger in the crunch. Fourth was an accurate reflection of their ceiling on the day.
That consolation isn’t available to Dickson and Waddilove. They know they should have an Olympic medal. They sailed well enough across the week to have earned one. But they messed up at the one moment they couldn’t afford to.
“It was pretty tough,” Dickson says. “It was especially tough because of the position we were in all week. We had the blue bibs for second place the whole way through the whole week. It definitely felt like we were sailing so well that we could get a medal.
“And I felt like I was confident that we would go out and do it. But then obviously it didn’t happen. It was really a tough, tough thing to happen. I don’t know what else there is to say. It’s just not a good feeling.”
Throughout that week in Marseille, Dickson and Waddilove did pretty much everything they had spent the three years since Tokyo planning to do. The format called for three races a day for four days – they posted a win on Day One and followed up with two seconds, three fourths and very few disasters the rest of the way. Going into the medal race, they were in second place.
Everyone knew the scenario. There were 10 boats in the medal race. Ireland started it five points behind Spain but three ahead of New Zealand and seven up on the US. Each place is usually worth a point but the medal race has double points so anything in the top four would have guaranteed the podium. They knew that fifth or sixth would mostly likely have done the trick too. As it turned out, seventh would have nicked bronze.
“On a day like we had for the medal race, the start was hugely important,” says Waddilove. “Whereas other days racing before that, the wind was more variable. There was a big difference in pressure. If you came off the line with not a great start, there were plenty of opportunities to pass other boats out. But the medal race day was a pretty perfect wind. So it was all down to the start.”
Here’s where the tactical nuances of sailing come into play. You have to pick your spot and hit it at the right time. Too far back when the horn goes and the wind in your sail is affected by turbulence from the other boats. Too far forward and you’ll jump the start.
As the seconds counted down at the start line, Dickson and Waddilove found themselves a lane in between the boats from Uruguay and Croatia. They zipped in to hit the line right as the horn went, only for the field to hear a second horn sound five seconds later. Meaning that one or more boats had made a false start.
One of sailing’s quirks is that you don’t get told if you are the culprit. Not straight away at least. It’s up to each individual boat to decide, in that split-second, whether they were across the line or not. If you think you were, it’s up to you to turn and go back and start again.
“If you’re over the line and you don’t go back, then you get kicked out of the race after two minutes,” Dickson explains, a fate suffered by the Croatian team that started just beside them.
“If you were over, then you have to go back under the line and then you can start the race from there.”
Three boats went back – Ireland, Poland and Uruguay. In the end, it turned out only Uruguay and Croatia had jumped the start. Dickson and Waddilove had turned back for a false start they hadn’t made.
“You just need to make a very quick decision,” says Waddilove. “Because obviously, the more time you spend discussing the decision, you’re getting further away from that line. It is going to take you longer to get back and restart the race. It’s a tricky call to make.”
Neither of them was to blame and both of them were to blame. They went back because they couldn’t be sure if it was their boat that was over the line. They couldn’t be sure if it was their boat that was over the line because they had got too trigger-happy in the first place.
“We were one of the quickest to react and go back,” says Dickson. “We have different roles on the start line and the acceleration was called too early by me. And then the decision was by Seán.
“He thought we were over the line – or at least too close to the line to risk it – and that we had to go back. In the end, you just have to go with it. You just trust each other and go with your gut. And the gut feeling was that we were too close or over the line.”
They’ve watched it back, obviously. They’ve seen how close they were. They built up momentum coming to the line and hit it at speed. They didn’t jump the start but probably more due to luck than judgment. You’re talking a matter of milliseconds.
“At all times, we are in line or centimetres behind the two boats that were over,” Waddilove says. “That’s another thing – it’s all based on the race officer looking down the line. It comes down to if he doesn’t get you or he does get you. So, yeah, even looking back on it, I don’t think it really changes anything. We would have still done the same thing.”
In any case, going back or not going back is the wrong conversation. The original sin was lining up between Croatia and Uruguay, boats that were starting the medal race in sixth and ninth. They both needed to do something special to grab a medal so they had to be a little reckless. Dickson and Waddilove found themselves tailgating Icarus.
“What we’ve basically recognised is that our decision of where we started on the line was the mistake,” Dickson says. “We were between two boats that had nothing to lose. So we didn’t calculate that the two boats beside us were going to go for a really high-risk start.
“They pulled us forwards because if you start back on a boat beside you, then you’ll end up with no wind. They’ll take the wind from you and you’ll have a bad start and you’ll be back behind people. So we had to try and be just behind them but to not be over the line and still be forward enough that you can get off the line properly.
“We should have moved somewhere else on the line where we were beside our main competitors, which would have been the Spanish and the Kiwis. But all in the last minute or so, everyone shuffled positions and we didn’t. And it ended up that the two boats that had nothing to lose were just beside us, which kind of encouraged us to go with them. That’s what caused us to be too close.”
Once they went back, they were relying on mistakes from the boats up ahead to bail them out. Hoping somebody would mess up. But nobody did. Ten boats started the race, Croatia got disqualified, Ireland finished ninth. The 18 points pushed them down to fourth overall, three points outside bronze. Brutal.
That night, they went for a drink with their families and friends and let the whole thing wash off them. The autopsy could wait. It wasn’t that they avoided talking about the race, more that they knew it wasn’t going to change anything.
“At one stage that night,” Dickson remembers, “someone said, ‘A medal isn’t going to make you happy’. And I said, ‘Well, it would make me pretty happy today!’”
“That was me!” says Waddilove.
“We know a few people who have Olympic medals and if you talk to them, they say, ‘Yeah, I was delighted with myself for a couple of months but that passes’.
“We do it to perform, not to get the medal. The result comes if you tick all the boxes off and have everything complete. I think if you do it just because you need to get medals, you’ll never be happy with yourself if you don’t get them.”
So on they go. They’ve been to two Olympics as a partnership now and, though no decision has been made, the likelihood is they will aim for Los Angeles together in 2028. Dickson is 26, Waddilove is 27 – they’re exactly four years younger than the Spanish pair that won gold in Marseilles.
Their timing could be perfect yet.
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