In the distance the outstretched arms of Christ the Redeemer and Corcovado mountain dominate the sweep of an achingly beautiful coastline. Looking out into Guanabara Bay and the sailing venue or inwards at the precipitous rock and trees, the dramatic beauty of Rio de Janeiro is just one of its many excesses. In a city of over six million people there are many.
It is a day of presentations and information exchange and the chairs are laid out around a large table. One by one or in twos the Irish sailors trickle through, bronzed, weather beaten, lean.
Ryan Seaton and Matt McGovern arrive. A two-hand act of the 49er boat, their bonhomie and jokey banter belies a binding work ethic. Relaxed and irredeemably upbeat McGovern says at four years of age he got a boat and “pushed out”.
The water and the then troubled north, where he lives, were worlds apart. The sea became a mental and physical detachment. He “pushed out” and found a different, untroubled space.
Saskia Tidey, striking and tall, her six feet one inch frame, she says, is good leverage for the physical side of the work with her partner Andrea Brewster. Her family name is well known to those of another age and of another life in Ireland.
To a new generation 22-year-old Tidey is an Irish sailor meeting the biggest challenge of her career. With Andrea Brewster, a decade older at 33, the pair are the first female skiff crew to have qualified for Ireland for an Olympic Games.
Tidey’s efforts in Rio may come to define her career and with Brewster – a meeting of Glenageary in south Dublin with Headly Downs north of London – there is an optimism that anything can happen when they begin racing along the Brazilian coastline.
The Olympics have never been about the grandiose IOC or a streamlined cheating system in Russia. It has never been about the billions in television money or what a gold medal might earn an athlete.
It has always been about dreams and hope and of that there is abundance in Tidey’s bright, confident personality. One of sport’s purist notions is that with optimism and work anything can be achieved. Those thoughts are sometimes the seeds of great things. That’s what the Olympics represent. Tidey holds them dearly. But their passage to Rio in their 49er FX boat was not smooth. It was rocky and demanding and arrived only in March after a delay of four months, when news arrived that Africa would not be entering their Olympic event.
The pair had delivered a strong final day performance at the World Championships in Argentina last year and appeared to have secured a Rio berth when they finished 14th overall. However, a rules protest ashore delayed that and as they prepared to compete for the final European place in Mallorca in March, news filtered through that their Argentina placing had been enough.
“It brought us closer together as a team,” says Tidey. “It was a massive hurdle to jump to get back on the boat, knocked our confidence. But we’ve done that now. It made us stronger.”
To a different generation the Tidey name harks back to a grim past now gone. Hers is an imperfect connection with McGovern’s revelatory “push off” into the water and breaking with the violence of the north. But as he broke away the Tidey family in Dublin were sucked into the ongoing dirty war.
Saskia wasn’t born in November 24th, 1983 when her father Don, the then-chairman and chief executive of the Associated British Food companies in the North and the Republic, was kidnapped by the Provisional IRA outside his home in Rathfarnham. The abduction sparked a nationwide manhunt and ended in Derrada Wood, in Ballinamore in Leitrim, where he was held for 23 days until the episode ended in a confrontation with Irish security forces.
Eight years ago giving evidence at the Special Criminal Court in the case of Maze escaper Brendan “Bik” McFarlane, accused of carrying out the kidnap before the trial collapsed, Tidey recalled how on his 23rd day of captivity in the woods he heard gunfire and explosions.
In the subsequent chaos he emerged shaken and alive but during the shoot-out, trainee 23-year-old Garda Gary Sheehan was killed along with 35-year-old Private Patrick Kelly.
Saskia speaks of her 81-year-old father with deep affection and admiration. She has taken energy and direction from him, much of it infused with his own experience of coping with pressures in the board room and maybe too of those under a blackened hood.
“I wasn’t around at that time,” she says. “I think he wouldn’t have survived that if he had not been that character. I would hope my gene in having dreams myself and having confidence in myself, backing my beliefs comes from him.
“He has been really amazing in teaching me how to handle myself in pressurised situations. There are so many attributes that I have learned from him that I believe can be successful.
“Yeah, it’s an open enough topic,” she adds. “It happened. It’s reality. I know just as much as the next person through media and through him. But I think really through his strengths, through his beliefs, through his fighting, whether that’s fighting for your life or fighting for what you believe in I think I’ve learned how to fight and I’ve learned how to believe and have faith.
“That has really given me strength and motive in times where I am having difficulties in seeing the end of the tunnel with issues in the boat or my performance. He definitely told me to just step back and take a deep breath and keep fighting. You know, and never give up.
“He’s my dad. What I take out of it is that he’s a very strong person and he motivates me in sport and in life and going out to achieve. I’m very proud to be my dad’s daughter. I look up to him. He is a very strong person who has always encouraged me to do whatever I believed in doing. I am so proud to be at the Olympics, for him to see me there.”
When the gun fire began and a grenade exploded, Don Tidey’s captors scattered. He fell to the ground and rolled down an incline into the cover of bracken, where he was found later by the army.
It is all part of another life for Saskia just as Rio is the beginning of a new one. She knows what the Tidey name means to some people and it has sometimes become a talking point. But her drive is to make it synonymous with success on the water too.
Brewster is the experienced part of the two and in a previous life sailed with the British team where she won a bronze medal in the 2008 Laser Radial World Championships. Tidey met her through Irish team mate Annalise Murphy and the pair have been together now for three years.
“I don’t think the Tidey name has had any influence,” says Saskia. “Apart from being very proud being a Tidey for representing my own family, it hasn’t. You make your life what it is. I would hope in time that Andrea and I have made a name for ourselves and our names are influential to others who want to come up through the system in the ISA (Irish Sailing Association).
“Yeah sure, it definitely comes up a lot. But it is not something that distracts me or offends me or my father. I’m proud of him and I am proud that he survived. It’s fantastic to now be going to the Olympics and for him to be here watching me I can only thank him and my mum [Barbara] for everything they have done.”
A netball international for four years, she took up sailing in transition year at Rathdown School in south Dublin and competed in the World Youth Championships. When Brewster, moving from the single Laser radial to a double hander, was suggested as a companion in 2013, it seemed like a good fit. Both know they are outsiders for medals but it doesn’t relegate their thinking or change the attitude that they will arrive in Rio as equals in a large fleet. The qualification came through because of their blind focus and ability to commit. They have been rewarded for their faith and that is at the fore front of Tidey’s mind.
“If you want something bad enough fight for it and it will happen,” she says. “It’s all about fighting when the opportunity arises, you take advantage of it. With our sailing Andrea and I have had to fight very hard to make the grade in order to go.
“Our qualification was all about fighting for every inch we could at that World Championships. It paid off because it was about not letting your focus down for one second.
“If you cannot come off that water feeling that you have given everything, then no matter what the result is, it’s a failure. It’s important for us a team that regardless of our results on a piece of paper it is knowing that we both gave it 100 per cent and we were both in it together. That is what we are hoping for.”
A father’s daughter. That’s a good beginning.
