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Back on the Olympic trail: Interview with 49er champ Chris Draper
Chris Draper has just come out of premature retirement from Olympic campaigning. He is back at the helm of a 49er with another ‘retiree', Peter Greenhalgh who is doing the physically tough job of crewing the Olympic skiff more than five years since he last set foot in the boat.
Draper made a quick and dramatic impact on the 49er class when he first started sailing them in late 2000. The big breakthrough came when he teamed up with Simon Hiscocks in early 2002 and just a few months later they finished second at the World Championships in Hawaii. A year later they dominated the 2003 Worlds in Cadiz, winning the event with a day to spare and earning Team GBR selection for the Athens Games.
 Chris Draper & Peter Greenhalgh at Hyeres 2009
After such a dominant performance leading up to Athens, gold was a very realistic prospect. In fact it was almost expected, so when Draper and Hiscocks took bronze there was an element of disappointment. Still, they pressed on with their next campaign, aiming to erase any feelings of missed opportunity with a drive for gold at the next Games in Qingdao 2008.
Things were going well, not least in 2006 when Draper/Hiscocks won another World Championship. But there was a fast-rising force in British 49er sailing, with Stevie Morrison and Ben Rhodes throwing down the gauntlet by winning the 2006 Europeans in Weymouth. The ‘new kids' continued to perform, culminating in victory at the 2007 World Championships and swiftly followed by gold in Qingdao at the Olympic Test Event. Morrison/Rhodes were selected for the Games ahead of Draper/Hiscocks, and so Draper hung up his trapeze harness while Hiscocks found a new sailing partner in the former 29er World Champion Dave Evans.
Over the past couple of years Draper has got married and forged a career in professional sailing by stringing together a number of projects including steering an Extreme 40 catamaran for Oman Sail and most recently doing the windspotting job for Team Origin at the Louis Vuitton Pacific Series in Auckland.
So, why the return to Olympic sailing? SailJuice spoke to Chris to find out his plans....
SailJuice (SJ): Chris, you've done a lot of different things in the sport over the last couple of years. Why are you going back into Olympic sailing?
Chris Draper (CD): I had become pretty miffed with the sport towards the of the last Olympic cycle. I'd lost motivation, and so I decided to explore different avenues, and the stuff I've done has done that massively. Doing the Extreme 40 and America's Cup stuff has made me realise how much there is in the sport, and how exciting it is. Now I'm going back into the 49er, prepared to give it my all.
SJ: Before we go into that, what was it like going up the rig of an America's Cup boat for Team Origin?
CD: It was a heck of a lot of fun, going 100 foot up in the air. I was standing in for Rob Greenhalgh [his 49er crew's brother] who was already committed to doing the Volvo Ocean Race with Puma. I'd talked to Ben [Ainslie] about opportunities to sail with the team, and because this opportunity came up Ben gave me a call and I dropped everything to give it a bash. It was very good fun, very interesting to work with Ben and Bart [Andrew Simpson] and [Iain] Percy. There were some pretty amazing sailors on that boat.
SJ: Yes, well, you're not too bad a sailor yourself though, are you?
CD: I got on there not knowing anything about anything, and it became apparent to me very quickly that my 49er experience was irrelevant.
SJ: Then again, a lot of 49er sailors seem to end up going up the rigs of Cup boats - sailors like Adam Beashel on Emirates Team New Zealand for example...
CD: I think maybe it's because you're trapezing up there, even if it's a hundred feet up! One of the things is getting your head around the heights, it took a long time to stop my leg from shaking, but really it is just like trapezing. Adam was very helpful about how to manage it up there. I'm used to sailing boats that are pressure oriented. Like the 49er, with the Cup boats the angle changes so much on the pressure. But it's pretty difficult to interpret the wind from up there. It takes a while getting used to gauging distance and working out how long the wind will take to reach you.
SJ: What else did you learn from the Auckland experience?
CD: Working with Bart, Percy and Ben how they manage their sailing - that was the most interesting thing. They're very close knit, they know what one another want, they sail with an incredible maturity. I learned a lot from just being a part of that group and the way they communicate.
SJ: Now you're back into Olympic campaigning after a two-year ‘retirement'. If you'd lost motivation before, how do you reignite that passion for sailing the 49er?
CD: I think we went too hard back into it after Athens. We'd put in so much effort between 2000 and 2004 that we were shot to bits. This time I'm having to start from afresh, with a new rig, a new partner, and we're going to have to work our cut out. It's going to be a steep learning curve, and we won't have time to get stale.
SJ: There's that old cliché of it being harder to stay at the top than actually getting to the top. You'd know whether that's true or not...
CD: Well, staying there is definitely one of the hardest things, but I'm under no illusions that getting back up to the top is going to be very hard too.
SJ: You and Pete Greenhalgh have both been off the RYA programme for some time, so what sort of support can you expect now?
CD: The RYA are being very supportive, but we've got to qualify funding quickly, we're going to have to turn it on for the Worlds in Lake Garda this July. If we didn't do the business in Garda we'd have to do the business at the Europeans in Croatia instead.
SJ: There's no doubt you're both talented sailors, but you are up against a really talented British squad all looking to get the one spot for the Olympics in 2012...
CD: It certainly is a talented squad, but if we didn't think we could do it, we wouldn't set about doing it. At the end of the day, with any of the Olympic classes it's about focusing on the rest of the world. You've got to get to being No.1 in the world. If you do that, then the funding and everything else takes care of itself. At the moment we're on the back foot with the lack of sailing we've done, but with the new rig everyone is starting afresh to some extent. It will be interesting for Pete and me both having previously been in long-term sailing partnerships. Putting all that together will be exciting.
 Chris Draper's old crew Simon Hiscocks is now a rival for Olympic selection...
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