Sports: Olympics

Paul Cayard's many years of sailing will give him an edge in the shifting wind conditions of the Olympic regatta.

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, August 20, 2004

GLYFADA, Greece -- At 45, former America's Cup skipper Paul Cayard is the oldest and most experienced member of the U.S. Olympic sailing team. The shifty, unpredictable winds that have plagued the Olympic sailing regatta this week have made that maturity and experience invaluable.

"A 45-year-old can be in the Olympics because experience is a big factor . . . and it probably will be a bigger factor in Athens than it would be in, like Long Beach [Calif.]," he says. "Here, the conditions are so variable and fluky that there's going to be a lot of bad luck and good luck. Probably the team that's going to win is the team that deals with bad luck both on the race course and mentally, not letting it get them down."

Accepting the consequences of bad luck -- and moving on from there -- takes maturity, Cayard believes.

"There are going to be guys who deserve to win," he says. "They'll have a great start, do the whole course well, control the fleet with good speed, and on the last run the wind will drop or shift 50 degrees, and they'll come in 10th. That's a huge letdown. If it's the first race of the day, you'll just have to swallow that and get focused and not lose your composure and go on and do the next race real well."

Cayard is sailing in the Star class with Phil Trinter, 35, who had been a 300-pound lineman at Indiana University. A sailor from the time he was a boy growing up on the shores of Lake Erie, Trinter made the transition back to sailing after graduating from college and becoming an America's Cup crew member. Sailing with Cayard this week, Trinter weighed in at 220.

Cayard is probably the most recognizable sailor in the world. He was the first American skipper to win the Whitbread Round the World Race, in 1998 on EF Language. He is a seven-time world champion and a five-time America's Cup veteran.

He began sailing in a borrowed 8-foot pram and was soon winning North American championships. As a student at San Francisco State University, he learned about match racing as crew aboard Tom Blackhaller's Star.

His first experience with the Cup was in Newport in 1983 when he was a trimmer aboard Blackhaller's 12-meter yacht, Defender. Cayard sailed again with Blackhaller as tactician in 1987 in Australia aboard USA, the first St. Francis Yacht Club entry in the America's Cup.

In 1992, Cayard led Il Moro di Venezia to victory in the Luis Vuitton Cup and his first trip to the America's Cup finals. Cayard is always being pursued for interviews by the Italian media in Athens. With fashion-model looks and fluency in Italian, he is still a celebrity in Italy. At the sailing venue in Greece, he does as many interviews with Italian TV as he does with the America press.

In 1995, Cayard was the helmsman aboard Stars & Stripes when he raced in the finals for the second time in a row. In 2000, as skipper and CEO of AmericaOne, he led the St. Francis Yacht Club entry to the finals of the Louis Vuitton Cup.

His first visit to the Olympics was in 1984 in Los Angeles as an alternate in the Star class. Four years later, Cayard won the Star World Championships, the victory he says he is most proud of.

And he always returns to the 22-foot Star between his big-boat programs. He makes the transition easily.

"As skipper of the [big] boat, you have 16 guys in the boat with you, and it's a lot about teamwork and getting other people to do their work right . . . It's general management as well as being at you steering the boat.

"Here [at the Olympics], there's one other person [and] it's pretty easy for two people who've been training together for 18 months to know each other's moves and feel each other's rhythms and know what's going on in their mind. This is much more a test of sailing skills and sailing smarts."

With the weird winds that the Saronikos Gulf offers, luck is going to play a role in the medal count. It's going to take experience to handle the bad luck along with the good.

"I think maturity and the ability to eat some humble pie is going to be a big factor here."

Cayard and Trinter's first Star-class race of the Olympics is scheduled for tomorrow.