Enduring the highs and lows of racing

Americans Nevin Snow and Ian MacDiarmid are competing in the Men’s Skiff event at 2025 French Olympic Week. They are in second with two days remaining, but after a day with finishes of 4-1, and then 21-14 following a lengthy delay, it got them thinking. MacDiarmid explains:

We had this discussion on the way in, about the different ways – I hate the word cope – but to cope with tough days. When you have these weird conditions, I think it’s hard for people to understand how gosh darn hard it is?

You can have everything go your way in the first two. And then the next two, you feel like, you’re sailing on another boat. And some of it’s mental, some of it’s how you reading the course.

But we were discussing on the way in, is it just a nudge to your buddy of like, hey, man, we’re in this together? Is it taking a second and look up the course a bit more? And, you know, in the end, it’s everything.

The delay hurt us a little bit. For the first two races, we read the shifty conditions incredibly well. The general rule of thumb, the shiftier it gets, the higher the average score should be. Then you walk away with nearly a two-point average, which is unbelievable.

Every once in a while, you get the hot hand and it feels like things are happening, you’re like, sweet. But then the breeze changed and we had a two-hour delay, or maybe 90 minutes (to the start of the next race). You usually wait 15 minutes.

It’s a little nicer when it’s light, because you’re just hanging out, you pop the gear off, and it’s kind of mellow. But on this day, it was windy and you’re waiting, the boat’s jumping around, and sails get destroyed. Pretty humbling how you can feel really smart and good in the first half and really not great in the second half.

At the end of the day, you’re the same sailor and just can’t get so dragged into the results. That’s been the trickiest thing, the most important thing for me as an athlete of actually buying into that, having a good priority and process list to focus on.

I’ve found that the more you can take the surprise out of everything, the better you react to it. That’s the great challenge of sailing – how do you take something that’s so crazy, so insane, and take away as many surprises as possible? And, damn, that’s hard. When we do it, we look really smart and we’re doing really well, but…