GILES SCOTT

GILES SCOTT IS ONE OF BRITISH SAILING’S BIGGEST TALENTS AND WAS A BREAK-OUT STAR OF THE 36TH AMERICA’S CUP, BUT CAN HE DEFEND OLYMPIC GOLD? HELEN FRETTER FINDS OUT

- HELEN FRETTER

Giles Scott is waiting. Like all of this year’s Olympic cohort, he is in a strange pre-Games limbo. Normally at this point in an Olympic cycle only the most finicky of final details would still be being ironed out, the big picture stuff, like travelling dates and training schedules, having long been bolted into the calendar.

This year everything is different. The sailors might reasonably have expected to be in Japan by early summer, acclimatising to the humidity, analysing weather patterns, tuning out distractions. But when I speak to Scott, he’s home on the south coast of England. The GBR sailing team won’t fly out to Japan until early July, with training time at Enoshima limited to just a couple of weeks. The news is reporting that Japanese public opinion has swayed against the Games taking place; the idea of competing at ‘Tokyo 2021’ seems almost as ephemeral as Tokyo 2020.

Scott, 33, has not spent all year in stand-by mode. While for many of his teammates the postponement left diaries peppered with yawning gaps, question marks where once there was the rigidity of a four-year cycle, Scott faced the opposite problem. Representing his country in the two biggest sailing events any inshore sailor could aim for – the Olympics and the America’s Cup – within six months of each other created a monumental diary clash.

In Auckland with INEOS Team UK from October until March, he bounced back into the Finn in time for the Europeans in Vilamoura, Portugal, in April. Despite limited time in the boat, he finished 2nd.