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Just Checking In U.S. sailing gold medalist Mark Reynolds
Competing in his fourth Olympics, Star boat sailor Mark Reynolds won gold in Sydney with his new crew Magnus Lijedahl. Reynolds won a silver medal in 1988 and a gold in 1992, and finished eighth in 1996.
October 9, 2000
I think I may have been just about as surprised as anyone that we could come back from our mediocre first half of the Olympics. We had a similar start in '96 and were not able to put it together. The main thing that I've learned over the years (and need to keep reminding myself of sometimes) is that just like Yogi Berra put it "it ain't over 'till it's over". Often there is a fine line between winning and losing. There were 16 very good competitors at this Olympics in my event, and with all the variables in sailboat racing sometimes everything clicks in a race and other times it's a struggle and it's hard to figure out why. Early in the series we missed some wind shifts and made some tactical mistakes and we paid for it. The races this time were short, so it was very important to get a good start and the wind was very variable. Fortunately it's an 11 race series and we had some time to recover. We had some very good races in races 7 through 10, so it turned out that going into the last race we were assured of a medal. We just need to figure out the color. This gave us the ability to be aggressive and really go for the gold. In the last race there was a lot of adverse current running at the start. I expected the fleet to be a little late to the line, so we got going what turned out to be too early and were over the line before the start. We restarted but noticed that the flag identifying that boats were over did not drop. This meant that at least one boat didn't not return that was also over the starting line. We were going fast and were fortunate to pick up a small shift soon after the start putting us right back into the race. At this point I realized that we had a good chance to win the gold. We rounded the first mark in second about eight points ahead of Brazil and ahead of Great Britain. We only needed five points on Brazil and to just finish ahead of Great Britain to win the gold. It was looking good but we knew that Brazil could pass some boats and we were also concerned that there could be some boats in between us that were over at the start and would not be counted. We loosely covered Great Britain the rest of the race, making sure that we didn't lose any other boats -- just hoping that Brazil didn't move up to sixth or better. We counted Brazil's position at each mark and it was looking good for us and at the finish. It looked like we had done it. As it turned out Brazil was also early at the start and did not score so it really turned out to be easier than it seemed during the race. I'm just glad that Brazil hadn't moved up to sixth where we would have had to make a decision on whether we should take a chance to move into 1st to gain another point on Brazil but would also risk losing Great Britain. We were sailing in the ocean, so it was a long trip back to the harbor and gave us a chance to catch our breath and realize what just had happened. But when I woke up the next morning, I asked my wife if it all had just been a dream or not. -- Mark
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