Series 3 - Ep23 - Tom Whidden Part 1

Shirley Robertson's Sailing Podcast

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This month on the podcast it's America's Cup Hall of Famer Tom Whidden who recounts one of the most important eras in competitive sailing as he sits down with double Olympic gold medallist and podcast host Shirley Robertson.
After a childhood spent learning to sail on the East Coast of the United States, a teenage Tom Whidden made two bold declarations. He would become a sail maker, and he would compete in the America's Cup. Decades later he's still a pivotal figure at sailing industry powerhouse North Sails, and he's raced an incredible eight America's Cup campaigns, having won the illusive trophy three times.
But in this fascinating chat with Robertson, it's Whidden's memories of the historic 1983 loss to Alan Bond's Australia II that are the most revealing. Whidden partnered up with Cup legend Dennis Connor for the 1980 Freedom Syndicate campaign, and was tactician for the 1983 Defence, but it was a Defence that would finally see the end to the one hundred and thirty two year winning streak. Unsurprisingly, Whidden's memory of each and every race is near flawless, as he talks Robertson through the historic loss....:
"I'm looking back and I'm going, they're about to tack, and the bow comes up, comes up, comes up and I go 'they're actually not tacking' and they get this big humongous left shift and they go up, and slowly but surely they sail away. They beat us by two minutes in that race. So now it's the race of the century."
The 'race of the century' was of course the deciding match of the 1983 America's Cup, a match that Whidden and his team onboard Liberty famously lost. It was the end of an era, Alan Bond's Australia II finally prised the Cup out of the one hundred and thirty two year grip of the New York Yacht Club in an historic edition of the Cup that still has implications int he sport today.
This edition of the podcast is in two parts and is available to listen to via the podcast page of Shirley’s own website, at www.shirleyrobertson.com/podcast or via most popular podcast outlets, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast and aCast. The podcast is produced and written by Tim Butt - for further enquires, please contact [email protected].

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