British sailing dominance in Olympic Sailing has long been fabled: from 2000 until the Tokyo Games Team GB were an unstoppable force, winning 28 medals. The most successful was 2008, when amid fog, tempest, and plagues of weed, the British team returned home from Beijing with six medals, four gold. Britain took gold in both the men’s single-handed classes on the tricky waters of Qingdao that summer. One went around the neck of Ben Ainslie (his fourth), in the Finn, the other to Paul Goodison, in the Laser.

Sixteen years later, the pair will be lining up against one another off Barcelona in a few months time, each helming for the America’s Cup. But while Ainslie will be racing Britannia, Paul Goodison’s red, white and blue are the colours of the New York Yacht Club’s challenger, American Magic.

Standing in for Ben Ainslie as Great Britain SailGP driver when Ainslie welcomed his second child. Photo: Ricardo Pinto/SailGP

Paul Goodison and Ainslie were born in the same year, and had come up through an Olympic feeder system so successful other countries dubbed it the ‘medal factory’, and other sports tried to emulate it. Many of his team mates cut their teeth on the Optimist circuit, but Sheffield-born Goodison took another route into the sport.

“I’m very, very different to my peers, I guess,” Paul Goodison reflects. “My first memory of sailing would have been on a lake in Rotherham, racing with my old man at four or five years old. Dad had a real passion for all sailing. We used to go up to the local gravel pit and I got thrown in to crew.

“We had everything – National Twelves, Enterprises, Streakers – basically old wooden boats. Every winter we’d take them home, put them in the garage and me and my little brother would help take the varnish off them – and gouge great holes in the wood and test dad’s patience.”

Paul Goodison’s road to gold

Football was Goodison’s first love, and only after winning a Yorkshire and Humber schools dinghy circuit repeatedly as a teenager did he begin to take sailing more seriously. He joined winter training camps run by legendary coach Jim Saltonstall – the man who so influenced many of those 28 medals – and was selected for the Laser youth squad “a tiny little kid in a full rig, hanging on for dear life!”.

Goodison has won three back-to-back International Moth World Championships. Photo: Martina Orsini/Foiling Week

“The big break was when a group of us – myself, Iain Percy, Ben Ainslie, Andrew Simpson, Alistair Coates and Hugh Styles – were selected to be in the development squad, the first group of sailors that had National Lottery support. It was an amazing opportunity for me because I was the least established of the group and the youngest. They went on to be some of my closest and best friends as I grew up sailing, which then led on to the national team.”

Seeing the success of his friends drove Paul Goodison on. “One of my biggest memories was Ben coming back from the Atlanta Games in 1996. We were in Mumbles [a small Welsh seaside town], doing the Laser nationals. Ben turned up towards the end with his silver medal, and we all put it on and went out with him and celebrated.

“It was the first time I’d had a realisation that the Olympics was not just a dream a million miles away, but actually could become reality. I thought, wow, this is something that’s doable and it’s something I want to do. It was a really big mind shift.”

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Change of gear

Paul Goodison got to the Games – representing Britain at Athens in 2004 in the Laser. But he finished 4th, and the disappointment was hard to process.

“It took me a long time to understand what on earth went wrong. You’ve got to get yourself to a level that even on your bad days you’re still winning. Whereas, looking back on my bad days, I wasn’t good enough. And on my good days I was only just good enough.”

Paul Goodison takes control of American Magic’s latest Patriot preparing for this year’s America’s Cup off Barcelona. Photo: Ugo Fonollá/America’s Cup

Paul Goodison refocussed ahead of Beijing. “The one thing that we’d had instilled in us as a team was that you have to be good at winning in the venue, in those conditions. So I made it my goal to win every regatta that was in China and on the Olympic waters.” This time, he took the gold.

Injury put paid to hopes of defending his Olympic title at Weymouth in 2012, but Paul Goodison had already been tempted into other areas of the sport. “I was very aware that I couldn’t keep that level of intensity up for four years. I needed to go and do other things. After [2012] I started introducing myself to some foiling stuff. And it just blew my mind. It was like learning to sail again.”

After more than a decade of sailing the brutally physical, and utterly untweakable Laser, the foiling Moth offered a totally different experience. “It was an awesome change. The first bit is frustrating when you have to spend a lot of the time fixing stuff that you’ve broken, but then you get more into the fiddling. Back in that era, the boats were much harder to sail. The control systems weren’t quite as good and so a little bit of time spent tweaking and making the boat more manageable made a lot of improvements on the water. It was great fun.”

American Magic’s Patriot heads skywards in the last America’s Cup – the crash landing seriously damaged the boat. Photo: Will Ricketson/American Magic

The Moth fleet was rapidly becoming the de facto training ground for America’s Cup sailors: Nathan Outteridge won the worlds in 2011 and 2014, Pete Burling in 2015. Goodison took his first Moth World Championship title in 2016, then went on to win three back to back – a remarkable achievement in a class where the development race is as sharp as the competition.

America’s Cup calling

After being recruited as back-up helmsman for Artemis Challenge in 2017, Paul Goodison was looking for his next campaign. “You desperately want to be involved,” he says, recalling the ‘transfer season’ for sailors between Cups. “Artemis was frustrating that I was there on the sailing team, but I didn’t race. At some point you want to be with the best team, and you’d like to be with a bunch of people you’ve worked with before that you like and respect. And you want to have a chance of winning.”

That chance seemed to come when Goodison moved to American Magic as mainsheet trimmer for the 36th Cup. By Christmas 2020 the team’s AC75 Patriot was looking positively slippery against the other Challengers.

But on Day 3 of the Prada Cup Patriot was hurtling into the top gate mark in a building breeze with a solid lead over Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli when skipper and helmsman Dean Barker called for a tack bear away.

Goodison was injured for the London Games at Weymouth in 2012. Photo: Clive Mason/Getty

Goodison’s voice was clear on the onboard comms. “I think a smarter move is a bear away gybe here,” he pointed out, reiterating “It’s going to be a real hard manoeuvre to tack bear away.” Barker went for the tack bear away, a gust hit, and Patriot flung herself skywards, dramatically crashing back into Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf with such velocity a huge hole was punched through the hull.

Everyone had heard Goodison’s call, and seen the outcome when Barker overruled him. How do you bounce back as a team after such a huge disappointment? Goodison is matter-of-fact. “I guess it was really tough the first day or two, but we’re very structured. Every day we sail, there’s roles and responsibilities of who’s giving information and who’s making decisions. It wasn’t any different from any other days.”

The team devoted long, long nights to trying to rebuild the shattered and flooded hull and return to competition. “Doug Devos, one of our owners, addressed us all in the boat shed about how these situations define us and how proud he was as a team. It was one of those amazing group come together moments. It feels so sad, looking back, that we weren’t able to finish the fairytale by performing.

Goodison won Laser gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Photo: Clive Mason/Getty

“But some special bonds were made there – which is why, ultimately, I’m back here at American Magic trying to do it again. I feel like we have a duty to the owners and to the other team members that went through all that.”

Goodison, who lost one of his closest friends when Andew ‘Bart’ Simpson was killed in a training accident ahead of the San Francisco America’s Cup, spoke after the incident about how lucky the Patriot crew had been.

In each other’s heads

For the 37th AC Goodison is on the port wheel, Tom Slingsby helming the starboard. The pair have sailed against each other for years – it was Slingsby who took Laser gold in Weymouth 2012, and won the Moth worlds after Goodison – and the ingrained rivalry runs deep. But now, with the split helm AC75s, they have to sail in perfect synchronicity.

When they began working on their partnership, Goodison was initially surprised at how many similarities there were between their approaches. “But then as you dig into the finer detail, it’s really interesting to see how you both see situations slightly differently. The one thing we keep coming back to is there’s always more than one way to skin the cat!

“But we’ve been working really hard these last 12 months, trying to make sure that we are aligned. Getting to a point where it’s not the way one of us thinks about how we should do something, versus the other one. We’re trying to think more on the same lines and read each situation similarly, which has been really interesting.”

Celebrating with Tom Slingsby after winning the first Preliminary Event of the 37th America’s Cup. Photo: Alex Carabi/America’s Cup

With the deck-sweeping mainsails meaning each helm has zero visibility on the other side of the boat, the trust between the two has to be absolute. “If you’re on port [helm], you basically have free licence to put the boat where you think is best. If you’re on starboard, it’s free licence to put the boat where you see more fit. And then learning how we hand off and pick up from each other has been really exciting.”

There is a quiet confidence emanating from American Magic in these pre-competition days. “Everybody’s proud of what we as a team have produced in the 75,” Goodison tells me. They have taken a slightly different design approach to many of the other challengers, including recumbent cyclors and a much lower volume hull than others.

Goodison co-helms in the AC40 and AC75 with Slingsby. Photo: America’s Cup/AC37 Event Limited

But while many of his former GBR team mates and oldest friends have also made Barcelona their home for many months with INEOS Britannia, the secrecy of the Cup makes catching up over a few beers tricky.

“We still chat. Last weekend, we were at the skate park and bumped into a bunch of the British guys there with their kids. So we chat about how Alinghi look and how Team New Zealand look, but we kind of awkwardly avoid talking about our own boat. It’s nice, I’m still really good friends with a bunch of those guys,” says Goodison.

“But I still want to beat them, though!”

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