It's a clash of Fire and Ice as Dickson meets Coutts

Chris Dickson - the eyes remain as
piercing as ever

Chris Dickson and Russell Coutts, two of the most illustrious names in New Zealand yachting meet in a head to head battle on their home waters, but representing billionaire-owned US and Swiss teams respectively.

It is like a movie scene, the opening scenes of which were scripted more than 20 years ago when, in the words of the Billy Joel song, both wore a younger man’s clothes. Fire and Ice might be the putative title of this drama, with Dickson representing fire and Coutts ice.

Dickson, mercurial, solitary, unpredictable is willing to make the high risk plays – using cunning, a lawyer’s instinct for loopholes in the law, and a fabulous intuitive talent. In the nature of high risk moves, some don’t succeed, but when they do, the results are usually spectacular.

Iceman Coutts is more methodical and analytical. In the great match-racing chess game, he plays the percentage game, bringing enormous talent to bear, making his moves with patience and planning his strategies long in advance.

These personality differences are significant and, in many ways defining, but more factors unite these stellar careers than divide them. For a start, both are perfectionists, sweating the details and applying very keen intellects to cover every eventuality -- and occasionally to invent some new ones.

Both are driven to achieve. With Dickson, though, you feel that the coiled tension which clamps his mouth into a tight line never leaves him, while Coutts can shed it and don it on demand.

The eyes, they say, are the window to the soul. If so, Dickson’s stare has the burning intensity of lasers, challenging and menacing. Coutts’ hooded glare is no less intense, but its cold poker-player calculation can quickly shift to reveal a mischievous humour.

“You would go a very long way to find two more determined and focused competitors,” says Harold Bennett, who has closely watched and, in some senses, shaped both skippers when they were starting out. Bennett, assistant general manager at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron and Principal Race Officer for the America’s Cup Match, is one of New Zealand’s most accomplished sailing coaches.

“I rate them both extremely highly,” he says. He agrees Coutts is very methodical, but notes that Dickson too will leave no stone unturned.

And, he points out, it is not only Dickson that makes those occasional wild throws of the dice. In the early days, Coutts gained a reputation for some high risk moves that on two occasions, at least, resulted in very public collisions, one with the committee boat and the other with the AucklandHarbourBridge.

Bennett recalls with affection and some nostalgia, being coach to a New Zealand youth team at Ft Worth, Texas more than 20 years ago. His three teenage charges were Coutts, Dickson and Sean Reeves. Coutts was sailing the single-handed boat and Dickson and Reeves were paired on the two-handed dinghy.

“I remember at the time wondering where they were all headed and recognised then that Dickson and Coutts both had tremendous futures.”

During the youth series, the four Kiwis borrowed a half-tonner and competed in the local yacht club racing. Dickson was on the helm, Coutts on the mainsheet, Bennett in the middle and Reeves on the bow. “We cleaned up every race, to the point where the yacht club asked us to stop racing, because we were throwing their championship into disarray,” recalls Bennett. “Although we were sailing two short in the crew, we beat every yacht in our division and often came in ahead of bigger yachts in the next division up.” It was one of the few occasions when Dickson and Coutts have ever sailed on the same boat.

Russell Coutts - cool and analytical

”When we were doing that stuff, the America’s Cup was so far off that if somebody had said in 20 years time we would all be involved in the Cup, off the East Coast Bays in Auckland, we would have laughed. We would have figured we would sooner get to the moon than that,” says Bennett.

Yet, here they are, Coutts and Dickson locked in a head-to-head battle on the Gulf, Coutts skipper of the powerful Alinghi team and Dickson skipper of Oracle BMW Racing. Reeves, meanwhile, is at the centre of a huge controversy with the OneWorld design secrets affair and Bennett will serve as Race Officer for the Cup Match. Fate deals strange hands at times.

The paths Coutts and Dickson have taken to reach this destiny are remarkably similar. Both started their careers in the ubiquitous P-Class yachts and showed a precocious talent early on. Coutts won one Youth World championship, Dickson three.

Both had early Olympic ambitions that played out quite differently. Bennett recalls flying to yet another international regatta. Where other youngsters might have spent the airtime watching movies or carousing, Coutts plied the coach for hours on end with questions about how to plan an Olympic campaign.

“He already had it all figured out,” says Bennett, “how he wanted two training partners to work with him, how he should manage that, would he be able to trust them?” Coutts went on to win the Olympic Gold medal in the Finn class in 1984 – a tough assignment at the best of times, made tougher in this instance when he had to sail the final race in agony from a rash of boils on his backside.

Dickson’s road to the Olympics took a much longer and more winding road. He came close to gaining the 470 nomination for Los Angeles in 1984 and, when he didn’t, showed an early willingness to challenge authority by initiating court proceedings against the New Zealand Yachting Federation. Even though he dropped the action before it got to trial, it helped cement his reputation as a John McEnroe type “superbrat”. It was 16 years later, at the Sydney Games in 2000, that Dickson at last sailed in the Olympics, taking 5th place in the Tornado class.

Dickson’s big break came in the first New Zealand challenge for the America’s Cup when he was made skipper of Michael Fay’s plastic fantastic KZ-7. Dickson thrived in the cut-throat arena of the America’s Cup. His youthful looks and blonde curls belied his ferocious take-no-prisoners attitude, earning him the nicknames of “the U-boat Commander” and “the choirboy with the gunslinger’s eyes”. The curls have long since disappeared, but the eyes remain as piercing and challenging as ever.

Dickson’s temperament also became a factor during that campaign as he clashed frequently with Fay, but in the end led a brilliant debut campaign, which was only halted by another of yachting’s bad-boy personalities, Dennis Conner.

As KZ-7 skipper, Dickson was briefly Coutts’ boss in that campaign, but the relationship was short-lived. Coutts decided to complete his engineering degree and left the campaign to go back to university. He said later that he deeply regretted the time and momentum his sailing career lost in that move – although the skills and disciplines he gained served him well later. Coutts is now recognised as one of the most design-savvy of all the America’s Cup skippers.

As Coutts completed his studies, Dickson launched himself into the international match racing scene, confirming his talents by winning more than 20 Grade One events and securing the world title three times.

Following the fiery clashes that marked their relationship in 1987, it was no surprise when Dickson was not required for Fay’s Big Boat challenge in 1988, or for the 1992 campaign. Effectively outlawed from the New Zealand sailing “establishment”, he took up an invitation to launch Japan’s first Cup attempt with Nippon Challenge.

As Dickson left New Zealand, Coutts stepped up to the plate, inheriting some of Dickson’s key match race crew members, including Simon Daubney and Warwick Fleury, who remain key Coutts lieutenants to this day.

These were the golden years for Coutts. From 1989 to 1996, he too amassed more than 20 Grade One titles and three world championships. Where Dickson had monopolized the Number One ranking slot for years, Coutts took it over and made it his own.

And, where Dickson had helped launch New Zealand into the America’s Cup, Coutts was to inherit that mantle as well – leading Team New Zealand to that historic victory in San Diego in 1995 and then to the even greater triumph of defending the Cup in Auckland in 2000.

As their careers have tracked backwards and forwards since those early days recalled so vividly by Harold Bennett, they have raced each other frequently on the match race circuit, but much less frequently in the America’s Cup. The last time they met was on the 27th March 1995, when Dickson was leading his TAG Heuer campaign and Coutts was at the helm of a Team New Zealand on the march. Coutts won that encounter with a delta of 1 minute 28 seconds.

In uncanny respects, Coutts’ career has followed in footsteps first carved by Dickson – even to the current situation where they both represent challenging syndicates and foreign flags in the land of their birth. And, on current form, both are the strongest candidates remaining from an original fleet of nine to meet Team New Zealand for the Cup next February.

Source: America's Cup