Raising Winners

Paula iIish asks Olympian Penny Clark how parents can best encourage their youngsters in the right direction?

When Olympian Penny Clark is asked who had the biggest influence on her sailing, dad is top of the list. “Without him,” says Clark, “I wouldn’t have got where I am because I wouldn’t have been as successful as a youth.”

It’s typical of the answer given by many Olympians, who look back and remember the huge amounts of time, energy and money invested by theirparents in supporting their sailing. The travelling, training and competing required to succeed can test the resources and resilience of even the best-organised families, so how do you ensure it all adds up to raising a winner?

Penny went to the Beijing Olympics for GBR in the Laser Radial in 2008, and as one of the RYA’s Lead Pathway coaches is now bringing her own experiences to coaching the next generation of sailors in the class. She grew up sailing on lakes in the Midlandsat Himley Hall and later Chelmarsh, and with two older sisters they were their own small fleet of Optimist sailors. Their father, Tony Mountford, applied his skills as a swimming and canoe instructor and from his own sailing to bring on his daughters’ racing in a way that encouraged them to think for themselves.

Penny looks back on it now as a great foundation for learning: “Every Sunday after racing at dinner, he made little boats out of matchboxes and myself and my sisters would debrief the racing with my dad as umpire. It wasn’t a parent saying, ‘Why didn’t you do this?’ – it was three sailors debriefing their own sailing with someone there to stop the arguments and keep it all on track. For me, that was a really important part of how he interacted with us to make us better sailors.”