Printable version  News feed

Southampton replaced Portsmouth as the start and finish port and around 4,000 boats carrying an estimated 50,000 people gathered in the Solent for the send off, a show that Steinlager 2 stole when she whizzed out ahead of everyone else to grab a 16-nm lead by nightfall.

Her speeds were awesome, and assisted by helpful winds, Blake and his crew set a new record when they covered a remarkable 343 nm in a 24 hour period. Fisher & Paykel had also been hurtling along, but six days before the finish they dropped off the pace without explanation. They arrived in Punta del Este without their mizzen. Dalton had refused to divulge this vital information to anyone even though the main mast was unaffected, lest it conceded an advantage to his opponents.

Not surprisingly, Steinlager won the leg, beating Merit by 12 hours and Fisher & Paykel by 30. The leg duration, anticipated to be 30 days, turned out to be a whole week less. Rothmans arrived fourth, one and a half days after Steinlager 2, and Smith, who returned to England for a break, was distinctly riled by the Kiwis’ success.

But according to Big Red, the account of the race written by Steinlager 2’s Glen Sowry and Mike Quilter, the British skipper’s posturing served as a great motivator for the New Zealanders. “Smith was quoted in the British press calling us cheats on the basis that no one has ever seen Blake’s boat out of the water. We were not sure what he expected to find on our keel. In retrospect, Smith was probably just trying to unsettle us but in reality, all he achieved by this accusation was to make us even more determined to beat him. All the same, we were not enjoying Smith’s broadsides and on a few occasions embarrassed Rothmans crew came up to us in Punta and apologised for their skipper’s comments.”

The Corinthian spirit of the old days had disappeared along with cocktails at dusk. The prevailing culture was now one of professionalism, pressure and cut-throat competition.

The first casualty of that intense pressure was Alexei Gryshenko, co-skipper of the first ever Russian entry Fasizi. He made little secret of the fact that he had not enjoyed the first leg and informed the management he would return home for a break then resume the race in Fremantle. A few days into the stopover however, he went missing. Some believed he had defected while others assumed he was having time out after spending the previous 12 months coping with the stress of building the boat and finding funds. His crew became worried when he did not return after 24 hours and the American co-skipper Skip Novak alerted race officials, who tipped off the local police chief.

Before the police were able to locate him, Gryshenko was found by the local media. His body was discovered hanging from a tree in nearby woods and before long, the television pictures, which featured images of him before he was removed from the noose, were being broadcast around the world, including Kiev where they were seen by his wife and family.

It was a ghastly time for everyone, complicated by a lack of understanding as to what had led to such a tragic end.

“We didn’t know why he had committed suicide, but we certainly could assume that the pressures brought to bear by the project, by the rushed and often confused construction in Georgia, the panic in England where he spoke not one word of the language, his lengthy absence from his young family, all must have contributed to his illness. In his planned return to Kiev, possibly he saw himself as a failure,” wrote Gryshenko’s co-skipper Skip Novak in his book Fazisi, the Joint Venture.