By all accounts, British ILCA 7 sailor Michael ‘Micky’ Beckett already owns a big slice of Sofía regatta history after winning the Olympic Men’s single-hander dinghy four times in succession. Beckett set a new standard last year winning with a day to spare.
Now a few days after celebrating his 31st birthday by working into the evening sticking on his sail numbers and event branding at the regatta venue - the ‘King of Palma Bay’ will set out to extend that remarkable run to five back-to-back wins from a massive fleet of 200 men from more than 50 nations including two of the 2024 Olympic medallists, gold winner Matt Wearn (AUS) and Pavlos Kontides (CYP).
Beckett arrives at the 55 Trofeo Princesa Sofia Mallorca by Fergus Hotels fresh from an excellent winter training and racing in New Zealand.
Leading Edge — Michael Beckett leads the ILCA fleet across Palma Bay in shifting breeze on day one of the Trofeo Princesa Sofía, with a 200-boat fleet spread across the course. Photo: Sailing Energy
“ I feel good, I feel confident. I go about this event the same way I've kind of always gone about it. I really don't take myself too seriously. It'd be very easy to pile a load of pressure on myself and think I must win. There's not a burden of expectation, not really. But there is always pressure because it's a big event and the world is watching.”
“I just love this event. The scale of it is always really cool. I think you probably know it's about 1,200 sailors. That's massive for Olympic sailing. And it all helps the enjoyment factor. Even though it's quite disparate and you've got a load of the other classes in other locations, the that it's a huge event, is probably the biggest event every single year. That definitely adds to everything. It's a nice place.”
And of course he feels very much at home, “I love Palma. This is number 11 that I've competed in. I think the first one I did was won by Robert Scheidt. It is such a cool event. First time here I was 36th I had just scraped into gold. The cut for gold fleet was 60th and I got in in 58th, which felt like a huge achievement at the time. The remainder of the regatta was just for free, essentially, because I was so happy to be in gold fleet. My memories of that first time is we were racing a long way out. I couldn't believe how far out it was to sail out and sail back. It was a huge distance. And big waves, actually. Really big waves.”
His New Zealand odyssey, the second successive year the Welsh racer has trained there, was productive, “It was a nice starting point. I had a bit of time off over Christmas but then a long haul flight, and then some jet lag, and so it felt like a pretty hard rese after that. But I was racing in a place that I'd never been to before, in the Bay of Islands, which is stunning. So it was just a really enjoyable way to get back into things. It was good. It was really tight racing and nice to win somewhere new.”
As for most of the ILCA 7 fleet the World Championships in August in Dun Laoghaire, Dublin Bay are the pinnacle event this season.
“This year the main difference is I’ll do Hyeres and the Worlds are back in Europe, in Dublin, at the end of August. So that's the main outcome for this year. I like Dun Laoghaire I did the ISAF Worlds there in 2012 when I was 17, my first international regatta. It's an east-facing bay in a part of the world where you predominantly have south-westerly gradients. So it's most likely offshore and tidal, it is quite a complex place to sail. I’m looking forward to it. I don't really have a condition that I prefer. I really struggle to answer that question about a preferred condition. That’s probably a good thing.”
He notes that there are more and more new, younger faces making it into the top places in the class at major events,
“There's been quite a big change in your average top 10, top 20 over the last two years. Particularly last year, you were seeing people in the top 10 that you hadn't really seen there before, generally speaking, if you look at the results from the Europeans, from the world in particular, even Palma last year, there are people who haven't been there before. People who are sailing significantly better, maybe haven't gone to the Olympics, who are taking advantage of additional time afforded to them, whilst people like me were taking a break. So that's good. We train with other people. But until you do a world-class event, you don't actually know how you stack up. And you don't really know how everyone else stacks up. Everyone holds their cards fairly closely. So this event is important, it is seeing where I stack up, seeing how effective my winter training was, seeing how everyone else is doing, seeing who's up, who's down, and just generally trying to get an idea of where further improvements might lie. “
And what is the key to winning in the giant ILCA 7 fleet here?
“When you start racing, it's really not about sailing your boat. It's about playing a chess game against 60, 70 other boats. You get up to a mile of separation. That has been my strength. You know, you need, you have ideas, ultimately you'll never know if they're going to work. I've had plenty of races here, even when I've won the event, where I've got it amazingly wrong and gone around the first mark in 50th, 60th even. But what you do from there is probably more important than how you ended up there. It's whether you can get that back to a 10 or a 20. That's actually really important. But equally, it's so easy to become quite insecure in your decision making. You make a few mistakes and then you just spiral down from there. If you end up repeatedly getting to the first mark in bad shape your event's over quite quickly. So I think having conviction is the main thing that I focus on.”
