5 Expert Tips: How to recover from a bad race

Even the best can’t win all the time. Terry Hutchinson talks to Andy Rice about how to turn a bad race into an opportunity

You learn more from your mistakes than from your successes. But when you’ve had a bad result, how do you get past the negative emotion and start turning that into a positive to take forward into your next race?

Terry Hutchinson has been grappling with this challenge for more than four decades. He says he’s still learning. Even for someone of Terry’s deep experience at the top of the sport, every day brings up new scenarios and new lessons, sometimes painful but always useful if processed in the right way.

But how to learn those lessons and improve teamwork without resorting to finger pointing and ending up in the blame game? It’s a tough job but it’s vital to the overall mission, not to mention making sure everybody is enjoying the process.

“Good communication creates clarity,” says Terry. “How do we communicate so that we keep our focus on the details and the process of racing well? The goal must be clear decision making without emotion. When you can make a decision without any emotion, you tend to make a higher percentage decision.”

Easier said than done in the heat of battle, which is why you need to read and absorb Terry’s best five tips for rallying the team after a bad outing on the race course.

Own your mistakes

When training recently on the TP52 we had a boat handling mistake which ended up with the spinnaker going underneath the bow – the worst possible thing that can happen.

It wasn’t an error on the bow, it was a steering error, and I pointed this out to the helmsman, and he got it. It’s not about attacking anybody, it’s simply that the only way we learn from these situations is by acknowledging them and working out what we’d do differently next time.

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Whenever any of us makes a mistake, we’d better be the first to acknowledge it, because without that how can you build the credibility to call anybody else out?

If you’re finding it difficult to get someone to own their mistake then I’ll bring the ownership back on myself, because nine times out of 10 it’s down to a communication error. So you get them to talk through what they were thinking. You don’t need them to say, “Hey, I screwed that up.” You just need to ask how they can be supported in those situations to eliminate that happening again.

Do your own job

When the majority of the crew are amateur sailors just doing it on the weekends, one of the things we’d instil is, ‘Know your job. Do your job 100% perfectly first’.

And when you develop the consistency to do that, then learn the job of the person in front of you and behind you. Not to do their job, but to help support them when they need a hand. It’s a great focus for every team member to work on their own skills before they’re too critical of others.

Debrief later

At the end of every race and practice day you should be creating your ‘capture list’ to write down all the things that happened, both the good and the bad.

You want a daily debrief with the whole crew but generally it’s better to do it the morning after, before you go out racing the next day. Sure, you can do it when you come ashore but people are tired, they need to eat, drink and rest. So aim for the morning after when moods are likely to be a bit less emotional.

Sometimes things happen in the middle of a race day, showing up an error that needs sorting as soon as possible. If you have a boat handling area error and there’s not a lot of time, get the relevant people together for two minutes, have the conversation and report back to the team before the start of the next race.

Then there’s the ‘personal debrief’, where you might have a serious conversation with yourself. People know that when I go to the back of the boat by myself, that’s my time to reflect, get my head back into the game and be ready for the next race.

Prioritise big errors

Always aim for as much detail as possible on your capture list, but at the same time don’t expect to tick off everything on the list. Use the capture list to identify what you did well, not just what you did poorly, and use the list to drive the narrative in your next debrief.

When you have a long list of things to address, just pick a maximum of three things that had the biggest impact on your race result. Start with something that went well, then move to the meat in the middle – something you feel you can improve upon – and then finish up with something positive. You don’t want to start the day out with a whipping; make sure you set out with a positive team mindset.

It’s how you finish

At the recent Maxi European Championship we were getting great starts but just weren’t getting anything to show for it. We knew that we’d got to just keep close, not hit any panic buttons, make sure that when the opportunity arrives we were in a position to take advantage of it. Remember, it’s not how you start but how you finish.

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