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Conny van Rietschoten
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Conny van Rietschoten
Cornelis "Conny" van Rietschoten (23 March 1926 – 17 December 2013) was a Dutch yacht skipper who was the only skipper to win the Whitbread Round the World Race twice.
Born in Rotterdam, Van Rietschoten had been sailing since he was three, and continued until tuberculosis interrupted both his sailing and business career in the early 1960s. He spent a year recovering in a Swiss sanatorium, and then threw all his energies into developing the family electrical engineering business, Van Rietschoten & Houwens.
A circumnavigation was something his father, Jan Jacob, had always wanted to do but never found the time.
At 45, the industrialist had retired from active business and was looking for a fresh challenge. He had read reports about the first Whitbread Race, saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime – and grabbed it with both hands. Van Rietschoten was unknown as a sailor even in his own waters before competing in the 1977–78 Whitbread Round the World Race.
What set Van Rietschoten ahead of the established sailing names like Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and Éric Tabarly was a professional business approach to his campaigns. His eight-year tenure at the top of the sport spelled the end of amateur gung-ho ocean racing entries. He may well have continued to see himself as an amateur, but he set levels of professionalism within the sport that were not repeated until Peter Blake also won every leg with his Steinlager 2 in the 1989–90 Whitbread Round the World Race.
Van Rietschoten was first to undertake extensive trials and crew training before the race, and invested in research to improve crew clothing, rigs and weather forecasting techniques.
For his first Whitbread yacht, Conny van Rietschoten turned to American designers Sparkman & Stephens to design a more modern version of the Swan 65 production yacht Sayula II, which had won the first Whitbread race in 1973/74. The new Flyer, built in aluminium by Jachtwerf W. Huisman, was also a ketch, but with a longer waterline and more sail area.
After winning the transatlantic race, the Flyer crew found their greatest rival to be another Swan 65, the sloop rigged British yacht King's Legend, with Nick Ratcliffe as the skipper and American Skip Novak as the navigator. 1,000 miles from Cape Town, the two crews found themselves within sight of each other, before Flyer pulled ahead to win the first leg of the race from Portsmouth by 2 hours 4 minutes. On the second leg to Auckland, New Zealand, King's Legend stole the upper hand, and soon had a 360mile lead over Flyer as the Whitbread fleet raced across the Southern Ocean, but then suffered a leak, which slowed her progress. At the finish, Conny van Rietschoten’s crew had cut King's Legend’s lead back to within 1 hour 15 minutes.
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Conny van Rietschoten
Cornelis "Conny" van Rietschoten (23 March 1926 – 17 December 2013) was a Dutch yacht skipper who was the only skipper to win the Whitbread Round the World Race twice.
Born in Rotterdam, Van Rietschoten had been sailing since he was three, and continued until tuberculosis interrupted both his sailing and business career in the early 1960s. He spent a year recovering in a Swiss sanatorium, and then threw all his energies into developing the family electrical engineering business, Van Rietschoten & Houwens.
A circumnavigation was something his father, Jan Jacob, had always wanted to do but never found the time.
At 45, the industrialist had retired from active business and was looking for a fresh challenge. He had read reports about the first Whitbread Race, saw it as the opportunity of a lifetime – and grabbed it with both hands. Van Rietschoten was unknown as a sailor even in his own waters before competing in the 1977–78 Whitbread Round the World Race.
What set Van Rietschoten ahead of the established sailing names like Sir Robin Knox-Johnston and Éric Tabarly was a professional business approach to his campaigns. His eight-year tenure at the top of the sport spelled the end of amateur gung-ho ocean racing entries. He may well have continued to see himself as an amateur, but he set levels of professionalism within the sport that were not repeated until Peter Blake also won every leg with his Steinlager 2 in the 1989–90 Whitbread Round the World Race.
Van Rietschoten was first to undertake extensive trials and crew training before the race, and invested in research to improve crew clothing, rigs and weather forecasting techniques.
For his first Whitbread yacht, Conny van Rietschoten turned to American designers Sparkman & Stephens to design a more modern version of the Swan 65 production yacht Sayula II, which had won the first Whitbread race in 1973/74. The new Flyer, built in aluminium by Jachtwerf W. Huisman, was also a ketch, but with a longer waterline and more sail area.
After winning the transatlantic race, the Flyer crew found their greatest rival to be another Swan 65, the sloop rigged British yacht King's Legend, with Nick Ratcliffe as the skipper and American Skip Novak as the navigator. 1,000 miles from Cape Town, the two crews found themselves within sight of each other, before Flyer pulled ahead to win the first leg of the race from Portsmouth by 2 hours 4 minutes. On the second leg to Auckland, New Zealand, King's Legend stole the upper hand, and soon had a 360mile lead over Flyer as the Whitbread fleet raced across the Southern Ocean, but then suffered a leak, which slowed her progress. At the finish, Conny van Rietschoten’s crew had cut King's Legend’s lead back to within 1 hour 15 minutes.
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