He’s not a sailor. He’s a ‘sailboat racer’
Hamilton’s Dale Whitmore, 17, is a consummate competitor with an eye on the Olympic Games
IT’S
PROBABLY BEST to clarify a few things before we begin. While he is indeed a sailor, he doesn’t belong to a snooty yacht club, doesn’t spend his days in a blue blazer accentuated by an ascot, there are no Roman numerals after his name, and to the best of his knowledge he’s never been on a sloop.
OK, but surely he owns one of those snazzy captain’s hats.
“No,” Dale Whitmore says with a laugh.
The fact is, there are so many misconceptions and stereotypes around sailing that when people ask what he does for fun he don’t even answer
sailor. That title makes it sound like he’s heading out on a cruise with a bunch of his upper-crust friends. Instead he goes with sailboat racer.
“It sounds cooler,” he says.
It also far better reflects who he is, which is one of the top young racers in Canada and, by the end of this month after a tour through Poland and Germany for two regattas including the Youth World Championship, possibly one of the best on the planet.
When the 17-year-old was a toddler, his sailing parents actually sold their boat. Which probably would’ve been the end of this tale but for the fact they signed him up for the Royal
Hamilton Yacht Club’s summer camp after one of his first years at school.
He loved it right away. Especially the idea that you’re alone on the boat — so success or failure is entirely on you. His passion really caught traction, though, on a particularly windy day that same summer when the gusts were so strong the Learn to Sail kids couldn’t go out on the water. As they stood on shore, they watched as the club’s race team flew by. At that moment, Whitmore decided he wanted to do that.
By 11, he was. He doesn’t remember much about his first regatta (“I think I was around the middle,” he says) but things moved pretty quickly after that. He started racing a lot. And training a ton.
Yes, training. It clearly irritates himthat people seem to think sailing is just lallygagging around on the water, letting the wind carry you wherever it blows.
“Some people who don’t know much about the sport don’t think it’s too athletic,” he says. “But it is.”
Just about every day, Whitmore’s in the gym doing squats and deadlifts to power up his quads. And planking for minutes at a time on a torturous-looking device that shreds his core. You need all that when you’re hiking — sailing talk for hanging over the side of the boat with everything from your knees up extended out over the water — to keep the boat level for speed. And upright.
Whitmore plays basketball for Westdale Secondary School, too. So he’s athletic by more common standards. But racing his laser radial boat (radial is a slightly smaller, junior-sized sail compared to the Olympic standard full rig on a laser) is the unknown workout. Fifty minutes of pulling, steering, leaning, ducking and planking and working to not just go fast but stay above the water is exhausting.
“You have to be pretty fit to sail it at a high level,” Whitmore says.
Which is what he does. Sailingworld.com describes the laser as “a boat that’s easy to sail badly.” Yet, the Grade 12 student is undefeated in it this summer. The other day, he won the Canadians in Nova Scotia. Before that, he won the Sail East Regatta. There have been other victories.
On Wednesday afternoon, he’s heading to Poland for the Europa Cup and then on to Germany for the youth worlds. And that’s where the best sailors are. He’s never raced internationally before, so he’s eager to see how he stacks up.
This matters because Whitmore’s dream is to make it to the Olympics. A good result at these events could help propel him toward the national development team. Then to the main Canadian squad. Which could mean funding and sponsorships. So, he and the family won’t have to pay for travel like they are for this trip.
Is a berth in the Olympics someday realistic, though?
“Yeah,” he says. “It’s pretty realistic.”
Stereotype or not, if he eventually makes it someone really should buy him a captain’s hat. If only for the opening ceremonies.