TARGETED PERFORMERS
Defending their title at the 420 Youth Worlds in July, Freddie Parkin and Asher Beck were on a roll—until they weren’t.
fter our crash at the worlds, Freddie got bandaged up, 13 stitches, and we were able to sail the rest of the day and hold our lead,” Asher Beck relates now. “All in all, not too bad a day, except for Freddie’s stitches and using our drop.” He got that out with a straight face.
Even with a driver who couldn’t bend one knee, the pair went on to win two more races and, finishing seventh, become the only boat with three firsts at the 420 Youth Worlds of 2023. Looking back at the 12-race series sailed out of the Spanish port of Alicante, Parkin says: “We finished up well, but there was an eighth that turned out to be a black flag. We had to eat 45 points.” There went the podium. And the rest is philosophy because, as Parkin’s mom observed, “You can’t win them all.”
No, and a near miss takes nothing away from a story worth telling, a story that began a year ago off a beach in the Netherlands. Call it a roll or call it a ride, but Parkin and Beck did not see it coming. They entered the final race of 2022 with a solid hold on second and no reasonable hope for first. Their consistently good finishes included nothing in the top three, while the 2021 bronze medalists from Israel, Roi Levy and Ariel Gal, wore the yellow bibs and carried a comfy cushion. For the final race, Parkin and Beck ignored the leaders.
Beck says: “There were only two boats remotely close to us, challenging for second, so managing them was important. Winning the race was not important, but it turned out to be a pretty easy win. Crossing the finish line, we had no idea what had just happened.”
What had just happened? Call it a nightmare race for the Israelis, that race you never want to have, not at that point, to be sunk deep in the fleet with the championship cushion punctured. And across the finish, our solid-second sailors, heads swiveling, counting boats, took a while before a suddenly dizzied Parkin grasped that he had just skippered to gold in the very same world championship that his big brother Jack crewed to gold in 2016. “What a crazy feeling!” he blurted as he and Beck tried to wrap their heads around the moment. On the beach, still recovering, Beck allowed that it probably helped that “our stress levels were lower because we didn’t have a target on our backs.”
Well, that was then, and this is now, and print deadlines being what they are, at least I didn’t jinx them with this story. But we can be sure what they were wearing on their backs. (And, yes, there are teams that run practice drills with one boat as the designated target.)
In the summer of ’23, Parkin and Beck pulled off a narrow win in i420s at the US Youth Championship, then made the Club420 Nationals in Chicago look like a walk in the park. Like many success stories before them, they have a target on their backs. Parkin declares, “I enjoy pressure.” Beck shrugs it off, or perhaps he just wants to sound like he does. I gave him time to think, and he put it this way: “There is always a little nerve before the race and always a little nerve on the starting line. Stress indicates that the race is important, but wherever we are, we just need to sail consistently with level heads.”
Yep, that’s all.
We talked twice via Zoom, first while Beck was in Spain where, being outside the C420/i420 mindset of the US, an i420 is a 420 is a 420. Parkin was home in Riverside, Connecticut, packed to fly to join Beck in Alicante for their next big adventure. It’s worth knowing that these young men followed very different paths to get to a point of sharing high hopes, with good reason for having them.
The pathway for Beck as a tyke began at a summer camp and later in a summer program at Riverside YC, mostly because a friend urged him to, he says. “But she stopped. I kept going, and I took up with kids who were sailing outside the summer
program. Then came the competition. Hopping into a car to go all the way to Larchmont (15 miles) was a big deal. Now my parents have taken a few lessons because of me, and my brother is finding a groove, but you can’t call us a sailing family.”
For Parkin, it was the opposite: Sail or rebel. He sailed. “My parents met on the British Olympic team. Mom was in the 470. Dad was in a Soling,” he says. “Until I was 10, they had to keep telling me I was going to learn, going to learn, going to learn to like it. As a family, we built our lives around sailing, so I didn’t have much of an option, and I did come to like it once I made sailing friends, but Jack was always the golden boy. When we moved from Britain to the US, we did the normal things—Optis for me at first. Then it was 420s. I liked going faster and meeting international sailors, but I was always comparing myself to Jack. I wanted to beat…my…brother.”
At this point in the Zoom call, I asked: If you could, what would you tell your Opti self?
“I wouldn’t change much,” Parkin replied. “I’d want me to mess up and learn from it. Opti times are for making friends. In most sports, you move on after a few years, but in our game, people stay with you.”
Beck answered: “I would tell myself a lot, mostly about staying level-headed when things don’t go well so you don’t take yourself out. Our coach is big on regatta management. Going low risk. Defining what a keeper score is and setting goals accordingly. I never thought about that when I was younger.”
Let’s note that keeper scores figured large in 2022 in their 420 Youth Worlds win and were playing a role in ‘23.
Even at 17, Parkin and Beck have history. Between them they are members of three yacht clubs, and their 420 coach is LISOT trainer Steve Keen, who has an enviable record of success. Prior to Keen, winning the RS Feva North Americans in 2018 put the pair on the map in a small way, and winning again in 2019 kept them there. The Feva is an excellent platform for tweens especially—roto-molded-tough with an asymmetric spinnaker and a slippery skiff hull. It’s used in the Siebel Sailors Program and has other pockets of action. However, by the standards of Beck today, he says: “The class is not competitive in this country. It’s fun for sure, and it’s huge in Europe. The Feva is what their kids move up to after Optis. It will be a great transitional boat here too, if and when the class gets big enough.”
In whatever boat, the pairing defies conventional thinking because the bigger, taller guy drives—that’s Parkin—and the shorter guy rides the wire.
Post-Feva, add a few younglife changes and a reunion a year and a half ago in the 420, and we know the wins that came next. Winter sailing in Florida is an asset they’ve weaponized. “I’ve been going to Florida since my Opti days,” Parkin says. “It’s a disadvantage to live with the short sailing season up north.” Mom and Dad—Susie and Barry—keep an apartment in Coconut Grove. Susie says: “We commute on a lot of weekends and vacation there whenever we can. Barry sails his Etchells out of Coral Reef YC, and Asher comes too. The boys have become very good at studying while flying.”
Time flies too. Big brother Jack was a two-time All-American as an undergrad at Stanford before entering graduate school. College is now on the far horizon for Parkin and the near horizon for Beck, who will soon be a high school senior. Parkin will instead be a junior this fall, though both are 17. I asked Beck about his outlook for college a year up the road, and he named no names but claimed, “I pretty much know what I’m going to do.” To the same question, Parkin replied in a very-Parkin frame of mind. He had only one point of reference: “The date when I’m allowed to start talking to college coaches.” ■