Ask Olympic sailing director and yachting legend Iain Murray what makes the Australian Sailing Team so successful, and he will tell you in one word; ‘efficiency’.

He’s not just talking about efficiency in terms of how our crews trim their sails to achieve maximum boat speed, he’s talking about how the national program uses capital to ensure sustained high-performance.

Australia is one of the most powerful nations in the Olympic sport, winning two gold medals at the Tokyo Games including back-to-back gold medals in the Laser class over three successive Olympic campaigns and improving from silver in Rio for the 470s.

In an equipment-based sport, where hydrodynamics and aerodynamics can be as significant as athlete talent and training, Murray sights the importance of how costs are managed being critical to athlete outcome.

Much like in business, every capital investment needs to be used wisely, and married into a strategy that promote success and growth.

“You have to value and use the money as efficiently as you can; that is a super key component of the sport of sailing and business of sailing,” Murray said.

“It's easy to undertake too much and turn the whole thing into a science experiment.

“What's important is to keep control of the costs, to make sure you finish in a proper way, to turn it into what's meaningful for our sailors to improve their performance and compete at the highest level.”

You only need to look behind the scenes of the Tokyo Olympic Games to gain a better understanding of the costs associated with getting our team on the water.

Australian Sailing shipped 10 forty-foot containers filled with boats for the eight classes our team contested, coaching boats, sails, equipment and even a workshop to Japan for the 13-strong team.

They set up a hub in Enoshima Harbour for the athletes more than two years prior to the Games.

Two of these containers will be shipped directly to Europe from Japan as the Australians prepare to set up a base in Marsille in preparation for the Paris 2024 Olympics.

"We're running a logistics company all aimed at ensuring we do everything possible to ensure efficiency in the Olympic campaign," Murray said

“Any investment you make has got be well mapped out and well-considered so that you're not putting time and money into something that's going to become a dead end.

“It’s important to have the right people identifying what the project is, what the cost should be, making sure that you are getting value for money in anything you do and the way you go about it.”

Iain Murray also acknowledged the impact of shared knowledge on the team’s performance.

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What is most impressive is Australia’s dominance in what is the most popular boat class, the Laser, with back-to-back-to-back gold from Tom Slingsby in London, Tom Burton in Rio and Matt Wearn in Tokyo.

“There have been many World Champions, there have now been many Olympic Champions, the trade has been a long-established line of how to sail a Laser well in Australia,” Murray says.

“The flow of skills and tactics and how to sail these boats has been kept within Australia and kept at the extreme highest level over the whole term.

“When you are the World and Olympic Champion, like Tom Burton, and you are left off the team for Tokyo, it says a lot about the success of our team.”

Efficiency. It sounds simple, but the impact it can have, particularly when it comes to the bottom line of any organisation, is testimony to high-performance.

Catriona Dixon

Behind High Performance Teams, Part 3: SAILING