Olympic Sailing, Sailing World Cup

Russell Coutts Has Changed His Interest Track And Feels Happy

Russell Coutts the Yachting legend with no remaining ambitions of America’s Cup is engaging himself at the grassroots level, writes to Michael Brown of Yachting New Zealand for the New Zealand Herald.


The Manly Sailing Club (MSC) is like many others in the New Zealand. The club has a small clubhouse made up of wood perched on the edge of the water with a bunker underneath and full of coach boats and a container of the ship out, back to keep a lot of the equipment used for other activities.

However, the Manly Sailing Club (MSC) is like no other, listed as commodore is R. Coutts. That is Sir Russell Coutts, five-times winner of the America’s Cup, two-time World Sailor of the Year, (WSOY) and three-time winner of world match racing champion and also the gold medalist of  1984 Olympic.

He has gone from running into the America’s Cup to running one of the smallest YC the region of Auckland and he loves it. It is one of the numbers of projects he is involved with but does not seem like he will be involved any more event.

He says, “At this point of time I don’t have any desire to continue with the America’s Cup.” He said, “For few years I was involved in the America’s Cup, it is a fantastic event, loved it, but there are many other things to do in life in addition to this.”

“You need new people to come to the event and this is the reason that they gave some different treatment to the event this time and on this I can say it is a good for them. I hope in terms of the event gets a huge success”

And this is what Coutts looks to care about at the present time. He discussed in an evangelical term about this new job of him at the Manly Sailing Club (MSC).