KRISTIAN SJöBERG INTERVIEW - FIN 201
blissfully forget about not being young any more ristian Sjöberg returned to Finn sailing in 2016 and was K immediately hooked. He is now part of the organising committee for this year’s Finn World Masters in Helsinki. He talks here about his journey, and the future of the class as well as looking forward to this year’s major Masters event. I got acquainted with the sea and sailing from a very young age aboard the family sailing boat cruising the Finnish archipelago for a couple of weeks every summer. When deemed old enough I was entrusted with my own Optimist, sailing it come rain or shine. I was lucky enough to have some friends who also had dinghies, which meant we were able to spend a lot of time just playing around and sailing around the islands close to where we lived in Helsinki. Sailing gave us a lot of freedom and kept us busy, as long as we remembered to be home by dark. We had no guidance
and learned everything by doing it ourselves. I remember vividly one late autumn having sailed our dinghies a long way outside Helsinki, coming back to Särkkä island – famous for being the location of the 1952 Olympics prize giving – and being totally wet and frozen without anything dry to change into, we realised we had grossly infringed the rule of being at home by dark but had no money to call home from the phone booth to let someone know that we were alive (which was usually the case). The oldest of the boys however showed us a way to make a call without a coin and thus this very essential skill was passed on to us young ones there and then. What we did not however manage to do was to elicit any pity from our parents and were left taking the bus home in our wet clothes. From then on, having sailed a boat called Flipper Scow with a friend of mine I switched to the Europe dinghy with racing starting to become a lot more frequent. My exposure to the Finn was basically zero before 1980 but after the Europe class worlds in Helsinki in 1980 the newly crowned Olympic gold medallist in the Finn, Esko Rechardt, arrived and announced to us after our prize giving that we would now become real sailors, Finn sailors. Almost then and there some four or five Finn dinghies were bought from some of the foreign sailors who had attended the Finn Europeans in Helsinki before the Olympics and within a few years we were some four to six Finnish sailors touring the international Finn regattas under the auspices of our gold medallist. Return Having been mostly absent from any serious sailing since 1988 but having tried a new Finn in 2014 I took part in the FWM 2016 in Torbole and have not been able to shake it off since. Whilst revisiting and reliving an old fling is never a good idea, this anyhow came pretty close, but without the adverse consequences. The feeling of surfing down big waves in heavy air, heeled dangerously to windward takes some beating and one tends to, in that fleeting moment, blissfully forget about not being that young any more. The Masters fleet is very diverse when it comes to the sailors experience and motivation and it is very nice to see how many different people can find satisfaction on so many different levels. When the absolute race result itself becomes less important there is much more time to enjoy the company of others and even the actual travelling to and from events can be made into a joy. Having gotten used to travelling from Finland to the southern Europe in a non-stop fashion in our youth I was amazed by the effect of firstly inviting my better half to the trip itself and ultimately of outsourcing the whole planning of the travel itinerary. Whilst sailing mostly provides us with a way to relax and maybe shield us from a hectic life and a chaotic world, that tranquillity and luxury can easily be shattered as we have seen. The fact that some of us Masters have had to rush home to step right into the line of fire to defend their home and families from aggression has forced us, understandably, to take a stance. We can only hope that our friends stay safe and that we at some point can have an approach that allows for more nuances. Motivator Sailing the Finn at this age is a great motivator to keeping fit. The class is also extraordinarily versatile in the sense that almost anyone in the 80-120 kg weight bracket can tune their boat to a competitive level. Of course it has to
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FINN MASTERS MAGAZINE & YEARBOOK 2022
