40 Breeze Magazine
With aggression always dialed up high, Robertson does not shy away from tangling with the big guns. – Ricardo Pinto Photo Programme graduates formed the Waka Sailing team. They sold up everything to go on the road in Europe seeking professional careers on the match race circuit. “We slept on a lot of couches and did a lot of begging to get accepted into regattas. Jimmy Spithill advised us to knock on every door, because we could sometimes pick up last-minute slots in events when the big dogs pulled out.” Robertson led crews to two match race world titles (2016 and 2019), but sailing was evolving in new directions. The match race circuit, which had been so strong through the Coutts, Dickson, Barker era, lost momentum. New, faster, more TV-attractive models were emerging around multihulls and eventually foiling boats. Determined to continue his sailing career, Robertson began his multinational pilgrimage, wearing flags of many colours. His CV includes China, Russia, Oman, Spain and next up Canada in events as diverse as the Extreme Sailing Series, GC32s, M32s, AC45s in the America’s Cup World Series and currently the F50 foiling catamarans of SailGP. Despite communication challenges and rookie crews, Robertson never gave an inch against the more seasoned and fancied teams. “There are two sides to that,” he says. “That is my personality. I definitely do not mind pushing a point. It comes from my match racing background, where you have to be aggressive. “The other side is that with an inexperienced team, you have to push harder to be competitive against the top guys. In SailGP, it is so important to get around the first reaching mark in a top-three position, so we put a
lot of emphasis on starting and getting off the line in good shape. We felt it was worth risking a penalty to put ourselves in that position.” A poll of the SailGP skippers midway through Season Two ranked Robertson the most aggressive and there were inevitable scrapes and bangs as a consequence. He does not shy away from that, although he points out there more serious incidents later in the season between other teams. When highly competitive athletes are racing at 40 knots in close quarters, every role on the boat is crucial and must be performed in a precisely choreographed sequence. None of the teams has escaped calamity of one sort or another and the loftiest reputations have suffered their embarrassments – highlighting the added pressure on any team with L-plates on the transom. “Early on, Phil was nicknamed Crash Bandicoot,” says Brad Marsh, who was in the RNZYS Youth Programme with Robertson and now heads up the technical team responsible for fixing and maintaining the fleet of SailGP F50s. “But that label never stuck. “The technical team guys understand where Phil is at and very often the mistakes are not his fault. Everybody looks at the skipper, but Phil is racing and coaching simultaneously, rather than having the world’s best sailors alongside him. He has always had to fight with one hand behind his back with inexperienced and under-resourced teams,” adds Marsh. Despite these challenges, in the circuit’s first season, Robertson led the start-up China Team to a remarkable 3rd overall. And in the recentlyconcluded second season, he brought a young Spanish team into the
