Fast friends and sailing stars, Peter Burling and Blair Tuke have won Olympic gold and the America’s Cup together in the past two years, but their career paths are diverging for the moment in their first attempt at the Volvo Ocean Race.
They are on different teams and in a race not only to finish first in this round-the-planet contest, but in a race to complete what could be considered the ultimate sailing triple.
Rivalry, not usually their thing, has become part of the equation.
“They are giving each other stick all the time, but they’re also best mates,” said Bouwe Bekking, the skipper of Team Brunel, the Dutch syndicate that employs Burling.
Last week, while Burling shuffled around downtown Newport, R.I., in his flip-flops on a cool and overcast afternoon, Tuke was in a Newport hospital recovering from a knee infection that had turned serious during the last leg of the Volvo.
“I think he’s about as bored as he’s ever been, sitting in a hospital bed, not being able to do anything,” Burling said before paying him another visit. “He’s pretty lucky the infection only happened a couple of days before the end of the leg. Otherwise, he probably would have had to be airlifted off the boat, because it starts getting pretty risky with your health.”
Tuke, when reached by telephone shortly before he was due to be discharged, confirmed his predicament. “Forced rest, but I’m pretty good, thank you,” he said. “Just a cut that got infected, and it was pretty painful, but other than that I’m good for next weekend.”
Good for the next and ninth leg of the Volvo that is set to begin here on Sunday and finish in Cardiff, Wales. the trans-Atlantic leg is the last long phase of the race, which is scheduled to finish in The Hague, Netherlands, in late June.
Despite his injury, Tuke – not Burling – is in the best position to become the first sailor to win Olympic gold, the America’s Cup and the Volvo.
With three legs remaining, his syndicate, the Spanish team Mapfre, has a three-point lead in the standings over Dongfeng Race Team of China. Team Brunel is in third place, 11 points back of Mapfre: still technically in contention, but with no room for any more mistakes after a shaky start to the race and after allowing Mapfre to slip past them late to win the leg between Itajai, Brazil and Newport.
The final margin was 61 seconds: a blink of the eye after a 5,700-nautical-mile trek.
“They took the opportunity we gave them, but we shouldn’t have given them the opportunity,” Burling said.
Burling, 27, and Tuke, 28, have not had many true setbacks in their sailing careers. After winning silver at the 2012 London Olympics in the 49er, they dominated the class for years and carried the flag for New Zealand at the 2016 Rio Olympics before winning gold.
They then played leading roles in their first America’s Cup with Team New Zealand in Bermuda on a foiling catamaran last year: outwitting and outperforming Oracle Team USA.
Burling had the higher profile, becoming the youngest helmsman in the Cup’s 167-year history to win it. But Tuke had the more diverse sailing portfolio, helping to produce hydraulic power as an on-board cyclist while trimming the foils that allowed the catamaran’s hulls to rise completely out of the water at the right speed.
Sailing the Volvo Ocean 65, a design class intended to cut costs and prove durable over the long haul, is not quite such a thrill.
“It’s fast, but it’s not fast,” said Burling, arching an eyebrow as he plowed through his calamari in a Newport restaurant. “You’d probably get beaten by a single-handed Imoca 60 right now with a guy that’s asleep sitting on autopilot.”
The race still provides plenty of adrenalin rushes: Sailing near Antarctica at any speed is a bucket list challenge. But Burling’s reaction helps explain why the Volvo organizers are considering a switch to the Imoca class, used in the single-handed Vendee Globe race and now often capable of foiling.
“The Volvo shouldn’t go with these boats anymore because they are getting outdated,” said Bekking, the Dutch skipper competing in his eighth edition of the race. “The new generation of sailors, they want to have something fast and flying, so I think it will go in that direction or at least I hope it will.“
Whatever the choice, the risk-reward ratio will remain different in this event than the America’s Cup or Olympics.
“Peter’s whole background is in the details, like when he talks about the Cup, it’s about sailing on that red line all the time,” Bekking said. “And that of course is the big difference with us because if you are on that red line and you snap something out in the open ocean, you lose out terrible. So that balance, I think we had to show him a couple of times, ‘OK, take the pedal off the metal now. We have to survive.’ ”
The learning curve has been relatively steep for Burling and Tuke. But though both are looking ahead to a possible defence of their Olympic title in Tokyo in 2020 and to an America’s Cup defence in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2021, they are interested in nipping their Volvo rivalry in the bud.
“After the America’s Cup, with the time frame, it was hard to pull a team together,” Tuke said. “But it’s something we want do together in the future, and we’re already talking about a campaign for the next time around.”