Robert Dickson: 'If we sail to the best of our ability, there’s no reason why a medal is out of reach'

Dickson and Sean Waddilove have been sailing together over a decade, since their mid-teens.

MEDAL IN SIGHTS: Sean Waddilove and Robert Dickson will be aiming to sail their way to a medal at the Olympics. Picture: ©INPHO/James Crombie

This country’s best athletes harbour big dreams but Ireland remains a small country. You might only need one or two rather than six the degrees of separation before joining the dots with any two people. Not even that in the case of Sean Waddilove and Ciaran Frawley.

Waddilove will partner Robert Dickson in the Olympic waters in the men’s skiff around Marseille Marina in the coming weeks. Frawley needs no such introduction after his heroics for Ireland against South Africa last weekend.

The common denominator here is Skerries.

“I was in school with him,” said Waddilove, who is set for his second Games with Dickson. “I was in the same class as him all the way up to sixth year. I actually used to walk to school with him as well, so I know him quite well.” 

His own rugby story stretched as far as Junior Cup and Senior Cup but that is where the similarities end with the Leinster and Ireland star who claimed that famous win against the world champion Boks in Durban with a last-gasp drop goal.

“He was definitely the better player.” 

Waddilove won’t be the only Skerries son hoping to catch the eye at the Olympics. Hugo Lennox is part of a men’s sevens squad that has a real shot at a medal but the focus for Waddilove remains in the boat.

Dickson and Waddilove have been sailing together over a decade, since their mid-teens. They spend more time together than with their families. They have to, yes, but they mix well too despite, or maybe because of, their different personalities.

Dickson likes to stay on the water on his down time. Kite surfing, wind-foiling, surfing. He’s the more laidback of the two. Waddilove is the organised one, the mental effort involved prompting him on to dry land when the opportunity allows.

Their sporting education has been comprehensive and it took in a spell in La Rochelle as transition year students which propelled them forward. They were sailing on weekends at home. In France that doubled and there was no let up through the winter.

Curiously, there didn’t seem to be an overarching goal.

“I don’t know,” said Dickson. “I think we were always quite ambitious and wanted to do whatever was in front of us as well as we could. Back then it almost felt like too much of a dream to achieve what we’re doing now.

“As we got better and better we realised we were really good and did have a chance to do what we do now. So it probably wasn’t until we got sort of finished in [the 420s class], for me anyway, when I started thinking we have a chance of going to the Olympics.” 

They weren’t a fancy to make it to Tokyo but that wasn’t the summit of their capabilities. A 13th place finish was respectable enough but it would have been so much higher had they not been disqualified from two races for a minor and innocent weight infraction.

“The harness is what we wear on the water,” Dickson explained. “We attach ourselves to the boat with the harness and basically stand off the edge to get more leverage, to get more power. There is just a weight limit on the harness.

“There’s a test where they dunk it in water and hang it for one minute. If it’s over a certain weight at the end of the minute, then it’s against the rules. What happened basically was, we had tested the harnesses, but it was a few months beforehand.

“It has a hydrophobic layer, so basically they were soaking up more water and it ended up 90 grams too heavy. They were meant to be two kilos and one of the harnesses was 90 grams over, so very, very little, but that was enough.” 

They qualified the boat for Paris at last year’s Europeans and earned the nomination to man it after a fairly gruelling trial spanning three regattas when they just about came through against the Cork crew of Séafra Guilfoyle and Johnny Durcan.

They go to the south of France now without much in the way of expectation from the wider sporting community or a media that is concentrating on the chances of more high-profile athletes in more high-profile events but they are going for gold.

“That’s the goal, yeah,” said Dickson. “We’re pretty confident that we can go and do a good performance. We’ve been to Marseille and we’ve sailed well in regattas in Marseille before. If we sail to the best of our ability, there’s no reason why a medal is out of reach.

“We’ll be aiming for it.”