OBIT ~ Noel Robins, sailor
Hyfler/Rosner
Sailing hero of Paralympic Games
Bob Fishe
Friday May 30, 2003
The Guardian
The Australian sailor Noel Robins, who has died aged 62 following a car
accident, was a gold medallist in the Paralympic Games of 2000 and, nearly a
quarter of a century earlier, skippered the Australian boat in the America's
Cup. He was a shining example of determination over disaster.
Forty year ago, another car accident had left him in a wheelchair, his legs
and lower body badly injured. But his determination to succeed in sport led
him to sailing, and his decision to sail on an equal level with able-bodied
sailors. It was never easy for Robins to move around on a boat, but he chose
his vessels not for any reason that they were easier, but simply that they
provided the very best competition.
Ten years after his first accident, he was winning championships on the Swan
River, initially state titles and then Australian national championships.
His greatest triumph at that time was to win the International Soling class
when it was first used for the Olympic Games. The success confirmed for Alan
Bond that his clubmate at the Royal Perth Yacht Club had the necessary
talent to skipper his new challenger, Australia, in the 1977 America's Cup.
In the match off Newport, Rhode Island, Robins, known by all who sailed with
him as "Stumbles", met Ted Turner, in Courageous, with a great deal of
confidence. As it turned out, this was misplaced since Turner had had an
even harder summer of selection trials and was better prepared than the
Australian skipper. Robins lost four close races, and returned to his
hometown of Perth to concentrate on his job as waterways commissioner for
Western Australia.
Peter Briggs talked him into skippering his 40ft ocean racer, Hitchhiker II,
for a European season in 1981. Robins led his crew to be top individual
scorer in the Admirals' Cup at Cowes, and followed that with a victory in
the Two Ton World Championship in Porto Cervo, Sardinia. He was still
sailing the same boat with Briggs in Royal Perth Yacht Club races up to the
time of his death.
Robins went on to be in charge of the organisation of the defence of the
America's Cup in 1986/87 for the Royal Perth Yacht Club after Bond's
Australia II had defeated the Americans at Newport. It was a task he tackled
without preconception, asking advice from every source. The result was an
America's Cup that is generally acknowledged to have been the finest ever.
Shortly afterwards, his lateral thinking led him to providing a race series
for the emerging professional racing sailors. He conceived the radically
designed formula 1 class with a series of grand prix events that were held
on the Clyde, at Hamburg, San Diego and Fremantle. Only a shortage of
sponsorship support ended the popular series.
In 1998, he supervised the building of a replica of the 70ft Dutch ship
Duyfken that, under Captain Willem Janszoon, had charted the west Australian
coast in 1606. His own sailing had returned to the Swan River.
Then, when the Paralympic Games introduced sailing as a discipline,
"Stumbles", at 60, decided there was a new goal to be achieved. He gathered
a three-man disabled crew and tackled the project in his usual thorough
manner, starting by winning the North American Disabled Sailing Championship
in Florida in early 2000.
It ended with the gold medal at the Paraplegic Games in the Sonar class in
Sydney harbour, and the award of the Order of Australia Medal in 2001.
. Noel Robins, sailor, born September 3 1940; died May 22 2003