Getting to know Seve Jarvin

Sydney’s skiff supremo and eight-times World Champion, Seve Jarvin, on best man speeches, inside jokes and all things Team GAC Pindar.

Saturday 2nd May 2015

I started sailing when I was five, I hated it I used to cry. I was forced into it by my dad because I come from a big sailing family. I didn’t really get into it until I was about eight. Dad’s really big into sailing, he’s been to the Olympics and sailed around the world, I guess he’s really happy that I’m still doing it.

It probably got serious for me about two years ago. I was doing little bits of sailing here and there but I still had a full time job. It was when Team Australia decided to do an entry for the Americas Cup that sailing became a full time job.

We’re a pretty tight team. I was the best man at Marcus’ (Ashley-Jones) wedding and Jack (Macartney) was also in the grooms party. We’re all very good friends from Sydney. There are a lot of inside jokes that go on.

I had to do a speech at Marcus’ wedding, its funny because we talk each day and we spend so much time traveling together it’s like its own little relationship, so in the wedding speech I had to get up and officially handed Marcus over to his new wife. Not sure how that went down…

Tyson is probably the guy that keeps the team going, nothing really fazes him and he’s always pretty amped up about life. He motivates us in the gym. The rest of us are pretty lazy he’s a bit of a drill Sargent. You can’t take him too seriously.

Here in Qingdao I’m sharing a room with Tyson, he snores a lot so I wake up pretty early and he’s pretty strict on getting to the gym on the morning – he works out twice a day but as you can tell from my figure I’m not so keen on it. I like to chill out before racing, seven to ten races a day with the Extremes is pretty mentally challenging, it’s fast and you need to keep on the ball so I try to be a fresh as possible before the racing starts.

I wouldn’t call myself a big team leader. When we are on the water I’m pretty serious and we try and keep what happens on the water out there, but we’re a fun team and all a bit mischievous. You do well when your having fun. All the times that I’ve sailed with people and gone well it’s been when we’ve clicked. In these boats you are a team and it’s important to get along with everyone.

We are stepping it up every regatta and hopefully by the end of the season we can be mixing it with the lead boats. There are two of us on the boat that have know each other since we were five or six years old so that gives us an advantage over the teams that have only just met in the last year.

Our aims in this fleet is to get off the start and hit the line in the top three, then you can avoid the ping pong that happens between the other boats. We’ve done a bit of work on the communication so hopefully it pays off. Muscat was a drag race, which didn’t suit us; we definitely prefer the tricky shifty conditions here in the city (Qingdao).

If I have a good day dad’s probably the first person I call, he’s pretty interested in how I do. He asks me how I go and follows my results – he’s a big fan I guess.