Peter Blake - Sailor on the shore

Sir Peter Blake is the figurehead of the America's Cup campaign, but spends his days in meetings and offices as GRAHAM REID reports.

The three page synopsis of Sir Peter Blake's illustrious career you can download from the Team New Zealand website makes for tiring reading. And they are just the bare facts.

From winning the New Zealand junior offshore group championship in 1967 through Whitbread races, manager and skipper of Lion NZ, bringing the America's Cup to Auckland to collecting a shelf full of awards and honours (in ascending order MBE, OBE, to the knighthood, in addition to sportsman, yachtsman and sports personality of the year), it has been a full and fruitful life on the ocean.

Yet right now Sir Peter Blake - more correctly Dr Sir Peter, he received an honorary doctorate from Massey for his pioneering role in the commercial sponsorship of sport - is a shore-bound sailor.

He's helming the defence, but he's not on the boat. Late last year he could say he hadn't been out on an America's Cup yacht for almost two years. And he said it with no discernible regret.

"I've done so much racing ... my entire life. I was brought up going sailing before I could walk and I've been passionate about sailing ever since. But right now the passion of being on the boat and racing has gone, which is fine.

"I admire the guys who spend every waking moment thinking about ways of making the boat go faster, because we have to have those people. That's how I used to be, but now I've got a different focus.

"People ask me if I'm going to do the round the world and the new one called The Race, a nonstop race around the world at the end of this year. But why? I've got rid of all that out of my system."

Blake's job now is to head the defence of the Auld Mug, ensure sponsorship is in place, the correct hands are shaken, the right profile put forward.

"It's very important the people involved in the defence, the sailors, don't have that pressure ... on the whole it's not their responsibility where the money comes from, but it's still got to be got from somewhere."

He prefers to style himself a yachtsman, but Blake has become a public relations businessman because someone had to be.

Yet at a time when heroes are in short supply and there is understandable suspicion about the America's Cup being a pursuit of the idle rich, Blake's profile and personality is carrying the nation with him - because his is an archetypal Kiwi story we can relate to.

He started off in a P class, he and his brother Tony built their own boats in the backyard shed as teenagers, days and weeks of small boat competition on the Waitemata stretched to years and a career ...

Blake is the kid next door who at 16 on his first ocean race was seasick for the full eight days to Suva. The kid who ended up on NBR's rich list in 1998 with an estimated $4 million and a "bright financial future."

He's the boy from Devonport who is an honorary knight of Burgundy and has a part of Bayswater Avenue renamed in his honour.

Blake's an inspirational figure because, in a country which still respects those who do rather than those who say they will, he's done it.

He was named the New Zealander of the Year in 1995 after bringing home the America's Cup in a boat he wasn't on the original crew list for. That's doing it.

Like Sir Edmund Hillary with whom he shares a similar powerful but slightly stoop-shoulder physique, he appears comfortable in any context - but you suspect he'd rather be somewhere more private.

He doesn't much like the attention he attracts when he and his wife go to a restaurant or movie, and values time with his family away from the spotlight.

But, being a pragmatist, he accepts these are the sacrifices to be made. If this cup is going to be kept - for the first time by any country outside of America - then sponsors need to be serviced and speeches given.

Sir Peter Blake is the hometown hero whose home is Britain, the dinner guest who says doesn't have a suit ("but I do black tie well enough") and the sailor who now charts a course through the seas of sponsorship.

An uncommon man who has earned the respect of common people - and he still hasn't got a manageable hairstyle.