Prada tactician Torben Grael is a risk-taker on the water but a steadying influence on the children of his native Brazil, as SUZANNE MCFADDEN writes.
Across the sprawling Guanabara Bay from the carnival city of Rio de Janeiro, Torben Grael lives a quiet life in his grandfather's house.
Now and then Grael slips out on the bay in a pretty little wooden boat named Aileen, once cherished by his grandfather, too. She is 90 years old, the oldest sailboat still racing in Brazil, and has nurtured a string of world champion yachtsmen from one extraordinary family. One of them, Prada's magical tactician, Torben Schmidt Grael, may well be Brazil's greatest sailor.
Concealed in boxes in Grael's home is the stash of trophies he has collected - four Olympic medals, 20 world championship medals and another for finishing runner-up in the 2000 America's Cup. He hides them away, not out of modesty, but because the sea air dulls the precious metals.
On land Grael may be a silent, shy man who cares passionately about the underprivileged children of his country. But at sea the 42-year-old is a sailor with an eagle eye, a killer instinct and a gambling streak.
With his smouldering Latin looks and hooded eyes, there is no visible trace of the Danish blood that runs through Grael's veins and makes him the sailor that he is.
Prebem Schmidt, Grael's grandfather, was a Danish engineer who travelled to Brazil for work at the turn of last century, and fell in love with Niteroi, the city which looks across the bay to Rio de Janeiro. Schmidt, like any true Viking, was a man of the sea.
He bought Aileen, a 6m boat which had just won silver for Denmark at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, and taught his two sons to sail in her.
They both competed at the Olympics for Brazil and won three world titles together.
Next, "Vo" put his young grandsons on board Aileen - Axel, Torben and Lars - and the two younger boys went on to win five Olympic medals between them.
Today the vintage yacht belongs to Torben, who also owns his grandfather's original house in Niteroi. Grael has carried on the tradition, introducing his son Marco and daughter Marine to the sea under Aileen's sails.
Neither 13-year-old Marco nor Marine (11) is under any pressure to follow in their family's wake. But with a father who travels the world from regatta to regatta, and a mother who was a Brazilian dinghy champion, the Grael children are natural-born sailors.
While their dad is spotting the windshifts on Luna Rossa on the Hauraki Gulf, Marco and Marine are racing Optimist dinghies nearby at Murrays Bay. "We encourage them to try all sports, but of course sailing is the atmosphere that they always find themselves in," Grael says.
Life is not all plain sailing for the Grael children, who go to an Auckland school during the day, then study Portuguese with their mother, Andrea, till 7 in the evening.
It is a transient existence, not unlike the way Torben Grael grew up. His father, Dickson, was a military parachutist, and the family was constantly moving to different corners of Brazil.
He was born in Sao Paolo, learned to play tennis in Uruguaiana, took up soccer and basketball in Brasilia.
But it was his grandfather, "Vo", who gave him his first little boat when he was 6.
He started crewing for his uncles and racing with his elder brother Axel. But sailing was just a hobby for Axel, who was more interested in the water underneath the boat. Today he is the environmental subsecretary of Rio de Janeiro's state government. Torben then turned to younger brother Lars, and together they won the world Snipe championships before going their separate ways in different Olympic boats.
Torben won silver in the Soling in 1984, then switched to the two-man Star boat, winning bronze in '88, gold in '92, and bronze in 2000.
Lars collected two bronzes of his own before he lost a leg when a motorboat smashed into his Tornado. Despite his disability, Lars is sailing again, and is now the Brazilian secretary of sport. He spoke at Sir Peter Blake's memorial service in Auckland last year.
T ORBEN and Lars have been working together to change the face of sailing in Brazil. The Grael Project was born six years ago when the brothers and Torben's sailing partner, Marcello Ferreira, devised a scheme to teach the disadvantaged kids of Brazil how to sail.
"We wanted to take kids who had problems and give them something to be proud of," Grael says. "It hasn't been easy - our sport has always been considered elitist and Brazil has so many people who are poor. It's a country where having a computer is a privilege for just a few.
"You see all these barons doing the America's Cup, but that's not what sailing is about - you forget the profile of the average sailor is middle-class."
The Grael Project goes into public schools and selects impoverished children aged between 10 and 15. Four days a week, the young sailors spend half a day at the Grael schools. Local firemen teach them how to swim, doctors donate their time to check the children over.
"They not only to learn to sail but also how to fish and how to protect the environment. They have lessons in carpentry, so they know how to build their own boats. Then when they are finished they get a basic licence from the port, so they can drive a boat," says Grael. "It builds their self-esteem. It fills their empty time. They learn how to be friends with the other kids. All of them show big improvements in their schoolwork."
The school has many success stories - one boy became Brazilian Optimist champion; the vision problems of a girl with trouble learning were only recognised when she joined the project. "It's difficult to live in a country where you have so many problems like we have, but if everybody can do a little thing it will make a big difference," says Grael.
Grael goes to the schools whenever he is in Brazil, but that isn't too often these days as he jumps from summer to summer - from Auckland to Punta Ala, Prada's Italian sailing base. Italy has become his second home, but it was that way long before he became entwined in Patrizio Bertelli's quest for the Auld Mug.
"I started my relationship with Italy when I started sailing Stars in 1988. Italy built the best boats in the world, and I started a lovely friendship with a boatyard there," Grael says. "Every time I would go to a regatta in Europe, I would stay there."
Through common friends, Grael met Francesco de Angelis and they began sailing big boats together. Then the opportunity to sail for Italy in the 2000 America's Cup came up. It was a time of emotional peaks and troughs. In the Louis Vuitton Cup Grael's sometimes unorthodox tactics earned him much kudos when Prada won.
But in the America's Cup match with Team New Zealand, his risk-taking did not pay off, and Bertelli publicly castigated him.
"I have a lot of memories, good and bad. If you analyse how the cup went last time, we went as good as we could," Grael says.
"We thought we had a real shot at it, but that didn't last long. As soon as the match started, we realised we still had some business to do to get as good as Team New Zealand. That's our motivation for this time: to do it better."
There were those who doubted whether Grael would sail with Prada in another America's Cup challenge, and when he immediately immersed himself in an Olympic campaign, then returned home to Brazil, the doubters seemed to be right.
But in February 2001, Grael signed up with the Italians once more, saying: "I'm extremely happy to be amongst so many friends again."
After the first round of the Louis Vuitton Cup 2002 edition, you can see the old Torben Grael at work, still making calls that make old seadogs flinch. In flukey winds against Victory Challenge, Grael suggested Luna Rossa take a flyer on the final beat, heading out to the right, and the bold gamble paid handsomely. The win was only Prada's second in the round, but helped pick up the spirits of a team battered by firings and rumours.
Grael's strategies are no guesswork. When GBR was beaten by Prada, British skipper Ian Walker said his crew had no answer for Grael. "He's probably the best person in the world for picking the windshifts."
Grael believes that in Auckland's fickle breezes you have to throw caution to the wind. "You have to play by what the weather is doing - you have to take risks," he says. "Of course it's not only taking the risk, but it's knowing the moment you can take that risk."
And more often than not he seems to know just when that moment is.
Perhaps it is something he learned from Vo and his Aileen on the great expanses of Guanabara Bay.
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Torben Grael, Prada Challenge
Crew role: Tactician
Date of birth: July 22, 1960
Country of birth: Brazil
Family: Wife Andrea, son Marco (13), daughter Marine (11).
America's Cup career: 2000, Prada, tactician
Other sailing: Four Olympic medals (one gold, one silver, two bronze), 20 world championship medals.
nzherald.co.nz/americascup
Prada team profile
Racing schedule, results and standings
Throwing caution to the wind
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