In March 2010, just after it was announced that Abu Dhabi would be one of the stopovers for the 2011/12 Volvo Ocean Race (VOR), Adil Khalid told a newspaper he was planning to be on whatever boat Abu Dhabi put into the race.
“I am the best here, so I’m hoping I will be part of that team,” he said.
He said this months before the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA) had begun the grueling process of selecting one Emirati sailor to be part of an 11-member crew of Azzam.
Publicly, Khalid may not be a man of many words, but that is not to mistake for a lack of belief in his own abilities.
In October that year three-month trials began for 120 aspirants, including Khalid. The candidates underwent psychometric examinations and physical tests, and then trials at sea, where specific sailing skills were tested.
By January, from a shortlist of three, Khalid had proved his self-assessment of the previous March to be accurate. He was the best here.
Yet it may have felt during that first race that it was not enough. He had become a first-timer father three months before the team embarked on the race. And in the very first hours of the first leg, disaster struck Azzam, as steep waves and 30-knot gales broke the mast.
Khalid was unnerved, calling it “the scariest moment” of his life. Over the next legs, doubts grew about whether he would last. At the Miami stopover, before the seventh leg, skipper Ian Walker admitted: “I wouldn’t have given him a greater than 50 per cent chance of finishing the race at the start.”
By that stage, however, Walker and crew were praising Khalid’s persistence. Not only was he the first Arab to race in the VOR, he eventually became the first to sail around the world.
With that milestone out of the way, Khalid returned to a newer, slimline crew for this year’s race with different objectives. Now, he said at the crew announcement in February 2014, he wanted to compete and win the race.
He returned bigger and stronger than before, at 83 kgs, 16 more than when he finished the previous race. Walker noted it too, as he did another development.
“Looking back, the first race, you had to tell him what to do all the time,” Walker said at the Abu Dhabi stopover.
“Now, he’s a lot more proactive so it could be Adil who says we should move the sails forward, or even if to change sail. He’s obviously grown in knowledge and confidence.”
So much so that he played a leading role in guiding Azzam home in the familiar waters of the Gulf for the second leg, from Cape Town to Abu Dhabi.
Ironically, however, despite his greater nous and strength, his race this time has been marred by a debilitating stomach complaint that has seen him miss three legs. He returned for the sixth leg, but fell ill again early in the seventh, from Newport to Lisbon and missed the sprint to Lorient.
That, however, is the tiny cost of a tremendous achievement, in becoming the first Emirati and Arab sailor to win the world’s toughest, most prestigious ocean sailing race.
He knew back then he was the best in the UAE. He is in more exalted company now.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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