Catching Up with Daniel Escudero
Over the next few days, AYC member Daniel Escudero will be racing the last installment of the Sailing Grand Slam series, the Long Beach Olympic Classes Regatta (OCR). He is coming off of strong performances, first at Kiel Week, where he finished 7th out of 120 sailors, and then most recently at ILCA North Americans, where he finished in 11th place. At ILCA NAs, in an international field flooded with Olympians, Daniel finished as the top North American sailor.
You can watch Daniel in action at Kiel Week on YouTube in in Race 5.
Daniel has been on quite a journey since Bell 42 last caught up with him in November 2024. Once he graduated from Webb, he dove into training mode in places like Portugal, Brazil, and Argentina. He focused on improving his fundamental skills, fitness, and pushing himself against the best competition he could find.
Daniel said, "First I had to regain my sailing fitness after school. I hiked every single day for a month. Piece by piece the skills stacked on themselves. At the beginning, I focused on volume with speed and technique rather than racing scenarios. Then with the big regattas this year I really focused on starting and tactical situations. When do I take risks? When is the fleet right and when is it wrong? When you focus on speed your head is in the boat but when you go to regattas you are very out of the boat."
Some regattas went well, such as returning to the US to win the ILCA Midwinters East. For others, like the Trofeo Princesa Sofía Grand Slam in Palma de Mallorca where he finished 84th out of almost 200 ILCA 7 sailors, he felt like he was fast but making the wrong decisions on the course and was too impatient on when to tack.
He said, "What has been so clear has been the importance of the mental game — being focused, positive, having fun. Improving this aspect has helped my starts tremendously. This journey also takes patience. All the advice in the world is great, but one has to learn from within. The lessons come from the regattas themselves."
One change in the Olympic format is the adoption of the Vakaros RaceSense system, which wasn't used at ILCA North Americans but will be deployed again at this week's OCR event. Daniel is a fan of the technology. He did Vakaros starts at a test event last September and found it to be very accurate. He said, "We looked at the video and the system was spot on. I loved having no general recalls and the early clock countdown to the start. One lesson was that it was better having the Vakaros low on marks and not high on the RC boat so the units didn't sway."
After the OCR event, Daniel will be heading to Ireland for the ILCA 7 World Championship. We continue to root for him as he marches towards his goal of sailing in the Los Angeles Olympics.
