Reg White, boatbuilder, sailor, and Olympic Gold Medal winner died of a heart attack on May 27, 2010, at age 74. He had just finished an sailboat race in Brightlingsea, UK.
Sailor and builder of revolutionary multihull boats whose international racing successes included a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics
One of Britain’s best-known sailors, Reg White was dominated the world of catamarans for three decades. He won the Little America’s Cup — sailed in C-Class catamarans — a record five times between 1963 and 1968 and dominated the Olympic Tornado class for two decades, winning the gold medal for Britain with John Osborn at the 1976 Games in Canada.
White, who also won the Tornado world championship in 1976 and 1979, was deprived of the chance of a second Olympic medal after winning the selection trials for the 1980 Games in Moscow when the British sailing team withdrew in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
White was born in 1935, the son of an oyster merchant in Brightlingsea, Essex. He grew up on the banks of the Colne estuary and took to sailing at a very early age. His first experience was aboard his father’s rowing skiff used to ferry the oysters ashore, which he rigged with home-made spars and sails.
From school he took up a boatbuilding apprenticeship at James & Stone’s yard in Brightlingsea and cut his teeth racing his father’s Brightlingsea One-Design dayboat, Tiller Girl, named after the dance troupe of which his elder sister, Pam, was a member. Later he built two Hornet class dinghies for himself and his friend Ken Howe, and finished sixth in the class world championship at Plymouth within days of launching his own boat.
It was while racing his Hornet that he met Roy Bacon, a catamaran enthusiast who got White to build a 16ft hard-chined prototype catamaran, which marked the start of a business partnership that led to the worldrenowned multihull company Sailcraft.
Reg White is survived by his wife, Lyn, whom he married in 1955, and three sons and a daughter.