SAILING / RICH ROBERTS : Klein Navigates Toward Games

By the end of last year, sailing had turned sour for Larry Klein.

Unable to raise money for his America’s Cup campaign, Triumph America, he scuttled it and joined Bill Koch’s megabucks America-3 operation. But it wasn’t long before Koch fired him for reasons now in litigation.

Koch sailed away with Klein’s designer, Heiner Meldner, leaving Klein on the beach--a sorry state for a guy who had parlayed world J-24 and Etchells 22 championships into America’s most prestigious individual sailing honor, yachtsman of the year.

Then in January, while doing a clinic at Key West, Fla., he was sailing into the harbor when an acquaintance, Wally Corwin, hailed him from a Soling preparing for an Olympic Classes Regatta.

“Do you want to sail the boat?” Corwin yelled. “(Skipper) Don Cohan can’t make it.”

And that is how Klein became a Soling sailor. With Cohan’s crew, he won the event and two months later bought the boat from Cohan.

Klein brought the boat home to San Diego, recruited Long Beach sailors Ron Rosenberg and Chris Redman for his crew and set a course for Barcelona in 1992. Rosenberg was with Klein when he won his first two world titles. A couple of weeks ago, sailing out of the Rochester (N.Y.) Yacht Club on Lake Ontario, they won the Soling world championship.

They had won the Olympic Pre-Trial match-racing series at Punta Gorda, Fla. Match racing will be part of the Solings’ format for the first time at Barcelona.

“The interesting thing is that we haven’t really practiced yet,” Klein said. “We’ve just been racing.”

A Soling is a three-man, 27-foot keelboat, the largest of the Olympic classes and one dominated by Americans. Not many sailors have won world titles in three major classes of boats, and this 70-boat fleet included the most recent Soling world and Olympic champions--France’s Marc Bouet and Germany’s Jochen Schumann, respectively.

Sailing Notes

OLYMPICS--Larry Klein had a string of 3-9-3-2-1 finishes in the first five races to win the Soling worlds at Rochester, N.Y. He was disqualified for a premature start in the sixth race and placed 19th in the seventh for 54.4 points on the Olympic table of scoring. Germany’s Joachim Schumann, with 57.0 points, could have won the event by placing first instead of second in the final race. Kevin Mahaney of Bangor, Me., top ranked on the official U.S. Sailing Team, was third with 65.4. This week, through Saturday, Klein and Mahaney are competing in the Ficker Cup match-racing series off Long Beach, sailing J-24s. The winner receives an automatic pass to the Congressional Cup next March. . . . San Diego’s Brian Ledbetter, who finished well out of the medals at Pusan, South Korea, in the 1988 Olympics, was second in the Finn Gold Cup (world championship) at Kingston, Canada, in his best finish in a world-class fleet. No other American was better than 21st. The Finn is a one-man dinghy.

EVENTS--The International Yacht Racing Union (IYRU) World Women’s Sailing Championship will be run out of Alamitos Bay Yacht Club in Long Beach Sept. 22-28. More than 90 sailors from five continents will sail three classes of Olympic boats: two-person 470, singlehanded Europe dinghy and Lechner sailboard. . . . About 50 entries are practicing in Newport Harbor for the North American Snipe Class Championships next Wednesday through Sept. 21. The event will be preceded by the U.S. Snipe Masters Championships Saturday through Tuesday. . . . The Yacht Clubs of Long Beach will run their annual Charity Regatta benefiting the Children’s Clinic on Sept. 29. There will be Bay, Catamaran, Sailboard and Ocean classes. Yacht club membership is not required. Details: (714) 531-2098.

SLEDS--Mitch Rouse has had his Taxi Dancer repaired to defend his championship in the Big Boat Series at San Francisco this weekend. The bright yellow Reichel/Pugh 68 had four firsts and a second last year but incurred $30,000 damages when rammed inadvertently by Ed McDowell’s Grand Illusion in the Summer Sled Regatta off Cabrillo Beach last month. Bill Peterson, steering Grand Illusion on port tack (with no right of way), was ducking past the stern of Pyewacket, on starboard, but through miscommunication with his bowman didn’t realize that Taxi Dancer was partially hidden on the other side. Six sleds are in San Francisco. Rouse hasn’t been able to sail on his own boat because of business pressures this year but is back aboard for the San Francisco event.

CATAMARANS--The U.S. Yacht Racing Union Alter Cup Championship for multihulls will be sailed on Prindle 19s Monday through Thursday out of the Coronado Yacht Club.