Built around the hard-earned wisdom of Olympic medal-winning coach Hamish Willcox and brought to life in collaboration with respected sailing journalist Andy Rice, Road To Gold is an online coaching programme that lays out, step by step, how to build a world-class racing campaign – regardless of whether your sights are set on Olympic gold, a world, european, or national title, or even on winning your local club series.
"It's basically a 12-chapter manual for putting together a campaign that actually works," says Rice. “In fact, it’s an organized brain dump of how Hamish Willcox constructed a campaign back in the early 1980s when he and helmsman David Barnes dominated the 470 class globally for several years.
Barnes and Willcox won three out of the four 470 world championships in the lead up to the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984. They also won the pre-Olympic regatta too, but tragically missed out on qualifying after a disastrous selection series.
Since then, Willcox has become one of the sport’s most sought-after minds—coaching everyone from Olympic champions Peter Burling and Blair Tuke to SailGP frontrunners Diego Botin and Florian Trittel, and even helping Emirates Team New Zealand and Luna Rossa during recent America’s Cup cycles.
The origins of Road To Gold go back to Willcox’s early coaching days in Japan, where he created a campaign guide to overcome the language barrier with his 470 sailors. That original manual—published only in Japanese—became a cult classic in the Japanese sailing scene. But it wasn’t until lockdown in 2020 that Rice convinced Willcox to bring the concept to life in English, reimagined as an online course.
“Once we started talking, it became clear this needed to be more than a book,” Rice explains. “It needed to be a modern resource—something structured, digestible, and widely accessible.”
The result is a 12-chapter online course that follows a strict sequence, starting with the foundational stuff that too many sailors gloss over: Are you in the right boat? With the right crew? Are your goals realistic? Are you even physically ready for the demands of your class?
From there, the chapters walk you through the core skills: boat handling, two types of boat speed (VMG speed and race speed), starting, tactics, strategy, meteorology, and psychology. “We don’t even talk about racing until Chapter 12,” says Rice. “Because that’s not the first problem to solve. It’s the last.”
And therein lies the genius of Road To Gold. It forces you to do the unglamorous thinking – the kind that, ultimately, gets you on the front row at the start. Willcox calls it “polishing the dirty side of the vase”—a metaphor for examining the parts of your sailing that usually don’t get addressed.
The programme isn’t just for Olympic hopefuls either. While the examples often draw from the 470 (Willcox’s speciality), the principles are broad enough to apply to any kind of short-course wind-powered racing. It’s been used by everything from club-level dinghy sailors to Melges 32 teams and kiteboard world champions.
One particularly telling story is that of Zena Martin, a GP14 dinghy sailor from the north of England. She started off mid-fleet at her local club and wasn’t sure Road To Gold was for her. But after giving it a go (a 30-day money-back guarantee helps), she began winning races, then open meetings, eventually becoming a top performer on the UK circuit.
“She’s the perfect example of someone taking a high-performance approach and applying it to weekend racing,” says Rice. “It’s like taking a gun to a knife fight.”
Road To Gold also found fans at the top. Olympic medallists and world champions have purchased the course. National federations have adopted it into their training pipelines—the Swedish Sailing Federation, for example, bought a number of licences and asked all its youth and Olympic sailors to complete the course. World Sailing has used it as a framework for coaching the sailors from its Emerging Nations Programme.
And the programme keeps evolving. Buyers get a full year of access, including video lectures, downloadable worksheets, and tracking tools to monitor progress. There's even a short quiz after each unit to reinforce learning – added, says Rice semi-jokingly, to ensure people are ‘not just Netflix-ing the content’.
Then there are some bonus extras too: a treasure trove of hour-long live Q&A sessions with elite sailors like Ben Ainslie, Hannah Mills, Jimmy Spithill, Robert Scheidt, Martine and Torben Grael, and more – all available on replay for subscribers.
“The idea of those sessions is to let sailors peek inside the minds of the best in the world,” says Rice. “You might not get to train with these legends, but you can still learn from them.”
Even top-level athletes like kiteboard world champion Daniela Moroz have found value in Road To Gold. “For her, the worksheets were the key,” Rice notes. “It forced her to engage deeply with each concept and put them into action.”
At the time of writing, the course costs $397 USD for a year’s access. While that might sound steep at first glance, Rice points out it’s significantly cheaper than a single day with a top coach – and you can revisit the material as often as you need.
“It’s not cheap, but it’s excellent value,” he says. “And if you systematically work through Road To Gold, it will make you better around the racecourse.”
There's even a 30-day money back guarantee, but as Rice proudly points out, the refund request rate remains less than one per cent.
Road To Gold has been around for five years now and has helped hundreds of sailors improve their results. Looking ahead, the team behind Road To Gold is planning further expansions—including a version specifically tailored for Optimist sailors, developed by two leading youth coaches. There's even talk of restarting the expert Q&A sessions with fresh names and new insights.
Interested? See the box below for a very special deal available to Yacht Racing Life readers.
Currently Road To Gold is closed to new subscribers – but as part of a very special deal, until July 31, 2025 Yacht Racing Life readers can gain access to the programme with a whopping $100 discount.
Click here to take a look at the Road To Gold website – and to take advantage of our special discount. Remember to use the code YRL100 when you check out.
Or you can use the button below to sign up now and start out on your own Road To Gold today.
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