Simon Fisher, known as SiFi, has been named the 10th recipient of the Magnus ‘Mange’ Olsson Prize, awarded annually to an individual who has made an impactful contribution to the sport of sailing.
Previous recipients include The Ocean Race winners Torben Grael, Grant Dalton, Carolijn Brouwer and Stan Honey along with Olympic sailing legends like Sir Ben Ainslie, Peter Burling, Martine Grael and Santiago Lange.
SiFi has competed in The Ocean Race six consecutive times, beginning in 2005-06, and has won the race twice, including the last edition with 11th Hour Racing Team. He is the only navigator in race history to earn this achievement. During his 20-year career in the race, SiFi has seen the race evolve from the Volvo Open 70 class, through the one-design VO65s (where he won the race in 2014-15 with skipper Ian Walker on board Abu Dhabi Ocean Racing), and now again to the flying, foiling IMOCAs.
“It’s such an honour to be recognised by the Magnus Olsson Memorial Foundation for this award,” Simon Fisher said. “I had the opportunity to cross paths with Mange a few times early in my career at The Ocean Race and he never failed to make an impact with his positivity, enthusiasm and pure joy at the prospect of going to sea and racing around the world. His attitude was infectious – you couldn’t help but smile when you were around Magnus.”
For over 10 years, Fisher has been a director of Diverse Performance Systems, which provides onboard systems for racing and performance cruising boats as well as superyachts where his vast experience as navigator has benefitted many projects. Traditionally, the role of navigator is among the most important on a boat competing in The Ocean Race, and their decisions on race strategy, alongside the skipper, are critical to the success of a campaign. But the work starts long before the race begins in terms of analysing historic weather patterns and working up an accurate performance profile of the competing race yacht to feed into the navigation routing software.
During this latest edition of The Ocean Race, SiFi embraced the leadership role his team was taking on sustainability via 11th Hour Racing, with a keen interest in the onboard science data programme, which feeds real-time data from the boat back to researchers on shore. One of the many uses of this data is to improve weather forecasting, which as a navigator is one of the core inputs needed to provide fast and efficient routing.
