LASER BRAIN
Designed by dual i14 World Champion and triple Olympian Bruce Kirby, a singlehanded dinghy called the Weekender won its first race at America’s Teacup regatta, at the Playboy Club in Wisconsin in 1969.
It became the Laser before its record-breaking launch at the New York Boat Show in 1971.
A staggering 216,000 Laser have been built over the subsequnt 49 years.
Kirby is from Ottawa, Ontario, and started sailing regularly as a crew with his father when he was six, along with his eight-year-old brother. He raced International 14s as a young teenager, with some success, and then was part of the Canadian squad that won the i14 Team World championships in 1958 and 1961.
He became a journalist, working for the Ottawa Journal for six years and then becoming editor of the Montreal Star.
“I started there in 1956, the year I sailed a Finn in the Melbourne Olympics,” he mentions. A conversation with Kirby is peppered with such offhand comments. Against the success of his most famous design, his own heavyweight sailing CV has been somewhat forgotten. Y&Y readers
