PAST: Royal Vancouver Yacht Club
PRESENT: English Bay
FUTURE: NCAA Div. 1 Stanford Cardinal
When he’s sailing English Bay in his 15-and-a-half-foot dinghy, Lloyd Lyall always wears a flotation jacket and has a towline tucked in a compartment. The required items aren't the only life-preserving tools the 18-year-old has on board. He also packs a bottle of highly concentrated sugar water, usually Gatorade.
It’s a lot better than drinking rancid orange juice that’s been spoiled in the heat. And he risks disqualification if he carries any liquid in a backpack.
Lyall, the defending 29er national champion and back-to-back national high school debate winner, has type 1 diabetes, a disease he must manage every day on and off the water. He wears an insulin pump in the case his blood sugar level is too high. If it’s too low out on the water, he has a bottle of Gatorade.
But doing either of those things during competition is an arduous and one-of-a-kind challenge that, if mistimed or mishandled, can evaporate any advantage the team has earned. “We’ve been working for a while to figure out a solution without stopping to pull out of a race,” he said.
In addition to reading weather conditions, picking their line, tacking and jibing, Lyall and his sailing partner Andrew Moreno have trained for the hand-off.
“While we’re sailing, he can hand me the bottle and I can drink it,” said Lyall. The best solution was also the simplest. But that doesn’t mean it’s not complicated when the wind whips up and the rain slashes their faces.
If they don’t pull it off and his blood sugar levels fall off or spike, Lyall immediately loses his edge. He’s tired, he makes poor decisions, his eyesight blurs.
“My coaches will see it right away,” he said. “If I wasn’t able to respond fast enough, you get really low and it’s never happened to me, but you can pass out.”
Lyall was diagnosed two days before his seventh birthday and didn’t stop skiing or sailing. His mom is also a doctor and together the family learned he didn’t need to hold himself back.
“I’ve learned to feel a lot more comfortable over time,” he said, acknowledging he’s not typical for pursuing physically demanding sports that often have him battling the elements.
Before he was 16, Lyall competed for Canada in the optimist class as a solo sailor. He started racing the 29er class in 2012 and has since finished second at the Canadian Youth Sailing Championships and the Canada Summer Games. He and Moreno won the 29er North American Championships in Kingston, Ont. last summer.
Lyall will study at Stanford University next year, keeping him close to the Pacific so he can race if he chooses. But the West Point Grey Academy graduate isn’t committed to a full competitive sailing schedule because he also intends to represent the university in debate. Lyall is one of five Canadians selected to represent the country at the World Schools Debating Championships in Singapore.
Sailing and debate, he said, “are probably the two most wildly opposite things you could get involved in. They could not be more different.”
What they have in common is Lyall.
