Whether at work or in his voluntary role, Stefan de la Motte ensures that everything and everyone is connected. The 63-year-old IT specialist has been volunteering for the world’s largest sailing week for more than half a century. That is even more extraordinary than the white Spitz that lives with him and his wife Marita in Strande, right opposite the Kiel-Schilksee Olympic Centre – the very heart of Kiel Week.
Stefan de la Motte grew up in Strande, where he attended primary school. The beach was his sandpit, with the Baltic Sea always in view; he had a happy childhood. His parents had met whilst sailing and, right up into their old age, always kept small boats so they could enjoy their summers on the water.
When he was nine, her son – whom she had named after one of the favourite first names of his generation – took up Optimist sailing shortly before the 1972 Olympic Games. Little Stefan was a bit sad that he was still too young to take an active part in the Optimist opening ceremony of the Olympic regatta in Kiel. But the primary school pupil watched the opening ceremony with great enthusiasm. And that enthusiasm stayed with him in his world-famous home waters on the Kiel Fjord, whatever he went on to try.
Windsurfing was all the rage in the mid-1970s. “Back then, people would stop and watch. For me, having grown up just a hundred metres from the beach, it felt like a completely natural sport at the time,” recalls Stefan de la Motte, who also tried his hand at Laser sailing as a teenager. His coach was Hermann Splieth, who played a key role in founding the DGzRS at the then newly established Olympic Centre in the Schilksee district of Kiel. Stefan de la Motte spent a lot of time out on the water with Splieth’s son, Jürgen Splieth. Or they would hang about up by the balustrade at the Olympic Centre, where the DSV had its office.
From ‘ball boy’ to IT whizz at Kiel Week
That’s how they came to be involved in Kieler Woche: in 1975, the lads helped out for the first time with handing out equipment to the start boats. Fifty years later, last year, Stefan de la Motte celebrated half a century as a volunteer for the ‘Grande Dame’ of major international regatta series. By now, however, he has long since moved on from the role of enthusiastic ‘ball boy’.
After leaving school, Stefan de la Motte found himself in the same situation as many others: his apprenticeship and the start of his career meant that sailing took a back seat. “I haven’t sailed actively for a couple of decades,” he says. Instead, after training as a wholesale and retail salesman, he served in the German Armed Forces and, in 1986, joined his parents’ business – an NKL lottery outlet with a modern travel agency – which he ran alongside his father for many years.
Even back then, IT was Stefan de la Motte’s passion. He later moved into sales at a hotel chain that grew so rapidly that he ended up focusing solely on IT there; he still manages the IT systems for an international hotel group’s German properties today. Hardware and software are also the key components that need to be up and running for the results service at Kieler Woche. Stefan de la Motte and a team of three ensure this happens every June.
The man behind the results service
Once inspired in part by Otto “Ötte” Schlenzka, the former chairman and later commodore of the Kiel Yacht Club, who encouraged him to apply his IT talent to the sport of sailing, de la Motte experienced the dawn of the computer age – and helped shape it at Kiel Week. He wrote his first data analysis programme at the age of 16 and used it in 1979 at a windsurfing regatta held as part of Kiel Week.
Over the decades, this self-taught enthusiast has seen IT developments emerge, fail or prove their worth, all the whilst bringing Kiel Week, its sailors and fans together. Whether he was grappling with radio problems in the past because 50 coaches had switched on their radios at the same time, or setting up 50 decommissioned Mobilcom computers, each weighing twelve kilograms, so that everyone could work. Whether he was still tinkering with hubs and switches or his team now benefits greatly from WhatsApp groups – calm multitasking was and remains the strength of Stefan de la Motte, who also played a part in developing the regatta management system and results service manage2sail, “so that you don’t have to start from scratch every time”.
According to de la Motte, in order to transmit the results from the water as quickly as possible, “we tried out a lot of different things at Kieler Woche”, but have since switched to writing the lists whilst out on the water. Given that everyone knows how to use a mobile phone, the technology is “admittedly not particularly exciting, but it’s reliable”.
These results are then sent ashore and entered manually into manage2sail. They are marked as ‘provisional’ straight away, rather than – as was previously the case – only after many hours of checking, waiting for jury decisions and making corrections. If corrections are required after the check, these are implemented in a second round.
A love of classics rather than a computer screen
Since 2010, Stefan de la Motte’s eight-metre-long vintage Baltic Sea cruiser, the ‘Gothje’ (built in 1935), has provided a stark contrast to his day job, his voluntary work at Kiel Week and his involvement with the Klassische Yachten society. “When I’m on board, I’ve left the world behind by the time I’ve left the harbour and am in a different universe,” he enthuses.
Now a classic boat expert, enthusiast and patron in his own right, Stefan de la Motte is once again this year’s point of contact for the ‘Rendezvous der Klassiker’, a regatta featuring these ageing beauties to mark the start of Kiel Week from 18 to 20 June on the fjord. He is also involved in Classic Week, which takes place every four to five years. Speaking of this passion, he says: “Unlike my work, you can actually touch a boat like this. Like old cars, it has a certain charm and eye-catching lines.”
When asked about a dream he would still like to fulfil, his answer is as lovely as it is modest: “I’d love to moor our boat in Copenhagen’s city harbour one day.”
During Kiel Week, however, Stefan de la Motte gets to see his ‘Gothje’ almost as rarely as he sees the fjord, even though his office in the Regatta House, in the heart of the Kiel-Schilksee Olympic Centre, is just a few steps away from the harbour. Once Kiel Week gets underway, his domain becomes the office for the results service and the hub connecting everything and everyone.
Tatjana Pokorny
Sports reporter
