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Ian Bruce
29 Mar 2016
Ian Bruce – he and Bruce Kriby designed the Laser dinghy…
LASER DESIGNER: Ian Bruce once said he stumbled into sailing, but he left an indelible mark on the sport as one of the inventors of the Laser – one of the world’s most popular sailboats.
The long time Dorval resident died last Monday in Hamilton, Ont., after a battle with cancer. He was 82.
“He changed the face of sailing in the world,” said Peter Bjorn, a longtime sailing partner, business partner and friend.
A 63 year member of the Royal St. Lawrence Yacht Club who lived just off the club’s grounds, Bruce was a passionate and accomplished sailor who won many regatta titles and represented Canada twice in the Olympics, in 1960 and 1972.
But he is best known for innovating a new class of small sailing dinghies, designed for the mass market but fast enough to interest the world’s top sailors.
The Laser was chosen as an Olympic class in 1993 and was first sailed in the 1996 Olympics.
In 1969, Bruce, an industrial designer at Alcan and co-owner of a small business manufacturing high end sailboats, came up with the idea of a single-handed dinghy that would be small and light enough to fit on a car’s roof rack.
In a 2013 interview with Sail World, Bruce Kirby, a former journalist at the Montreal Star and Olympic sailor who designed the Laser, said Bruce proposed the idea over the phone in October 1969.
“While we were talking on the phone, I was doing a sketch on a piece of yellow legal paper,” Kirby recalled. The sketch later became known as the “million-dollar doodle.”
Also involved in the project was the late sailmaker and former Olympic sailor Hans Fogh, along with others, including Bjorn.
A celebration of his life will be held May 7 from 4 to 7pm at the Royal St. Lawrence Yacht Club, 1350 Lakeshore Rd. in Dorval.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that people make donations to a charity of their choice or encourage someone to learn to sail. Story by Jason Madger in the Montreal Gazette