Full details of today’s action to follow, but for now check out yesterday’s round-up video featuring some of the match racing from the quarter finals (though sadly not our all important deciding match which really was a thriller!)

Right, off for a wee celebration!

Lucy, Annie & Kate x

The regatta started on Monday, though strangely we began with a lay-day as Group A raced all day. Tuesday was our turn, and it was a long day on the water as we competed in both the first and the last of the 11 flights sailed by Group B. Six races in all for us, bit of an average start but an OK day with four wins and two losses.

Group A were out again first yesterday to complete their round robin, with Sally Barkow (USA), Silja Lehtinen (FIN), Ekaterina Skudina (RUS) and Anna Tunnicliffe (USA) making it through to the quarter finals. There’s a change of format this year at the World Cup events, with two groups of 12 instead of three groups of 8. The top 4 from each group then go straight into to the quarters, making it a pretty big cut with no second chances of progressing through a repechage round.

Yesterday we only did two races, first a win over Olivia Price (AUS), but then lost to Julie Bossard (FRA) which was pretty disappointing. A stupid mistake early on, we were both over the line early and I took the most ridiculous way to get back behind the line and ended up with too big a distance to try and catch up.

We’d been struggling a bit with a couple of little things in the boat over the last couple of days, but had a great day today. We had three races left to complete our round robin, and the results were really tight at the top. A good start to the day saw us with two wins against the Dutch teams of Renee Groeneveld and Mandy Mulder. With one flight to go to complete Group B there were six teams all pretty much tied on points with only the top 4 to advance. Our crucial final match was against Claire Leroy (FRA) and proved to be a typically close contest, but we just managed to get to the finish line ahead to make it three wins out of three and in fact to win the round robin. Had we lost to Claire however, I don’t think we’d have made the quarters on the tie-break, as indeed the French team didn’t.

Due to a breakdown we had a bit of a wait while the other three quarter finals were held, before we were on against the 4th place finisher from Group A — our adversary from the World Championship finals in Perth just a month ago — Anna Tunnicliffe. The 0–4 score line from our last encounter belied the closeness of the racing, and this time around was no exception either. Today we were starting really well against them and in fact in the first two matches we were leading her the whole way round the course only to get rolled at the finish line. Two-nil down in a first to three wins match is never a great place to be, but we had confidence and dug deep to turn it around, kept on doing what we were doing well and worked out how to defend her a little bit better, and delivered three straight wins to advance to the semis.

It’s really good to have got through the quarter-finals, it is always a massive sigh of relief because it’s such a big cut and everyone racing in the quarters is good — Anna’s the World Champion and we meet her in the quarters. It’s a really tough stage and a relief to get through it! A pleasing end to a pretty tough day :)

Tomorrow we’re up against Silja Lehtinen’s team from Finland, follow the action on Twitter @RMOCR_CourseE or at matchracingresults.com.

Cheers,

Lucy, Annie & Kate x

The Rolex Miami Olympic Classes Regatta will be our first event of a somewhat important year for us! Although entries are down for some classes, we have a full entry of 24 teams in the match racing so it should be a great week and with the selection for the final three nation spots taking place the week after, results will be watched closely. The most important thing for us to achieve here (other than coming home with a gold medal of course) is to have an even clearer goal of what we want to achieve in training during February and March.

As I said racing starts on Monday so until then the plan is to get settled in to the Phillips house (very generous British family that house us) today and have a few cuddles with their dog Cookie! Tomorrow we’ll have another training session, register and catch up with Team Sperry and hopefully we’ll then be all set to start on Monday.

Update: Acctually the racing schedule has just been announced, there will be two round robin groups with Group A racing on Monday so we’ll have to wait until Tuesday until we get started as we’re in Group B. See matchracingresults.com for all the action.

We’ll keep you posted!

Lucy

Having been working towards the Olympics for many years, it now seems really rather close! Time is going by very quickly, we’re really excited but there’s still plenty to do. People keep saying ‘You can win it’ but the pressure is really from ourselves, we know we can do it.

At the moment we’re in Miami for two weeks training ahead of the Rolex Miami Olympic Classes Regatta, the first stop on the 2012 Sailing World Cup tour. All the top teams will be competing, so it’ll be another valuable test for us in working towards our goal of gold in Weymouth later this year.

In other news today, we’re delighted that our fellow Skandia Team GBR team mates Luke Patience and Stu Bithell have officially been selected as the Men’s 470 team representatives for Team GB, and will be joining us at the Games in Portland and Weymouth. Woop! :)

Sunset in Miami...

]]> http://www.matchracegirls.com/news/2012/01/200-days-to-go/feed/ 0 http://www.matchracegirls.com/news/2011/02/our-second-home-palma/ http://www.matchracegirls.com/news/2011/02/our-second-home-palma/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 15:30:16 +0000 Lucy http://www.matchracegirls.com/?p=1334 Miami feels like weeks ago now and Annie is doing a good job of recovering so we are on to the next period of the winter now which is training in Palma. This morning my Dad and I finished our road trip which started from Portsmouth on Sunday night with a Brittany Ferries trip, then a drive down France to Barcelona and another ferry across last night to Palma. In tow as well as our rib we had two 470s and trust me with all that weight there was no danger of us breaking any speed limits! Today was meant to be container unloading before flying home this afternoon however unfortunately the container with our two Elliotts is delayed so I am staying out another day to hopefully unload and fly back tomorrow.

After lessons learnt in Miami, we are looking forward to getting back to training. We have a lot we want to get in done before Princess Sofia in April and believe we have the right programme with the right support to get a fair way down the to do list. There are a few changes to our campaign for 2011. A new coach will start with us on Saturday when we start training in Palma and we have a lot of exciting sponsor relationships building. In December we were delighted to team up with Oakley who provide us with fantastic glasses for performance on the water and we have a number of companies we are close to teaming up with in the run up to the Games.

For now though, back to the day to day I’m off to continuing setting up base here in Palma where not much has changed since I first came here in 2005; sea breeze still coming in at lunch time, coffee and sandwiches still excellent and many of the same friendly faces to help us in the yard and take the mick out of our attempts at speaking Spanish!

Lucy

With a good win in the quarter finals yesterday against the New Zealand team we raced against Tunnicliffe (USA) in the semis but unfortunately didn’t beat the American’s to make it through to the finals. In today’s petite finals we raced against another American team helmed by Barkow. We won the first race by a very convincing margin and then were able to gain the lead in the second but had a penalty. In trying to rid our penalty we unfortunately got another and therefore lost the lead. It all came down to the final race in the end and it was Barkow that came out on top after winning the start and preventing us from making it up around the course.

Considering Annie’s very unfortunate accident last week and just our four hours of practice with Mary before starting this regatta, we are really pleased with the week and Kate, Annie and I can’t thank Mary enough for stepping in and doing a great job!

Lucy x

The breeze was dying as our turn to race came around after the repecharge group but it just held long enough such that the races weren’t too fluky. After both starts we were able to make the first jump and gain control of the race to cut off the options for our competitors and ultimately extend to comfortable wins.

With one loss in the gold fleet round robin from yesterday, we now qualify through to the quarter finals in 1st and will be racing against the New Zealand team after they finished 2nd in the repechage group. The other pairings for the quarters will be Skudina (RUS) vs Barkow (USA), Souter (AUS) vs Leroy (FRA) and Tunnicliffe (USA) vs Lehtinen (FIN). The race committee’s plan A tomorrow will be to race first to three point quarters and semis but it looks like the breeze could be fairly light so we’ll see….

Keep tracking us,

Lucy x

Our second race was against Leroy (FRA) and was a bit of snakes and ladders with them infringing prestart and being given a penalty but then us giving the advantage back by misjudging the line and being OCS. From there we then caught up and gained a good advantage ahead for the second lap however catching weed early on the second beat saw us get extremely slow and the lead passed back to the French for them to take the win. Somewhat frustrating but unfortunately just one of those things!

Our final race of the day was the most convincing win for us from start to finish against the Finnish team helmed by Lehtinen and a good boost going into tomorrow. So far in the gold fleet there are four of us on equal points so it’s all to play for tomorrow in our final two matches which will seed us for the quarter finals on Friday.

Keep checking the website out for Twitter updates and the GPS tracking.

Lucy x

The first round is so critical for us with the format we race with because only the top two teams from each of the three groups are guaranteed a place in the gold fleet (the seeding round for the quarter finals). This means that every race counts and even with just one loss you can still miss the cut. In our group going into the final race, if we won we would be through to the gold fleet and if we lost we would be in the repechage so the pressure was on for our race against Anna Tunnicliffe. It was not a good start for us but we were ahead round the first mark and still ahead – just with Tunnicliffe having a penalty round the leeward mark. Racing remained extremely close up the second beat but we remained ahead until the top of the final run where after being rolled, we were behind but with the Americans still having to do a penalty. When Tunnicliffe dropped her spinnaker in the bottom third of the beat it was time for us to make a choice, match her and drop too or use our positioning to be able to roll her with our kite still up. Option two it was and after a shaky gybe at first, we rolled them straight away however still were being luffed – something the Y flagged solved and we crossed the finish line ahead and with Tunnicliffe having two penalties….it got the heart rate up a little ;).

Tomorrow we will sail the first three of our gold fleet races in the middle of the day aftre the repecharge group. Keep updated at the event website http://rmocr.ussailing.org/.

Lucy x

There are live updates and tracking on http://rmocr.ussailing.org/ where you can also cheer us on!

Lucy x