Credit: Sander van der Borch
Credit: Richard Langdon
Credit: Jesús Renedo
Credit: Lloyd Images
Credit: Lloyd Images
Credit: Lloyd Images
Credit: onEdition
Credit: Toby Melville
Credit: Richard Langdon
Saturday 28th January, 2012
Crikey — a couple more nail-biting matches in some light and fluky conditions but today we took the gold medal at the Rolex Miami OCR, defeating Olivia Price’s Australian team 3–1.
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
Thursday 26th January, 2012
Wow, big day for us today at the Rolex Miami OCR but we’re through to the semi finals :)
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
Saturday 21st January, 2012
Annie, Kate and I have been out here in Miami with Maurice our coach for two weeks now. We’ve had some really good training against the American team helmed by Sally Barkow during the first week and some racing against the Dutch, American, Russian, and Finnish teams during the second week but now we’re definitely looking forward to starting the real thing on Monday.
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
Monday 21st March, 2011
Annie, Kate and I are home this week taking a week away from the water but still putting the delightful hours in at the gym and doing some admin work so we are all up to date. It is hard to believe but this is our last week off before going back out to Palma for a weeks training and then the first European ISAF World Cup Regatta of the year, Princess Sofia. After the winters training, Princess Sofia is always an exciting event because the fleet is reunited and everybody’s training starts to be put to the test! Especially for us with Annie having missed out Miami Olympic Classes Regatta due to injury, we are really looking forward to going racing.
Lucy
