GBR Match Race Girls

What an awesome summer it has been in Great Britain this year! As the Paralympics comes to an end and the victory parade takes place we can’t but help as both competitors and spectators feel the Olympic Blues a bit and just hope performances like Andy Murray’s in the US Open keep coming in!

There are so many thank yous we would like to make to so many people for supporting us to have the most incredible few years and Olympic experience. To all our sponsors however big or small but especially our title sponsor Volvo and to Sperry Top-Sider, Oakley, Brittany Ferries and Skandia thank you for enabling us to do all the training we felt necessary in the past four years to get us into the potential medal winning position we achieved. This was also significantly helped by everyone that helped us raise extra funds and have supported us for so long so thank you to City Livery, Royal Thames, South West Shingles, Royal Motor , Poole and Parkstone Yacht Clubs.

Ultimately we are very disappointed with our final result at the London 2012 Olympic Games. Going into the event and now in hindsight we believe we were capable of winning an Olympic Medal last month. As it was we had some fantastic racing in the quarter finals against another great team and we missed out on a semi final place by the very narrowest of margins. In the past if you had said we were going to enter the Olympics with the form we had and only walk away with 7th place we would have been incredibly disappointed in ourselves, we knew it would be tough but we were there to win an Olympic medal. However something happened over the last year and in particular, the last two months which was not unexpected but the shear size of it was. The support our amazing families, friends and the Great British public have shown us before, during and since the Olympics finished has been absolutely incredible. Thank you all for helping us to have the most amazing weeks of our lives and help us realise the extent of what we have achieved as a team. We are very proud of the way we sailed at the Olympics, we stepped up our game when we needed to and gave the Russian team a fantastic fight. We also hope we helped inspire a generation. Sailing together and having Maurice Paardenkooper as our coach has been brilliant, we’ve worked hard but had an awesome time along the way, thank you for everything Maurice! We were also part of a much bigger team this summer, the British Sailing Team including all the Olympic team, the non selected sailors and in particular the support staff has been a privilege to be a part of and we look forward to working with them all more in the future. Also to all the other British Olympic Athletes who have put in some fantastic performances this summer to make it our most successful team ever, we are very proud to have been a part of it.

So what is next for the Match Race Girls? Well, at the end of the day we are doing what we love, racing in a sport we love at the highest level and we absolutely plan to continue doing that. We are off next month to race with each other in a Grade 1 women’s match racing event in Korea and are currently working out what other events we can fit in. Unfortunately match racing is not going to be a discipline in the Olympics in Rio 2016 so in terms of Olympic Sailing the three of us are going to have to split up. There are a number of aspects of professional sailing that we hope to do a bit more of within the next year however we all have the Olympic bug and are looking at potential options for campaigning for 2016 so keep checking in for what we are up to next, we’ll be back!

Thanks again, its been incredible.

Lucy, Annie and Kate x