Race Day 7 - 470 Women Report
Written by RYA | 04 August 2012
470 Girls Pleased To Be in Hunt
Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark overcame gear failure to end day seven of the Olympic Sailing Regatta sitting pretty in silver medal position at Weymouth and Portland (Saturday 4 August).
After an opening race fourth today the Brits came out in determined fashion in race two, carving out a commanding lead in the early stages of the race. But Mills and Clark suddenly started to slow down on the first downwind leg with Clark spending several minutes seemingly tackling an equipment problem in the boat.
The girls got going again and managed to secure a creditable sixth place finish in that race – their fourth race in total – to leave them two points behind Jo Aleh and Olivia Powrie (NZL) in first.
Saskia explained: “We had a bit of gear failure, which we are really disappointed about. It’s something which we check every day but the shackle on the mainsheet came undone so halfway down the first run we wasted a lot of time with me trying to fix it with Hannah flying the kite [spinnaker]. We couldn’t get it fixed so we had to sail the second half of the race with Hannah operating the boom and the mainsheet.
“As soon as we called it that we weren’t going to fix it Hannah made the call that we just needed to make sure we didn’t muck up on all the things that we could still do well, and make the right decisions, even though we couldn’t go that fast.”
Hannah added: “It was all about damage limitation and we just wanted to grind out another result as best we can and we did that so were still in the hunt.”
The 470 Women are scheduled to resume at 2pm tomorrow (Sunday 5 August) on the Nothe spectator course.
The Olympic Sailing Regatta runs from Sunday 29 July – Saturday 11 August. The Women’s 470 medal race is scheduled for Friday 10 August (1pm).
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