Silver success after a tough few months
Written by Hannah Mills | 17 July 2014
After such a frustrating few months, winning a European Championship medal wasn’t really top of the list of priorities it’s fair to say.
With Sas’s hernia operation and then my back injury we’d had so little time in the boat that we couldn’t reasonably expect to be in with a shout for the medals in Athens, so we were pleasantly surprised when we were!
For us it was more about staying in one piece, getting through the week, and ticking a few boxes of things we needed to look at with the main focus being performing at the Santander Worlds in September.
My back had not been the best in the build-up to the Europeans but our physio Wayne has done an amazing job in keeping me on track. I think I got comfier in the boat as the week went on, so that’s been nice. It’s just more the two months out with Sas’s hernia that I think caused it to go into panic mode when I got back in the boat! Maybe we need to sail a bit more consistently is potentially the solution, but it’s feeling pretty good right now and we’ll try and make a bit more of a physio plan now we’re back home!
We had to change a few things with our hoisting technique with the spinnaker, but other than that we could race pretty normally and it was great to get through the week unscathed. To come away with a medal is more than we expected so we’re really happy with how we raced. We did sail really well this week – we sailed exactly how we wanted to sail, barring just a few little mistakes here and there which everyone has now and then.
Our enforced time off has meant in terms of our equipment projects that we’re not quite where we’d liked to have been – that had been the plan for the past couple of months where we’d hoped to nail down our equipment selections for the Santander Worlds, so we’re a little bit on the back foot on that. But it’s not a disaster – we’ll just need to reschedule all that for a more appropriate time, and we have enough experience and enough equipment that we can deal with it.
Next up for us is the first Olympic Test Event in Rio, and I’m really looking forward to getting back out to Brazil with the rest of the team. We have been to Rio for ten days’ training, but not during what would be the Olympic dates, and we’ve not raced there yet so it will be really interesting to see what it’s like.
It will be a very different style of sailing there which we need to make sure we’re engaged with and can switch in to. It will be really cool to see the venue, and at the right time of year to see what it’s like.