A successful Santander City Trophy and a look forward to the 2014 Worlds
Written by Stephen Park | 18 September 2013
It’s been a really interesting week here in Santander at this test event for the 2014 Worlds.
I think the sailors have really enjoyed coming to north-west Spain, getting a view of the venue and getting the opportunity to get some time on the water and actually seeing what the environment that they’re coming to be operating in is like for when it really matters at next year’s World Championships.
We’ve had a really good mood in the team this week, which has made it quite good fun for everyone and the results have been pretty good as well. The competition’s not been so tough this week, but it’s been a great opportunity for learning for everyone and it’s been a great way for a lot of our sailors to round off their season and just finalise what they’ve got to work on now over this next training period through the winter which they’ll be kicking off in a few weeks’ time.
The conditions here in Santander would be best described as changeable. Today we’ve got bright sunlight, hot conditions and light winds to the point where we didn’t actually race today, but just a week ago there was a good 20 knots of breeze and it was pouring down with rain, so it’s certainly very changeable in northern Spain at this time of year. There’s also quite a lot of tide here. The tide can get up to in excess of one and a half knots at times particularly on the medal race course. It’s going to be quite tricky but certainly some of those conditions and challenges are challenges we’ll face in Rio in 2016.
As we look now towards the end of the year, we’ve just got a few World Championships left - the 49ers and FXs starting next week, the Laser Radials out in China in October and then we’ve got the Laser full rigs in Oman in November. We’ve those three still to go, but our performance has been pretty good in this first year of the cycle. We’ve seen a lot of our young sailors making some really good progress and I’m pretty pleased with that. We’ve hit all our funding targets with UK Sport which of course is very important for us, but most important is seeing the progress of a number of sailors and of course setting ourselves up well for year two of the cycle. But with the 49ers, 49erFXs, the Radials and the Lasers still to have their World Championships in the next month or so hopefully there’ll be a few medals still to come yet.
As we move into the winter time, there’s an opportunity for people to get a serious block of training time in, both domestically and in either southern Europe or north America. The next major regatta for most of our sailors will be the Miami World Cup, so there’s a good opportunity to get some serious training in and make some gains on the fitness aspects, the flexibility aspects and on the boat-handling side that tend to fade off during the competitive season.