Winning at Sail for GOLD! Plus Team Saxton Diamond’s approach to Olympic campaigning.
Written by Hannah Diamond | 19 June 2013
Last week saw our first International Regatta in the UK and the British weather certainly kept us on our toes!
From bright sunshine and light winds to almost freezing temperatures, torrential rain and strong winds all in the space of five days.
In the lead up to the Sail for Gold Regatta we had a seven day training camp which was a great opportunity to test out a few things now that we have had a few months in the Nacra 17 to gather information about the boats.
Sailing a new Olympic class feels a bit like constantly running on a treadmill, if you stop looking for the next development be it technical or technique based, you’ll soon be thrown off the back! Each time we sail the boat we learn a huge amount and looking back to where we were at the beginning of April we have come on a very long way and we expect this huge learning curve to continue well into next year!
Sail for Gold didn’t start as well as we’d hoped putting in a 3,6,2 on the first day and we knew that the other British and Australian boats had upped their game since we had last raced together.
Day two was a lot better scoring 1,2,1 and we were really happy with our downwind speed, which has never been a particular strength of ours. For the next two days we only scored one result out of the top two and managed to get a good lead in some of the races we won.
The final race turned out to be a bit more exciting - with the wind forecast to build to 35 knots we raced in Portland Harbour under the Bill. One gust on the first downwind saw the majority of the fleet tipped onto their side-including us! We righted the boat pretty quickly and nursed the boat round the course in the building and gusty breeze and with one final push on the last downwind managed to scrape a fourth. The Medal Race was unfortunately called off because due to too much wind but we were happy to take the gold medal by a safe margin at our first home international event.
Our focus is now 100% on our World Championships which are in Den Haag, Holland at the end of July. The next month will mostly involve trying to get a lot of hours on the water, in the gym and making sure that we are ready to go!
Many thanks to the British Sailing Team and Cook’s of Bedford for their help so far and if anyone is interested in helping us in our bid for Gold in Rio 2016 we would love to hear from you!
Check out www.teamsaxtondiamond.co.uk or www.facebook.com/teamsaxtondiamond for all the latest news and action from the TeamSaxtonDiamond camp.