Success in Palma
Written by Hannah Diamond | 15 April 2015
Nacra 17 sailor Hannah Diamond updates on her partnership with John Gimson, which earned silver and a World Cup berth at the Princess Sofia Trophy in Palma.
The level of racing in the Nacra is improving incredibly quickly, everyone is really raising the bar as we get closer to 2016 and every regatta we go to the racing gets better and better. It’s really fun to be part of a class that is evolving so much but that also adds a bit of pressure, we have to keep pushing every single day to make sure that we don’t just keep up but also make gains on the rest of the world. I like to think of it as a treadmill that can’t be turned off, you have to keep running just to keep up, there’s no opportunity to kick back. As we get closer to the Games, the speed is only going to increase!
We are having so much fun sailing together and we have a real emphasis on teamwork to get the best out of each other and working together to make sure that the whole is more than just a sum of the parts. It is something that is really important to us and we have really enjoyed making that happen over the winter. We have a really good plan and timeline of where we think we need to be in terms of learning to make sure that we are ready to win a medal in Rio 2016 and that gives us a lot of confidence. So far we have only had time to cover the foundations and so it’s really encouraging that we can already win a medal at this stage because we have so many areas that we haven’t even had time to look at yet!
The goal for us in Palma was to improve on some of the areas that we identified in Miami after the World Cup there, it was a bit of a baptism of fire for us in January because we had never done two laps of a race course together, let alone line up on a start line with 50 other boats! We are really trying to take the learning points forwards at this stage so by no means was Palma an outcome regatta, we had very definite goals for the racing including identifying the decision making points around the course, starting and downwind speed so that made it easy to prioritise each race.
Read more of Hannah's blog on the Volvo Cars Sailing website
John Gimson and Hannah Diamond are in action, along with 50 other British sailors, at the ISAF Sailing World Cup Hyeres from 22-26 April.