Ready for the toughest World Cup so far this year
Written by Stephen Park | 24 April 2011
While the UK’s been enjoying some Easter sunshine, Skandia Team GBR has been preparing for the Semaine Olympique Francais – the French Olympic Sailing Week – in Hyeres which is the fourth stage of the ISAF World Cup series.
It’s always a great racing week here, the competitions is always very, very tough here so we’re really pleased to be back in Hyeres although we weren’t so happy to have been greeted by a lot of rain when it’s been so sunny back in the UK!
From a Skandia Team GBR perspective, things have gone fairly well so far this season in terms of the numbers of medals won across the events – we’re pretty happy with that. Of course there’s the temptation to be a little bit self-critical of our team because there are a number of opportunities that we’ve missed and certainly in some of the events, some of our sailors have not performed to their own expectations so they’ll be looking this week in Hyeres to put that right and hopefully we’ll get some better results in a few of the classes than we have done in Princess Sofia earlier in the month.
Hopefully it will be another fantastic World Cup regatta and that will set people well up for the next few events that are going to come, which for most people are probably going to be based in Weymouth, for the Skandia Sail for Gold Regatta and the Pre-Olympics, with us sending smaller teams to the Delta Lloyd Regatta and Kiel Week.
We’ve got a strong team – we’ve got 57 sailors entered across the classes. It’s particularly pleasing that the Paralympic classes have had adequate entries here to ensure that we have a full 13 event series taking place here in Hyeres – it’s the first time that all three of the Paralympic events have raced at the World Cup here so that’s good to see as there are very few top quality regattas for the Paralympic classes.
I think following this event we’d just like to have our sailors confident that their preparation for what they have as their target events, which for most people are the test event in Weymouth or the Perth World Championships, is on track. If that is the case then they’ll be able to stick to their planned programmes through the course of the summer. There are likely to be one or two who feel that things haven’t gone quite the way that they want and we’ll have to be looking closely at their programmes and that will affect the size of the team that we then send to the next World Cup events.
This year’s an interesting year because all the teams are ramping up for the Olympics in 2012 and of course the majority of teams see the Pre-Olympic test event in Weymouth being a key part of that preparation. The different teams and the different sailors are picking particular events to race in and are focussing their training to ensure that they can deliver the best performances particularly at the test event and then hopefully at the Games.
In terms of Skandia Team GBR we’re confident that the progress we’re making along that line has been good – we aim to be competitive in all ten Olympic and all three Paralympic events at any event that we go to, and aim to have medal potential in all of those 13 events with the thought that if we do that, we should be able to come away with medals in roughly half of those.
As long as we can continue to deliver medals in most events in four or five of our Olympic classes and one or two of our Paralympic classes then we’ll be on track for 2012. That’s our goal and so far we’re managing to achieve that – we’ve had a good outcome in Miami, a good outcome at Princess Sofia and hopefully we’ll be able to maintain that at this regatta which for me will definitely be the toughest World Cup so far in 2011.
We look forward to seeing whether we are still on target by the time we get to the end of the week!