World Championship silver for Mills and Clark 

Rio-bound duo wrap up their 470 Worlds podium finish with victory in the medal race

Olympic silver medallists Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark have claimed silver for Great Britain at the 470 World Championships, which concluded today (17 October) in the Israeli port city of Haifa.

After a difficult penultimate race day, the British duo faced an uphill battle to try and wrest gold from the grip of the Austrian defending champions Lara Vadlau and Jolanta Ogar, who started the final 10-boat medal race with a near insurmountable 18 point lead.

The British duo had to win the race, with the Austrians finishing tenth to overtake them on the top step of the podium.

It was a tall order, but the 2012 World Champions Mills and Clark took on the fight and played their part to seal an emphatic medal race victory.

At one stage Vadlau and Ogar were placed tenth in the race and British gold looked a possibility, but the Santander 2014 World Champions pulled back through the fleet to end the race in fourth and retain their overall lead.

The 27-year-old Mills was happy with their final day’s efforts: “We had a great medal race today. We really wanted to just have a strategy and execute it well. We did that and so it was really nice to get the confidence of being able to do that in a pressure situation.

“It was exciting – at one point the Austrians were right at the back so that would have given us the gold, but to be honest yesterday it all slipped away from us. We didn’t nail our starts well enough and got stuck in the middle of the course too much. Unfortunately that’s what lost it for us."

Clark added: “For a brief second there around the leeward marks we might have been World Champions, but the Austrians caught up so it wasn’t to be. It was good to end on a high winning the medal race and improve on a few mistakes we made at the Rio Test Event medal race.

“Overall we’re really disappointed with our day yesterday, that’s where we lost it, so we’ll go away, have proper debrief and think about what went wrong yesterday and come back a bit stronger and more solid.”

France’s Camile Lecointre and Helena Defrance completed the women’s podium positions, keeping New Zealand’s Olympic Champions Jo Aleh and Polly Powrie at bay.

Luke Patience and Elliot Willis were also in action in the men’s finale, but were out of contention for the podium positions ahead of the final race. They concluded their regatta in tenth place overall.

“Our medal race was a disappointing end to a challenging week,” said Willis. “We’ll take lots from it. It’s been off the back of an otherwise pretty successful season and we’ve got plenty to work on looking forward.”

Patience added: “We’ve had quite good upwind speed this week. We had a new boat out and it seems to be performing quite nicely upwind so that’s been alright and we’ve been starting on the whole reasonably well and creating options.

“But the downwinds are where we’ve been losing places. That’s probably the bit that’s standing out the most as an area that we’re wanting to change and work on and improve. That’s let us down really. We’ve been in really good positions at top marks to capitalise on and have not.”

The men’s victory went to Australia’s Mat Belcher and Will Ryan, with Croatia’s Sime Fantela and Igor Marenic in second place and Russia’s Pavel Pavel Sozykin and Denis Gribanov in third.

Elsewhere at the 470 Worlds, Jess Lavery-Eilidh McIntyre and Amy Seabright-Anna Carpenter were 32nd and 34th respectively in the women’s fleet.

Full results are available at http://2015worlds.470.org/

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