Frustrating yet exciting

It was a day of fickle wind on the Olympic 49er course reports Andy Rice

Windwise, this Olympic Regatta will not be remembered as a classic. But the frustratingly light winds on the Saronic Gulf are making for extremely tense and exciting racing in other ways. Realistically, there are eight teams still in the hunt for medals with five races still to go. Of those eight, perhaps only Brazil are the surprise inclusion, with the German team a significant points gap away from the top bunch and looking highly unlikely to make up that deficit in these high-scoring conditions.

The race committee managed to run two of the three scheduled heats, with the third one abandoned soon after the start due to a 45-degree windshift. No one is able to show much consistency in this wind, which had the added difficulty of a huge swell running sideways across the course today. With a strong westerly breeze blowing a few miles down the Greek coast, the 49ers were surfing upwind on starboard tack and almost wave-jumping on port gybe downwind.

There were also big holes in the wind, one of which the British team of Chris Draper and Simon Hiscocks sailed into while leading the first heat today, allowing Aussies Chris Nicholson and Gary Boyd to gybe around the windless zone and grab the gun at the finish. Nicholson has now won three heats so far in this regatta, compared with no victories by series leaders from the Ukraine, Rodion Luka and George Leonchuk.

Nicholson was very inconsistent in the early rounds and appeared to have cut himself out of medal contention, but he has been the most steady sailor over the past two days and is now back in the hunt in 7th overall. He will be grateful when the second discard kicks in after Race 12, when he can drop a 17th place. Then again, perhaps he will have to count it, the way that even the very best sailors are notching up some bad ones.

Luka and Leonchuk’s position at the top of the leaderboard is a welcome turnaround in form for a team that have really underperformed for the past few months. Since taking Bronze at last year’s World Championship in Cadiz, they have struggled but they seem to be reading the difficult conditions as well as anyone here. Just behind him are the two teams who were tipped to fight it out for Gold - the Spanish and the Brits - and perhaps it may still come to that. Draper remained upbeat after a reasonable day of 2, 8. “We are looking forward to the remaining five races,” he commented. “We feel well placed going into the second half of the event and ready to pounce. Today was very tricky on our course but we managed to be relatively consistent, or at least as much as you can be, and we won’t be changing our tactics going into the final five races.”