Tight after qualifting

Andy Rice reports from the third days 49er racing at the Semaine Olympique Francaise

The Olympic Champions Iker Martinez and Xabier Fernandez edged closer towards the top of the leaderboard after another solid outing at Hyeres Olympic Regatta today. However Stevie Morrison and Ben Rhodes from Britain did enough to cling on to the overall lead at the end of the qualifying phase of this ISAF Grade One regatta. The Brits qualified with 24 points from their best eight races so far, followed by the Spanish on 25 points and the Danish brothers, Peter and Soren Hansen, third with 26 points.

Stevie Morrison was happy with his eight, five, one scoreline. “We did well enough. The main thing was to get out of qualifying without any bad results. I had a couple of moments slipping over in the boat during gybes, when the waves were a bit bigger than I’d thought. I like to have a hop, skip and a jump across the boat sometimes, which isn’t ideal. But as I say to Ben, I’m the best 49er helm in the world when falling over. You might say I’m a good man for a crisis!”

Although it wasn’t excessively windy, with around 13 knots and beautiful sunny skies, the waves can kick up quite viciously in Hyeres and can punish the sort of slip-ups that Morrison was talking about. The Spanish, Martinez and Fernandez, had some near misses in the stronger breezes of the previous day but strung together some very useful scores of a first, fourth and third in today’s heats. Although they haven’t raced much since winning Gold in Athens two years ago, they appear to have lost none of their competitiveness. “The secret is not to go training,” joked Martinez. “The year before the Olympics I injured my knee and we couldn’t sail much before Athens. So now we are trying it again – no training and then go racing. It seems to work!”

One thing that you must be for any Olympic class, however, is the right weight. After muscling his way around the world in the Volvo Ocean Race for the past six months, Xabier Fernandez was better suited to sailing a Finn dinghy than crewing a 49er. But after a month of dedicated salad eating he has dropped a few dress sizes down from 95kg to 85kg, and is looking fighting fit for 49er racing.

The top six hasn’t changed since yesterday, although there have been some musical chairs being played lower down the order. A snapped gennaker halyard saw John Pink and Alex Hopson tumble out of the top ten, and fellow Brits Chris Draper and Simon Hiscocks limped across the finish of the last race in 20th place after their top spreader broke. The Olympic Bronze Medallists did well to save their mast from toppling down when the spreader cap shattered, although it is likely they’ll have to switch to a spare rig for the first of tomorrow’s Gold Fleet finals heats. Two second places in the earlier heats at least gets them back into the top ten going into the finals, although they would have expected better.

The big climbers today were another British team Paul Campbell-James and Mark Asquith, whose two sixths and a first dragged them back up to seventh overall. But biggest beneficiaries of the day were the Polish team of Tomasz Stanczyk and Pawel Kuzmicki. Scoring a sixth, a first and a second the pairing shot up from the teens into eighth place overall. The only team whose position appears set in stone is the Italian team who have been in fourth place all week so far, Pietro and Gianfranco Sibello. Acknowledged as one of the best performers in the breeze, they are proving consistent but need to step up an extra level to break on to the podium. With the prospect of finals racing and the showdown of the Medal Race, there is a lot more drama to come.