The new game

Briefly world no.1, Lucy MacGregor tells us about her Olympic women's match racing campaign

While Skandia Team GBR is looking in good shape in classes such as the Laser, Finn and Star, Lucy Macgregor and her Elliott 6 women’s match racing crew of Annie Lush and Annie Martin have also been having their fair share of success. Last season they were second at the Skandia Sail for Gold regatta, and won the Delta Lloyd Regatta in Medemblik as well as the Busan Cup Women’s Match Race in Korea and were second at the ISAF Nation’s Cup. This year they finished second in an unfortunate final against Anna Tunnicliffe team at Rolex Miami OCR and today they are successfully through to the quarter finals at the Trofeo SAR Princesa Sofía Mapfre in Palma (while Tunnicliffe is out).

As a result earlier this year Macgregor finally managed to topple Clare LeRoy from the French match racers length tenure in the top spot of the ISAF Women’s Match Race standings – although this was all too brief. “They changed the ranking criteria and how much the World Cup regattas counted for,” says Macgregor told thedailysail. “So we slipped down without us or Clare doing any racing.”

This week conditions in Palma have been mixed. On windy Tuesday the women’s match racing was one of only two events to hold racing and this took place in a corner of the Bay tucked away to port immediately out of the harbour entrance and over the course of racing the breeze went heavily right and dropped to 10 knots.

“We have made some silly mistakes so far in both the group stage and on Tuesday we made a couple of pretty big errors, but generally good and today felt really good,” said Macgregor yesterday. “It is interesting looking at the results, because in the gold fleet, all the results are really close - it came down to tie breakers. Lotte [Meldgaard Pedersen] didn’t sail so well, but apart from that all the results are really close. Compared to Miami where there seemed a bigger difference between first and eighth going into the quarter finals, here it seems it is a bit more levelled out.”

Being a new Olympic class, the women’s match racing fleet is still establishing itself. To date no event has managed to attract a full 24 teams with only one boat per country, allowing top nations such as Team GBR, Australia, Spain, France, USA and the Netherlands to field two teams. Spain in fact has three racing in Palma. “I think it is because of when teams pull out, the date by which they can do that is too late, so it doesn’t give new team time to turn up, but they are looking to improve that system,” says Macgregor.

New faces continue to pop up and in Palma for example top Danish sailor and match racer Dorte Jensen is competing (although she was knocked out in the repechage).

As ever with match racing, the format between the round robins into the finals seems to vary. The Olympic system that appears to have been settled upon is to have an opening round robin with three groups of eight. The two top boats from each group then move into the Gold group of the second round robins, while boats three and four from each initial group move into the repechage group, boats five and six into silver and seven and eight into bronze. So the results in the initial round robin are crucial. Into the next stage and the gold group are really only racing for positions in the quarter finals, which the top two finishers from the repechage round also qualify for the quarters – in this case Germany’s Silke Halbrook and Australia’s Nicky Souter. The racing then progresses on normally through quarter finals, semis and then to the final on Friday.

Since Miami, the Skandia Team GBR women’s match racing squad has moved to Palma for training. As the RYA Olympic Manager Stephen Park told us during our recent interview with him, with their women’s match racing they have been taking a leaf out of the Dutch Yngling team book and while Macgregor’s team have not been tampered with, the GBR B-boat slot has been crewed from a mix and match squad. For Princess Sofia, it is Mary Rook who got to skipper, finishing second in the bronze fleet.

“We brought two boats down and were doing speed work, boat handling and just trying to pull the match racing tactics apart a bit,” says Macgregor of their training.”We did a bit of sailing against boys and against the other girls in the RYA squad.”

They are also still learning about the new women’s match racing boat – the Elliott 6. “I really like them and more so the more I do in them, which his hopefully a good thing. They are quite exciting and pretty physical. They manoeuvre really well and there is definitely a lot of technique to it. Although initially they are quite easy to sail, I think there is a big difference between getting them around the course and sailing them really well and I don’t think it is obvious what those differences are.” She gives an example: “Because you can sail such big angles downwind, it was quite hard as the leading boat not to be in dirt in many ways, so it can make the trailing boat quite powerful.”

At regattas the boats are all supplied equipment obviously and crews are not even allowed to make alterations to the rig tension.

It is only the last few months the national sailing teams have managed to get hold of their Elliott 6m, and in Palma they are using the boats from the French and Spanish team. Despite reports of some boats having some structural issues from flexing - now been fixed, Macgregor says that none have experienced breakdowns during racing at any of the events she had done. Reassuringly all the one designs are also pretty much identical as she puts it “even down to a lot of the ropes being the same colour.”

Beyond Princess Sofia the plan for Macgregor’s team is to compete at all the World Cup Olympic classes events in Europe, culminating in Skandia Sail for Gold, their primary focus for the year. In addition they will also be at the Europeans in Austria and the World championship in Rhode Island, at the end of the season after Sail for Gold. For training they are to decamp from Palma after Princess Sofia and return to Weymouth.