Dorian Van Rijsselberge wins gold with two races to spare

Extraordinary performance from the Dutch RS:X sailor at London 2012

470 Women

The Women’s 470 sailors were the last to come ashore after the first attempt their second race, held on the Nothe course after the Star and Final medal races, had to be abandoned when early up the first beat the wind backed by 50°.

British starlets Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark, chomped out more solid results, winning the first race, followed by a sixth in the second.
Mills described it: “The first was on the West course in 12 knots-ish - and we had a nice first beat and rounded the windward mark just in first place and we managed to just about hold on to that all the way round which was cool.

“We then went on to the Nothe, after the medal races went on – we guessed Ben had won by the mental media attention but we didn’t know what had happened to Perce. We had one race abandoned. The wind did a massive left shift, which was fair enough, but we got our heads back in the game for the last race and we came away with a 6th which we were a bit disappointed about, because we got yellow flagged just before the last upwind and we had to do a 720. We went from fifth to eighth but we caught up again.”

Her crew Saskia Clark added: “I don’t think we are going to draw too much from the fact that we are leading. We are very close to the Kiwis and the Dutch had one good and one bad day, so we are still very close to them. So we are just happy that we are all up there in the top pack and keep pushing out some good races in the days to come.”

Italians Guilia Conti and Giovanna Micol had the best day with a 3-1 putting them six points off the leaders.

“The first race we didn’t round the first mark very good - we were about 7th-8th - but step by step we managed to catch some boats,” Conti described it. “There was this big cloud on the race course which was blowing air from the right on the first leg which was closer to the cloud. So the fleet came off from the right and we were controlling the fleet from the left, and we rounded close to the first ones. Then on the second upwind – we did the outer course – so the cloud was far away and we believed there was more in the left hand side of the course and we gained a lot then and one more boat on the last downwind. That was a nice race.”

The Italians were joyous that the first attempt on the Nothe course was abandoned. When the second attempt was successfully made, the race proved quite hair raising. “We rounded the first mark first, but we were very close each leg. We didn’t have very good speed downwind, so all the boats came very close to us and then in the upwind we managed to make some gaps between us and the second boat and then downwind they caught up again...” said Conti.

“And it was four laps of that!” said Micol.

“Our tongue is totally dry!” agreed Conti. “On the last upwind I said ‘we need to create a bigger gap between us and second or we won’t make it’. We managed to do that and we gybed a little bit before the others to get the inside of the leeward gate because we had to turn the left one and we planned things that we did, so that was also why we won the race.”

Results: