Laser Radial medal race nail-biter

China's Lijia Xu takes gold, poor Annalise Murphy goes home with nothing

While in some classes like the RS:X Men, 49er and 470 Men there are breakaway leaders, this was decidedly not the case in the Laser Radials, which, based on the points score going into the medal race, has perhaps surprisingly proved to be the most competitive sailing class at London 2012.

Four sailors – China’s Lijia Xu, Belgium’s Evi van Acker, the Netherlands’ Marit Bouwmeister and Ireland’s Annalise Murphy - were fighting for the lead just a point apart at the start of the day. All were capable, and deserved, to claim the gold medal and devastatingly, one would go home without anything around her neck. Understandably the Laser Radial medal race was a nail biter from start to finish, as the sailors' medal prospects changed second by second.

The key move for gold came early on when shortly after the start Lijia Xu was first to tack off and, on her lonesome, headed for the right side, followed subsequently by Evi van Acker and Mexico’s Tania Elias Calles. This move appeared to work well for the Chinese sailor, until the Irish express, Annalise Murphy stormed around the top mark just ahead of her.

On the run Britain’s Ali Young pulled into the lead, but Xu then pulled forwards to round the mark just ahead, with Bouwmeister third, Murphy ninth and Evi van Acker bringing up the rear. On the next beat Xu repeated what she had done on the first beat, but this time with Finland’s Sari Multala also trying the right, and at the cross, Xu was leading with Evi van Acker who had done well on the right on the latter half of the beat, pulling her up to fourth at the top mark, with Murphy having regained second.

On the second run, all of the four contenders were into the top five with Xu hanging on to the lead, followed by Ali Young. Up the next beat Bouwmeister came good to round the top mark in third with Murphy fourth, but with Evi van Acker dropping back once again to round the top mark in sixth.

In the race for bronze the awful moment occurred on the final run when Murphy split left while van Acker went right with boats laterally between them. On the approach to the final mark the right of the run came good for the Belgium sailor who rounded the final mark before the finish in third to claim the bronze. Lijia Xu won the gold, China’s second ever sailing gold medallist after Jian Yin, the RS:X Women’s gold medallist from Beijing, and Marit Bouwmeister silver. And poor Annalise Murphy nothing.

After having the strongest of starts across all of the sailing events with her four consecutive bullets, Murphy was justifiably upset. “I am pretty devastated,” she said, while trying to hold back the tears. “But it is how sport happens and I just was, I guess, on the wrong end of it. There were four of us there today and it was really tough, but I am just going to have to try and get over it.

“I feel like I had a brilliant event. At any other regatta if I got those kind of points, I’d probably be winning easily, but those three girls also had amazing events, so it was always going to be really tough to beat them. It was all so close and it all happened so fast. I thought I pulled back quite well but it happens and I can’t do anything about it now.

“If you had asked me a year ago if I would be fourth, I would have definitely taken it, but now it is so hard... Fourth is the hardest place to finish – you are so close but it is definitely going to push me to train harder and work harder overall. I am only 22, so I am the youngest by a good bit in the top 10. So I am going to work really hard in the next four years and hopefully, come Rio, I will be able to give this a better shot.”

In contrast, effervescent Evi van Acker was beside herself with joy. “I had a really good start - it was a bit my weak point the whole week, so I was pretty happy that that went well, but for the entire race I wasn’t really in front and then I went backwards. I got caught up on the first two downwinds when I was on the left side and that was really not paying off, because in the training it was always left, left, left and then [in the medal race] it was only right. So I was fed up that that didn’t work out.

“At the last top mark I was five boatlengths behind Annalise, so I thought that the only thing I can do was go right and go right hard and that is what I did – I just looked where the wind was, didn’t look at her, didn’t go behind her - because if I followed her I wasn’t going to catch her, she could luff me, or squeeze me out - so I just went where the gust was and I can’t really understand what happened either, I just didn’t look at it – I just went...

“It has been a really great week of sailing here in Weymouth. It was every sailor’s dream – we had no waiting, because of no wind or too much wind, so it was really great and today was also great and having the crowd there on the Nothe – it was amazing. I have never experienced anything like it. So I think they did a really good job in doing it and on selling the tickets there, because it was so much fun to go there after the race and wave the flag and see all the fans and family and friends.”

Van Acker is the first Belgium sailing medallist since Seb Godefroid in the Finn in Savannah.

Will she carry on? I don’t know yet. I will finish my studies first and then see what I will do. But Rio de Janeiro...that sounds better than Weymouth [lots of boos and hisses from the assembled journalists]. But it is good - I can lose some weight!”

For Marit Bouwmeister it was a case of blowing a huge sigh of relief after a windy Olympics, when she had been gearing up for a more all-round week.

“Together with my team, my training partner and my coach Mark Littlejohn, we worked really really hard for it and I have been really selfish working towards it, so I am a bit disappointed, but maybe that will change tomorrow or a week later,” said Bouwmeister. “It is nice to see my friends and family everybody came over because I spent so much time in Weymouth I have hardly seen them.

“I have been on the backfoot all week, because it has been so windy and I like the change. We gambled on it being all-round conditions so I had to put all my weight into it and my strength and also this medal race was really tough. The other girls are a lot heavier than I am and in the flat water and the strong winds I struggled a bit in upwind boat speed. But that is definitely not an excuse and the Chinese definitely deserved to win.”

According to Mark Littlejohn Bouwmeister was around 66-67kg compared to some of the bigger girls who were 72. However Bouwmeister pointed out that her relatively lightweight was also what helped her downwind speed.

Bouwmeister is dating Ben Ainslie, but she says they keep their campaigns very separate. Did she get any Laser top tips from the former double Olympic medallist in this discipline? “No, he’s a bit old school! Don’t tell Ben! It was a long time ago in the Lasers. He is an amazing sailor and I think he is definitely the greatest ever and he deserved to win.”

Bouwmeister paid tribute to her coach Mark Littlejohn and says that they will take a break post-Games, mainly for Littlejohn's sake. “I think I am pushing him really hard. I just missed 2008 and he had a hernia operation and they said he was lucky to ever walk again, so he came a long, long way and he has been really working hard, doing exercises two or three times a day. So I am very proud of him. I was always worried that the only thing that would go wrong would be him not coaching me. But he survived really well so I am very proud of him.

“I am happy the Brits don’t want him – I couldn’t have done it with someone else and I would never do it with someone else. He has all the skills - he knows how to make a boat go fast and he taught me the skills of how to be an independent sailor. I want to try and lock him down [for the future.”

It seems very likely Bouwmeister will return for Rio 2016, as she says, “hopefully with a different colour medal.”

Coach Mark Littlejohn paid tribute to Bouwmeister: “She is a wonderful, wonderful competitor. I was proud to work with her.”

What do the silver and gold Laser Radial London 2012 medallists share in common? They both have British coaches. While Bouwmeister has Littlejohn, Lijia Xu, has Jon Emmett.

“He has given me such huge help,” says Xu of her coach, in her surprisingly near perfect English. “He taught me so much about real sailing which we don’t have in China and because he is much much more professional than the Chinese coach and support team, he taught me lots about everything related to sailing and made my knowledge grow a lot. Without him I wouldn’t have had this success, because during the whole years he taught me lots of things that I didn’t know before like the weather, how to observe the clouds – I didn’t even know about sea breeze before he coached me!”

Sadly the Chinese team wouldn’t get Emmett accreditation, so he has had to support Xu from the periphery. “He just supported me in the background and he supported me by phone and email each day. Of course I would have loved to have had him on the water to coach me. Maybe next Games.”

Xu attributed her success in today’s medal race partly to her homework with Emmett analysing the breeze for the hour before the start. “Today on the Nothe course it was pretty shifty, but we did some course testing an hour before the start so I knew the wind shifts and the wind patterns so after the start, I tacked on to port and I knew it was the lifted tack so I kept on going to the right. I was very confident of the course so I rounded the mark second.”

24 year old, Xu moving from swimming to sailing when she tried out an Optimist. “I used to swim when I was four until I was 10 and then I thought sailing was so much more interesting than swimming. Swimming was just to and fro, to and fro, whereas sailing we have different conditions every day and it was so much more fun, so I changed to sailing."

From the Optimist she moved into the Europe at the tender age of 15, but then switched to the Radial after the Europe was binned after Athens. At Beijing 2008 she finished with the bronze medal in the Radial and she says that this experience certainly helped her today.

“I am perhaps mentally tougher, because I felt that they didn’t perform their best in these strong conditions. Because normally Marit, Evi and the Irish girls they are physically stronger than me and faster in upwind speed but I have to sail smarter if I want to beat them, so I have to have a good start and good strategy.”

Xu says she is proud of herself and her nation and hopes the effect of her bronze medal in Beijing and now her Olympic gold will encourage more sailing in her country. “I don’t want to be a big name in China, I just want to introduce sailing more to all Chinese people, because this sport is not that popular in China yet, so I want to introduce it to more people and let them feel the joy of steering a boat on the wild sea.”

Xu, who was just off to phone her parents in Shanghai, also hedges when looking forward to Rio. “I am not sure where my future will be going, so I just want to enjoy every process of it and see what I can do because four years time anything could happen.”

We can’t help feeling that China becoming a powerful sailing nation, has got to be good for the sport.

More from Carlo Borlenghi/www.borlenghi.com/FIV