Match racing worlds start tomorrow

Britain's Ian Williams takes on Coutts, Jablonski, Baird, Spithill, etc etc at Riva del Garda

Racing at the ISAF World Match Racing World Championship gets underway tomorrow at Riva del Garda on the Italian lake.

The impressive line-up comprises:

1. Russell Coutts, New Zealand - 161st in the ISAF ranking list (published
on July 8, 2003)
2. Karol Jablonski, Poland - 1st
3. Jesper Radich, Denmark - 2nd
4. Jes Gram-Hansen, Denmark - 3rd
5. Ed Baird, USA - 4th
6. James Spithill, Australia - 5th
7. Bjorn Hansen, Sweden - 7th
8. Mathieu Richard, France - 8th
9. Staffan Lindberg, Finland - 9th
10. Mikael Lindqvist, Sweden - 10th
11. Ian Williams, UK - 11th
12. Paolo Cian, Italy - 12th

The event comprises a double round robin format from Tuesday until Thursday, where the skippers will sail each other twice. From here the top four will go straight into semi-finals for a best-of-three series starting on Friday. There will then be a petite final to determine third and fourth place and the final itself on the Saturday.

The racing will be in the new fleet of purpose-built BLUSail 24s as used in Rimini earlier in the year.



The man to beat...

Among the heavyweight competition is British hope Ian Williams, who along with crewmates Simon Fisher, Joe Llewellyn and brother Mark is hoping that he can pull out some of the form that saw him come second to James Spithill in Rimini earlier this year.
"We’ve just been practising the last three days," Williams told The Daily Sail. "We got out on Saturday and practised in the afternoon. The conditions have been wildly different over the three days. We had good breeze this morning from the north, which was good practise, but yesterday the afternoon was a bit wild because it came from the west and the only place you could get any consistency was by the valleys where it funnelled down and it was gusting to about 30 knots, and we had everyone hanging on the back!"

These boats were used in Rimini, so Williams and his team are reasonably familiar with them. "The boat seems very small, because it has a long cockpit, they are reasonably well sorted," he continued. "There’s a bit of concern about whether they are going to be even or not, but we are hoping that the problems we had in Rimini won’t happened again." He adds that the boats were brand new when they sailed them in Rimini.

During training they have lined up against Italian Paolo Cian, who has been helping promote the new match racing one design. "That was quite positive because we assume he has been sailing the boats quite a lot and we seem to be on the pace," said Williams. "It was good to sail against him to see how he was sailing the baots. We did a bit against Ed Baird this morning, which was a bit more focussed getting closer to the event."

The forecast is supposed to be good for the week, although there has not been a huge amount of wind in Lake Garda for the last few weeks.