annatunnicliffe.com - Gold in Holland Feels Great

Gold in Holland Feels Great

Fort Lauderdale, Fla
May 26, 2008

Great news …I won at the Delta Lloyd Regatta 2008! I’m so excited. The Gold Medal marks my first ever major international Grade 1 event victory outside the US and it feels great. I’m writing this on the plane ride home, the day after the regatta.

We woke up on Sunday morning to rain and very windy, blustery conditions. The Medal Race for the top ten contestants in the Laser Radial fleet was at 1:00 pm, so I got to watch a couple of races before my start.

I got an idea of what I wanted to do on the race course once I got out there, and had talked with my coach about race strategy against second-placed Gintare Volungeviciute from Lithuania before hitting the water. Once we got on the water, we decided that given the conditions and the point spread, it was better to just approach the race as a race, rather than a match race.

However, there was a match race for third between Larissa Nevierov from Italy and Sarah Blank from Australia. At the start I was four boats down from the committee while Gintare was the windward-most boat of the fleet. All I had to do was to keep less than four boats between us in the race and I would win overall.

At the start, Gintare tacked off to the right, but I wanted to go to the left. Approaching the weather mark, she was sixth while I was ninth with no room for error. Gintare underlaid the mark and had to pinch up to try and make it around. Unfortunately for her she didn’t quite make it and had to do a one-turn penalty. However, it took her a while to do the turn, so the jury required her to do a second penalty turn.

At this point I had passed her and knew all I had to do was to keep her behind me. The leaders in the race, Sophie de Turkheim from France, (FRA), Alberte Holm Lindberg from Denmark, and Evi Van Acker from Belgium had taken full advantage of the conditions and extended their margins which also made my life easier.

Ours was a three-lap windward-leeward course and up the second beat I passed Larissa, while at the bottom of the second lap, Sarah capsized. I caught up to fourth and fifth place up the third beat and passed them both on the last downwind leg to finish the race in fourth. It wasn’t until a couple of people started clapping that I realized that I had won because I was quite stressed out during the race trying to focus on keeping my boat upright and sailing clean. But when I finally realized it, I was ecstatic. I was presented a trophy and a bottle of champagne.

After all the fun and excitement, it was back to packing up the boats. The rain was falling harder in every squall that went through. Packing up was easy, I just had to derig and have a friend do me a huge favor by taking the boat to the next event. But I did have to go and help load the container in the rain. Luckily a lot of people showed up, so the process was pretty quick.

Afterwards Brad and I went back to our bungalow to pack up and then head out to Amsterdam for the night. I had never been there and he wanted to show me around. We arrived around 8:00 pm but drove around for an hour, trying to find a hotel with parking. We eventually found one, checked in and headed out for dinner. Afterwards we walked around the town for an hour, checking out Amsterdam’s celebrated nightlife … and it was quite a cultural experience! I can now say that I’ve seen it so I don’t feel obligated do it again.

I’ll have a few days at home in Ft. Lauderdale before leaving for China on June 3. I don’t expect to do much sailing during the week but I’ll definitely be heading to the gym to keep working on my strength and cardio.

You can find full results from this regatta at Delta Lloyd Results. As always I want to acknowledge my sponsors Carmeuse and K-Swiss for supporting my campaign for Olympic Gold in Qingdao.

Sail hard
Anna

Team Member