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| Bronze In Weymouth; Next, To Defend The Detroit Cup | | Print | |
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August 16, 2010 Team Tunnicliffe arrived home yesterday evening from the UK having won the Bronze medal at the Skandia Sail For Gold regatta. I apologize for the short report immediately following the regatta, but it was a bit of a run around with not much time. We had to clean our rental house, pack up our Elliotts into our team shed, then drive to London and fly back to the US. 
Team Tunnicliffe At The Awards
Photo: (c) US Sailing AlphaGraphics Facebook Album, August 2010
Anyway,
we had a great regatta with many ups and downs throughout. Two races
were highlights for us. The first race was the race against GBR's Lucy
Macgregor which qualifed us for the semi finals. The second best race
of our regatta was our final race against the Netherland's Renee
Groeneveld for the Bronze medal.
In the Groeneveld race, we rounded the first mark right behind her. Downwind, she luffed us too quickly and earned a penalty. On the second upwind leg, she spun her penalty just before the top mark which positioned her right behind us as we rounded the mark. After a luffing match at the top, we headed off for the last downwind leg to the finish. After a fight on port tack, she finally got over us and gybed to starboard. We hesitated too long with our gybe and earned a penalty. Despite that, we were able to roll her and soak down in front of her.
Now
it was a waiting game and a test of nerves, coming into the finish.
She was right behind us and if she tried to roll passed us, we would
luff her and either earn us another penalty or burn the one we already
had by giving her a penalty. As it turned out, she did try to roll us
just before the finish line. We were able to luff her, and her kite hit
Molly and our sidestay. Both teams flew their protest flags and now it
really was a race to the finish while the umpires made their decision.
So this was it, the decision was going to go one of two ways.
The umpires decided that Renee fouled us in the incident giving us the
race win. It was quite exciting and made for a great race on which to
finish.
We learned some valuable lessons throughout the week on which we will be working over the next month and a half leading into our World Championships in September. We have a busy few weeks coming up, with our next event starting on Wednesday. It is the Detroit Cup, the Open Grade 2 event which we won last year. Molly is taking off that event, but joining us are Liz Bower and Amanda Callahan, the same team as last year. We would like to thank Carmeuse and Trinity Yachts for their continued support of our campaign for the 2012 Olympics in London. We would also like to thank US Sailing Team AlphaGraphics (USSTAG) and its sponsors for their support. Sail Hard, Anna Team Tunnicliffe
PS:
In an attempt to make these updates and this website more user
friendly, if you have any question regarding terminology etc about
match racing that cannot be answered in the MR Simply Put section, please email us and we will do our best to explain. We really do want you to understand how it works and why we enjoy match racing so much.
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Team Member
Representing the USA, Anna Tunnicliffe won the Gold Medal in the Women's Laser Radial dinghy at the 2008 Olympic Games in Qingdao, China. Anna was the ISAF world's Number One-ranked women's Radial sailor from April 9, 2008 to May 2010. She was voted 2009 & 2011 ISAF Rolex World Sailor of the Year. Now Anna, skipper of Team Maclaren, has teamed up with Molly O'Bryan Vandemoer and Debbie Capozzi to take on the world and go for Gold in 2012 London Olympic Games in Women's Match Racing and the team is currently ranked #1 in the ISAF WMR rankings.
