Yachting Australia

Silver medal for Australian crew at World Cup in Spain

Souter and crew competing in Spain

Souter and crew went down three wins to one against Dutch sailor Renee Groeneveld but were thrilled to take away the Silver medal after making it into the quarter-finals by the smallest of margins two days ago.

 

“The final was tough, with all of the races being incredibly close,” said Souter. “The lead was constantly changing in every race, we had the edge off the line and up the first beat but Renee had better speed downwind and was better at the bottom mark.”

 

“I’m still thrilled with the Silver medal, after only scraping through the round robin earlier in the week to make it the whole way to the final was great,” she said. “I’m sure one day I’ll make it up that last step and win a Gold medal at a World Cup event.”

 

“The competition was incredibly tight here all week, the winner from the last round, Anna Tunnicliffe, didn’t even make the quarters here and then we knocked Claire Leroy of France out early so it was really mixed.”

 

“From here we head up to Varese in Italy to the Australian Institute of Sport facility for a strength and conditioning camp before some of the girls head on to France for the next round of the World Cup and at this stage I head back home for a couple of weeks before round five in Holland at the end of May,” she said.

 

The Australian Sailing Team’s Mathew Belcher and Malcolm Page have finished fourth in the 470 men’s fleet after a tough medal race where they crossed the line in ninth position.

 

“It was a bit of a hard race for us, we went into it with our super light setting and the wind picked up more than we expected which left us really slow,” said Page. “The guys that we had to beat did all the right things and were right up the front and unfortunately we were fighting it out further down the pack.”

 

“Though in saying that we’re still very happy with where we finished up seeing as we only arrived here the day before the regatta began and had very limited preparation,” he said. “The big thing we learnt here is that if you want to continually be in the mix you’ve got to spend a lot of time racing in the big fleets.”

 

“We want to get as much practice in big fleets like we had here and unfortunately we don’t have that back in Australia,” he said. “It gets quite expensive when you make a mistake in a big fleet, when you’re racing back home you can get away with the little mistakes so it’s important for us to do as much racing over here as possible.”

 

Page now heads to New York to continue his honeymoon before moving down to the Dominican Republic for the Farr40 Worlds and then returning to Europe to join up with Belcher again for round four of the ISAF Sailing World Cup in France.