49er European Championship at Porto - Day 4
by International 49er Class 10 Jul 2015 22:07 BST
7-12 July 2015
Burling and Tuke take charge
With two days to go, Pete Burling and Blair Tuke have made their customary big move with three very solid race results that puts them at the top of the leaderboard with a big gap to the rest of the fleet.
After a delay waiting for the breeze to build on the Atlantic, the wind finally started blowing at a very steady 10 knots.
The most consistent performers of the day were the young Lange brothers, Yago and Klaus, son of double Olympic medallist Santiago Lange. The young Argentineans scored 3,1,4 and leapt up the rankings into 5th overall. Next best performers were the reigning World Champions Pete Burling and Blair Tuke who scored 2,6,1. This lifts them to 1st overall and a whopping 15 points ahead of the 2nd placed team, Great Britain's John Pink and Stu Bithell. Unfortunately for local fans, Jorge Lima and José Costa tumbled from the lead down to 8th overall. It was also a hard day for Polish team, Lukasz Przybytek and Pawel Kolodzinski, who fell from 3rd overall to 11th after three tough races. On the polish front, on the rise are Abu Dhabi Final Champions POL 52 (AKA Superman and Captain America) who had a fantastic day to leapfrog their Polish team mates and now sit tied on points for 3rd.
Saturday sees the women complete their championship with three Gold Fleet races in the morning and a Medal Race finale on the River Douro in the afternoon. For the men it's the penultimate day of Gold Fleet racing. The forecast is for medium airs, and you can watch all the action on the live TV broadcast which is scheduled for the start of racing on Saturday at 10.00am local time. Tune in and watch the drama on 49er.org.
For all the event details, highlights, interviews, results, photos, tracking and more, head to 49er.org/event/2015-european-championship