SAP 505 World Championships at Aarhus, Denmark - Overall
by Andy Rice 5 Aug 2010 21:37 BST
24 July - 5 August 2010
If you can’t win the regatta then perhaps winning the final race is the next best thing. That’s what Jan Saugmann and Morten Ramsbæk did today in the final heat of the SAP 505 World Championships in Aarhus, Denmark.
While new World Champions Wolfgang Hunger and Julien Kleiner had the luxury of packing up their boat a day early, the rest of the 126 competitors ventured out into a light-airs Bay of Aarhus for one last gate start, one final opportunity to move themselves up the rankings.
Early leaders of today’s race were the Americans who had led the regatta after day one, 1999 World Champion Howie Hamlin and Andy Zinn. Defending in such tricky conditions was tough, however, as Jorgen and Jacob Bojsen-Møller took over the lead for a while. But it was the ‘Fast Danes’, so called because they’re fast, but also because it’s easier for foreigners to say rather than pronounce their names - Saugmann and Ramsbæk - who took the lead when it mattered, beating the Bojsen-Møller brothers by a few metres.
Saugmann and Ramsbæk, the 2007 World Champions, had high hopes of winning on home waters and had trained extensively in Aarhus leading up to the Worlds. They were leading race one almost a week ago when gear failure put them out of action for heats one and two. It wasn’t until today when the two discards in the nine-race series kicked in, and their final heat victory shot them back up the rankings to 6th overall.
One place in front was Meike Schomaeker, the highest placed female competitor ever in the distinguished history of the 505 World Championship, crewed by three-time former World Champion Holger Jess. A 3rd in today’s race cemented the Germans’ 5th place in the overall standings. “We are really pleased,” said Jess, “and really happy that our training partners [Hunger and Kleiner] won overall. Our good boatspeed only came from our strong partnership in training.”
Hunger and Kleiner sailed at a level beyond any other competitor. Even Hunger himself couldn’t quite explain how he had made sense of such tricky conditions in the latter stages of the regatta. “It was from watching things, the clouds, the other boats, but also from a feeling that I had, maybe an intuition,” he said. It seems the three-time 470 Olympian hasn’t lost any of the sharpness that brought him two 470 world titles, not to mention his three previous 505 world titles won with Jess in the front of the boat.
What pleased Hunger particularly about victory in Denmark was that the wide variety of wind conditions made this the most all-round test of any 505 World Championship in which he has competed. It has also been the most widely followed 505 championship ever, thanks to the live coverage delivered by a team in Aarhus, consisting primarily of volunteers and sailing enthusiasts.
Event organiser Thomas Capitani from Sailing Aarhus said visits to the website have increased day by day, with more than 37,000 unique viewers registering more than 125,000 page views, and with each visit lasting an average of 5 minutes 24 seconds. “In television terms that equates to a very big commercial break, but what’s even more important is that this many people are spending more than five minutes at a time, watching and getting excited about sailing. In Aarhus, we have shown that with a relatively simple set-up, cheap equipment, you can do a great media job, and you can achieve high numbers of worldwide media coverage.”
Just as Aarhus’ extensive use of GPS tracking software in the Volvo ISAF Youth Worlds two years ago has led to much wider uptake of tracking technology in sailing, Capitani hopes the 505 mashup experiment will also inspire others to take on similar media projects. “We are doing it again in two weeks for the Danish National Youth and Junior Championships, with about 500 boats on five race courses, and next year we plan to do a similar job for the A-Class Catamaran World Championships.”
“What we did this week can be done anywhere, although we’re very fortunate to have a number of things working very well for us in Aarhus. We have 3G mobile coverage across all our race courses; we have strong partnerships with small companies such as StreamFactory and TracTrac, and the support of the Active Institute from the University and a City that wants to attract sailing events here on an ongoing basis.”
Rasmus Johnsen from the Active Institute has endured some long days keeping all the technology working, but has drawn his strength and motivation from the enthusiastic response around the world. “It has been a very good week, but we don’t want to say this is the definitive way to do things. This has been an experiment in bringing sailing to a wider audience using affordable means, and we would love it if other people take the ‘Aarhus model’ and develop it further for the benefit of the sport.”
Any class association, sailing club or event organiser that is interested in finding out more about how Johnsen and his colleagues put the 505 ‘mashup’ together can contact Johnsen at his email address: Full results are on the event website.