Nick Dempsey blog: 'It will be difficult to win the Worlds, but not impossible'
by Nick Dempsey 12 Feb 2013 07:34 GMT
12 February 2012
Nick Dempsey chases down Ricardo Santos one day 2 of the ISAF Sailing World Cup Miami © Walter Cooper /
www.waltercooperphoto.com
It's always good to come away from an event with a medal. It's even better when you've gone in to that event more unprepared than you've ever been in your life! The ISAF World Cup Miami was a great loosener for me having not really done any sailing since the Olympics. After I made the call to do another Olympic campaign for Rio I'd planned to get back on to the board in December. But when it came to it I just didn't feel ready.
Instead of feeling bad about what I should or shouldn't be doing I made the decision to draw a line under 2012 and start afresh in January. Miami was the deadline I set for myself where I had to be back on the board. I arrived in Miami for five days training before the regatta, but in the first race my whole body was like 'Ohmygod I can't do this!' I'd probably been out on my board three times since the Games, none of which were planing conditions, so to be racing and planing again, well I just got spat straight out the back. The board felt heavy, I felt slow and it hurt.
At this stage I was thinking I would be pleased to just get through the event in one piece! But when you're in that sort of environment your competitive instinct always takes over and within half an hour I was fine again. Rusty but fine. I'm a racer and it's my nature to want to win every event I enter. You can go underprepared but when you're actually there you can still do everything properly and the way you would do it as if it was any other Grade One event. There's no point doing an event otherwise.
The racing format was certainly one of the most talked about parts of the week, and I've already made it clear I wasn't a fan...
The Olympic silver medallist looks ahead to the 2013 RS:X World Championships. Read more from his latest blog here.