Laser Radial Worlds at Fortaleza, Brasil - Team GBR Report

The 2005 Laser Radial World Championships (raced in Fortaleza, Brazil in the first two weeks of December) was a superb event with everything set running like clockwork. 76 Women and 90 Men competed in the most important event of the year. There were even people to launch and recover your boat for you. In fact boats often reached the top of the slipway long before the sailors. So all you needed to do was jump on a plane (or two) and get a taxi to the Marina Park Hotel and everything was then set. Racing started at a civilised 12:30 with starts at approximately 15 minute intervals.

Day one showed it was not going to be easy when top sailor Sari Multala finished the first race second from last! Likewise Great Britain’s Lizzie Vickers scored her round robin discard in race one. (There was three days of racing to cut the fleet into Gold (top half) and Silver fleets, then three more days of racing to choose the champion). Despite all the rumours very few of the girls have gained weight to sail the Radial (which makes you wonder if the carbon rig comes in after 2008 if any will bother losing weight!) Many were pleased to be racing in the light airs for the first couple of days.

Day two and Tina Mihelic scored two first places, with consistency the key, and our very own Penny Mountford who has made leaps and bounds in terms of fitness, was lying in second overall. Many of the Championship favourites were looking doubtful for the gold fleet!

Day three, and there was much scrapping to get in the gold fleet! Laura Baldwin qualified comfortably, but would have been higher up if she had remembered to tie the knot in the end of her mainsheet! Lizzie Vickers ended up in protest (which as we all know is at best a 50/50 chance) but managed to make it to gold fleet – it seemed whatever the course of the championships the Brits were in regular attendance at the protest room, which involved the dodgy experience of going outside the hotel (only one person got mugged this week – name?) but fortunately when in the room we maintained 100% record, perhaps helped by the fact that all protests were heard in English. Unsurprisingly Olympic Development sailor Colette Blair and previous runner up Nikki Muller were disappointed not to make the cut.

Day four and Vickers posted her discard in the first race of the finals, but from then on she was on a charge, never finishing out of the top ten! Those who made the silver fleet made their feelings known by showing a complete inability to start, and were rewarded by being put to the back of the starting order for the rest of the week, which ultimately meant they ran out of time to sail race 12 due to the time limit.

Day five and the expected breeze kicked in and so did the benefit of all those training days spent out in Brazil. The French team made the biggest impact, climbing through the results (eventually taking three of the top ten finishes) but it was also the start of the rot for those who had enjoyed the lighter airs. Ben Paton who had qualified for the Men’s finals in sixth place finally dropped out of the top ten, and Mountford who failed to finish in the top thirty in the finals started to drop sharply.

Day six and the final results of both the Men’s and Women’s events were decided with a race to go, with Eduardo Courto taking the Men’s and Paige Railey taking the Women’s event. However with funding at stake further back down the field, it was Lizzie Vickers who made the top ten. With one race to go she was just one point behind the far more consistent Baldwin: she showed superb mental stamina to overtake Baldwin who was forced into eleventh in the final standings. In the Men’s no-one made the top ten, but Ben Paton and Jon Emmett both made the top twenty, finishing 12th and 17th respectively, despite a poor last day.

Full results may be found at:

http://www.laserinternational.org/wrad2005/Results/index.htm