Olympic Finn Team America 2012
Midwinters Regatta Shows Gains for USA Sailors Railey, Casey, Boyd
(Harbordale, Florida—February 16, 2009)—The next generation of American Olympic Finn medal contenders earned two of the four trophies at the 27th running of the Finn Midwinters this past weekend in an international field that included Olympic medalists, world, and national champion sailors of the men’s premier single-handed dinghy.
Past USA Finn National Champion Tom Lihan reprised this year’s event, also awarding first-place honors in the Women’s Radial to 2008 Gold-medal sailor Anna Tunnicliff (Plantation, FL).
2009 Silver-medalist Zach Railey finished second in the standings behind Ed Wright (GBR). The Royal Yachting Associations firebrand, training here for the winter, also place first in last month’s ISAF World Champs Miami, edging 5th place 2008 Olympian Chris Cook (CAN) by a point after winning the medal race.
Andy Casey (Alameda, CA) notched a fourth place, just a few points behind third place winner, Rafael Trujillo (ESP), the 2004 silver-medalist and 2007 World Champion.
Bryan Boyd (Annapolis, MD), challenged for the lead most of the regatta, finishing 7th.
Conditions were hot, humid, and light wind for most of the vent, save for two races on Saturday that allowed for open kinetics. The fleet generally sailed more within the rules after the race committee empowered the six coaches attending the event to yellow-flag sailors who illegally propelled their boats.
Three events this winter, the Coaches Regatta and Miami OCR in January, and this just-concluded, were the time when the national sailing teams begin coagulating their programs for the next Olympic competition, and the ISAF World Championship series (Australia, Miami, Mallorca, Hyers, Medemblik, Kiel, Weymouth), assessing the state of their sailing toward the next quadrennial preceding the Olympic Games in England in 2012.
For the American part, US Sailing will name the representatives to those games after a 3-regatta selection trials. USSA), the national authority for American Olympic sailing, will name the summer, fall, and winter regattas of 2011 that will provide data points for that selection in the near future, according to USSA coach Luther Carpenter, who added that this selection process differs from the traditional national open regatta held up to now by the USA Finn Association (USAFA) and USSA.
USAFA has also named their development sailor. Bryan Lake (North Shore, HI), a 3-time All-American sailor at the University of Hawaii, will be provided with a Finn at upcoming North American Finn regattas and clinics.
2 comments:
Good to hear about the MidWinters. An interesting development, having coaches act as on-the-water judges! I assume that this was something that everyone agreed to beforehand? There would seem to be the potential for misuse of this system.
Did Ed kick butt up and down? Or is he rounding top five and then working into the lead on the runs?
A strong group, even if the overall numbers weren't high.
Well Charles, I wanted to be the first to comment on your new blog, but it appears an MIT genius beat me to it.
The coaches had to come to a consensus, Derek, at least 2 and preferably 3 had to agree. This would not result in any penalty, but a competitor could then use this a grounds for protest. Then "judges" opinions were to be strongly considered as evidence in a protest.
It was just used to bring some reasonable behavior to the down wind sailing.
So there is prize money for replying to blogs? Ten bucks, right Chuck? So now I only need to find about 5000 more of these things to comment on and Europe will be paid for, this year.
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