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You are here:    Home arrow News / Results arrow Team 7's Qingdao Olympic Blog arrow Climbing the Scoreboard

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Qingdao, China - August 10, 2008 - We had a great conditions for sailing today. We could not have been luckier with the Qingdao weather, with blue skies, an open ocean course, and breeze that ranged between five and nine knots and averaged around eight knots. Consistency

was the name of the game on a day when subtleties in pressure and angles kept everyone guessing and mixed the results up to a major degree.
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Upsidedown class flag "Guess Olympics are stressfull for all of us!"

We came away with an eighth place finish in the first race and a fifth in the second race and could not have been happier. That’s best illustrated by the fact that we were ninth place in overall points after the first race of the day but moved up five places to fourth place overall after the second race. We expect our overall scores to improve further as soon as the discard rule kicks in and we can drop our 14th place from the first race of the series.

The racing today was extremely close and the conditions made it extremely difficult to make good tactical calls using the observed weather. The key was simply to stay in the hunt and keep plugging away. In a high-caliber fleet like this one, it’s real easy to drop a few places. Just one bad lane or a bad move and you can be in trouble.

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Hotel staff team supporters

We had a great start to the first race. Only two boats did better but our day changed when one of them tacked on our leeward bow. That put a kink in our game plan because we were forced to tack away and abandon a great lane of pressure. We’d planned to extend out to the left side of the course but now we were going right and ducking a bunch of right-of-way starboard tackers. At the top mark we were 10th in a fleet of 15 boats and 1 min 19 sec behind the leader. Getting through traffic was almost impossible but we managed to finish 8th.

Our start in the second race of the day wasn’t as good as our first. We still liked the idea of working the left side of the course but rounded in 9th place at the top mark. From there, we steadily ground down our competition, picking up two places on the run to start the second beat in 7th and then gain two more places in the second half of the race to be 5th across the line.

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Supporters in spectator boat #1 with a/c and sleeping Chinese spectators

Tomorrow’s forecast calls for a change in conditions with rain squalls predicted for the morning, followed by light breeze. We’ll be ready for it.

Until the Olympics are over, the format of our reports is changing a little in order to comply with International Olympic Committee requirements for all athletes. The IOC wants to protect the commercial interests of its sponsors and thus we’re not permitted to post photos of sailing action or provide you directly with official results. However, we have all the links to official photos, results, and other items of interest on our special Team 7 Qingdao Olympic Blog page. If you want to tell your friends and family about our reports, they can find them at http://www.team7sailing.com/content/blogcategory/20/36/.

For a really great photo of us in sailing in front of the British team on Day One, go to http://www.sailing.org/olympics/news/24681.php. Then click on the thumbnail shot. You can also watch a slideshow of the eight shots in the archive from Day One and Day Two.

For results go to http://www.sailing.org/olympics/resultscentre.php and click on Yngling Women in the left-hand column. This site will also let you follow leg-by-leg results during each race.

Carrie Howe

for Team Seven Sailing -
  - Sally Barkow, Debbie Capozzi, Carrie Howe