Smith Closes in on Rio Selection
With the final round of Olympic selections for the Australian Sailing Team imminent, WAIS sailor Carrie Smith has put forward a strong case for selection in the women’s 470 class with partner Jaime Ryan.
With competition wrapping up the Hyeres World Cup event in France last weekend, Smith and Ryan secured a 12th place finish, that although short of the medal race target they had aimed for, continued a strong stretch of recent form for the duo which included an eighth place finish at last month’s European Championships.
Further strengthening the top ranked Australian 470 combination’s credentials is the fact that Australia had previously officially qualified a boat in the 470 class for the Rio Olympic Games, after Smith and Ryan had sealed a top ten finish at the 2015 World Championships, on their competitive return from an illness to Smith, that had left 21 year-old bed ridden for large parts of the year.
Hyeres attracted an impressive fleet of competitors across the Olympic and Paralympic classes, and this was evidenced in the battle for the podium at the front end of the field, with gold medallists Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark of Great Britain (41 points) finishing narrowly ahead of Fernanda Oliveira and Ana Luiza Barbachan of Brazil in second (42 points) and Camille Lecointre and Helene Defrance of France in third (42 points on countback).
Smith and Ryan missed the top ten medal race on account of a couple of races where they slipped from the front end to finish mid-fleet, but they otherwise demonstrated once more that their best is highly competitive.
The pair provided a rundown of their campaign via their shared Instagram page (caz.and.jay.aus99) lamenting a missed opportunity but focusing on an overall positive experience.
“12th place finish at Sailing World Cup Hyeres. Not quite the top 10 we were hoping for but we’re happy with this result after super tricky racing against all of the top teams,” it read.
In other events:
WAIS scholarship duo Colin Harrison and Russell Boaden, along with teammate Jonathon Harris fought back strongly from a slow start to earn a fourth place finish in the Paralympic class sonar.
The Australians finished eighth in their opening regatta race, which they would later drop (each crew can drop the points of one race per regatta, which will then not count in their overall points total). However, despite posting a race win, and four more top five finishes, two further results outside the top of the fleet hurt their net points, seeing them miss the podium in France.
The regatta threw up interesting sailing, with varying results for all crews except Norway, who managed the conditions best to win on 18 points. Great Britain (27 points) and USA (28 points) edged the Aussies from the podium, with the Australian crew instead settling for fourth position, on 32 points.
Matt Wearn, the youngest member of the Australian Sailing Team at 20 years of age, produced a typically tenacious campaign to finish fourth in the men’s laser class.
The Western Australian was unfortunate to miss Olympic selection for Rio, with nations only permitted to nominate one entrant per class, and despite Wearn’s great talent and second ranking internationally, his ranking was marginally but crucially, behind that of world number one Tom Burton, who also hails from Australia.
This razor-thin margin again evidenced itself at Hyeres, with Burton finishing in third place on 58 points, one position ahead of Wearn’s 59 points for fourth. Gold went to German great Philipp Buhl (53 points) with silver taken by New Zealander Sam Meech on 56 points.
WAIS athlete Caitlin Elks and her skipper Tess Lloyd wrapped up their campaign in the 49erFX class in 16th place with the podium places filled by crews from Sweden, Brazil and Denmark, fetching gold, silver and bronze respectively.
WAIS sailor David Gilmour and his crew Lewis Brake were 21st in the 49er class.
Further details from the Hyeres World Cup can be viewed at the following link.