After 12 days of hard-fought competition, the British sailing trio of Lucy Macgregor, Annie Lush and Kate Macgregor booked their berth in the semi-finals of the women’s match racing event at the Perth 2011 World Championships
14 December 2011
The defending world titleholders defeated the Dutch trio of Mandy Mulder, Merel Witteveen and Annemiek Bekkering 3-1 in the quarter-final to earn their place in the final four.
The Skandia Team GBR crew battled through to Wednesday’s quarter-finals the hard way. Having fallen the wrong side of a three-way tie-breaker in their round-robin preliminary group, they then had to race an additional 15 matches, winning 13 of them, to just make it into the knockout quarter-finals.
Macgregor, Lush and Macgregor won the first two matches of the first-to-three series. They conceded the third but then wrapped up the tie 3-1 to secure their place in the final four.
“We’re feeling good and are excited to finally be in the semi-finals and hopefully be one step closer to that title,” said an elated Lush. The crew admitted they were frustrated to have lost the third match to the Dutch crew since they had been beating them round the course but unfortunately were given a penalty at the bottom of the final run so didn’t have time to catch up before the finish.
The Skandia Team GBR trio will face the French team, skippered by Claire Leroy, in Thursday’s semi-final and are in confident form in spite of their intensive schedule.
“We know Claire well, what she’s good and bad at, and we’ve no idea which conditions we’ll have, whether we’ll be inside or outside the port, whether have waves or it’ll be flat – we’ll just have to wait and see.”
In the 49er class, a solid day for John Pink and Rick Peacock, the 2010 world silver medallists, sees them on top the leaderboard heading into gold fleet racing.
Paul Goodison remains in second place in the Laser fleet with his sights trained on narrowing the gap on the Australian series leader and three-time World Champion Tom Slingsby, while Nick Thompson drops to eighth overall but just five points off of the podium spots.
Penny Clark and Katrina Hughes are in fifth overall, with Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark just two points behind in seventh, while in the RS:X men’s windsurfing event, Nick Dempsey has still to catch a break. He lies in 20th overall with just one race possible for the fleet in the shifty conditions today, while development squad sailor Elliot Carney continues to hold his own with a sixth on the racecourse today seeing him in ninth place overall.
G4S 4teen’s Laser Sailor Juan Maegli had a fantastic day on the water, climbing the ranks and earning his place to represent his home country of Guatemala at London 2012. He has another two days left of racing, during which he hopes to climb even further up the leader board.
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