Silver medal success in Japan bodes well for Games bid
It’s often said success at the Olympic venue leads to success at the Games themselves and there were encouraging results in Enoshima yesterday, with New Zealand sailors picking up two silver medals.
Logan Dunning Beck and Oscar Gunn were second in the 49er, improving one place in the final stages of a dramatic race that was the difference between second and fourth overall, and Alex Maloney and Molly Meech found their form in the 49erFX top 10 medal race to finish second on the day and second overall.
There’s an outside chance of another couple of medals tomorrow in both the Finn and Laser classes but results would need to go the way of the New Zealand sailors.
As many as 17 medallists from the London test event in 2011 went on to win an Olympic medal in 2012 and 16 medallists from the Rio test event clinched a medal at the 2016 Olympics. The main test event for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics will be held next year but it’s a good sign that New Zealand crews are already performing at Enoshima.
Dunning Beck and Gunn were third there last year and backed it up with second this week, and Maloney and Meech won the test event last year.
Great Britain’s James Peters and Fynn Sterritt easily won the 49er medal race yesterday to collect gold but the real drama was further back in the fleet as three boats battled for the minor medals. Dunning Beck and Gunn rolled over the Austrian combination on the finish line to finish eighth, which was enough to snatch silver on countback over the Polish crew who were 10th.
“I think the race summed up the regatta,” Dunning Beck said. “We thought we had set up for a glamour start and at the last minute the wind did a u-turn and whacked us on the back of the head. We tried to play catchup from there which has been a feature of the week. It was a luckbeats-skill kind of day for us.
“This regatta we feel like we have learned a lot about what we can improve on, which is more important than any result. It was a good week in the end, though, to come away with silver.”
Maloney and Meech went into their medal race in fourth with silver the best possible outcome, given Olympic champions Martine Soffiatti Grael and Kahena Kunze had already wrapped up gold. The New Zealand pair didn’t have the best of starts but played the shifts well to be among the leaders up the first beat and controlled their position from there to finish second in the race.
Gemma Jones and Jason Saunders were 10th in the Nacra 17 medal race and sixth overall, with Australian’s Jason Waterhouse and Lisa Darmanin breaking the dominance of Itay’s Ruggero Tita and Caterina Marianna Banti who had won every major regatta this year.
Andy Maloney had the best day of any of the other Kiwis, picking up his second race win of the week and backing it up with a sixth to jump into fifth overall in the Finn class. He has an outside chance of a medal but would need all the cards to fall his way. Josh Junior slipped one place and is sixth overall.
Sam Meech had a difficult day in the Laser, finishing 18th and 25th to slip to ninth overall.
Tom Saunders is now the best of the Kiwis in seventh and, like Maloney, would need results to fall his way to claim a medal.