Dynamic duo ride momentum ahead of Worlds
Budding stars full of confidence after victory at junior Asian Championship
Hong Kong sailors Molly Highfield and Sandy Choi Wing-choi have finished top of the podium at the junior Asian Championship in the 49erFX division.
The 22-year-olds now turn their attention to the Youth Sailing World Championship, which start on Monday, and say the next few days are about focusing on the task at hand.
“It’s a great feeling to have that work pay off, but it’s important to stay calm. We can enjoy that moment, but the job is not nearly done yet. Leading up to the Worlds is about bringing the emotion levels back down and focusing. We haven’t put ourselves under any unnecessary stress just because we did well,” Highfield said.
They finished second overall to a Dutch team, who competed in the races but not the Asian Championship.
The Asian and World Championship are both held in Oman. The pair have been sailing 49ers, a double-handed dingy. Highfield is an experienced sailor while Choi’s background is in windsurfing.
Double-handed sailing is relatively new to them both. This week’s result is an improvement from one of their first races together, also in Oman, in April when the occasion got the better of them.
“On any double-hander, communication is such a big factor, if not the most important factor,” Highfield said. “That’s the one thing we’ve really worked on.
“We only started together last year. It’s been a big learning curve the whole time. We couldn’t travel to races for most of last year,” she added.
“It’s always been key to get into a realistic race scenario, because all the stress comes into play, making quick decisions, meshing as people, learning how to deal with problems.”
Instead, they were thrown in the deep end without much race experience and the situation got to them. Highfield said that the stress caused her to react slowly or to delay communications. But now, with more time together and more racing experience as a pair, they are beginning to relax.
“It all varies on number of boats, each event, and where you want to position at each event. That perspective is starting to build for us and solidify. Certain tactical decisions we have to make are coming more into focus the more we do,” Highfield said.
“We are getting more comfortable in the boat. We are beginning to expand beyond just sailing our own boat, and looking at the course and the bigger picture.”
Their new-found ability to communicate effectively was hard won. “We tried to maintain a really open dialogue,” Highfield said. “We had to build that up, it wasn’t instinctive. We both came out of single-handed classes.
“That’s happened more for us as we’ve encountered more scenarios and it’s become more clear how much we need to communicate. It is a case of tackling a challenge in the moment and going over it again later to see how we could have done better.
“There has been a lot of trial and error for us but we’re building structure into the training too as to how we can simulate the stress factor – there’s a lot of visualisation, a lot of creating scenarios and talking through them.”
They are now a few days away from the Youth World Championship, and have the momentum of their Asian title victory.
“But our focus is performance based, and trying to do each aspect as best we can in this environment rather than focusing on the overall result,” Highfield said. “We’ll focus on each manoeuvre and the process as it comes, and then the result will follow, but it is not the focus.”