Clark lands new partner for 2nd Olympic voyage
Late-forming team on wave of success
Maybe the best and worst thing about Amanda Clark’s Olympic sailing event is that she can’t do it alone. Clark sails in the 470 boat class, consisting of two people maneuvering a dinghy at high speeds.
When Clark teamed with Sarah Chin, they earned a No. 5 world ranking and a spot in the 2008 Olympics. They reunited in 2010 but, with about a year and a half to go before the London Games, Chin stepped away from the sport.
In a moment, Clark went from preparing for the final stretch of Olympic qualifying to not having a teammate, a coach or much funding. Fortunately for her, she found another Sarah — Sarah Lihan, 23, who competed in sailing at Yale.
The two qualified for the Olympics about a year after their team was formed, beating former world champions Erin Maxwell and Isabelle Kinsolving Farrar for the spot in a tiebreaker in the 2011 world championships.
Clark, 30, who is from Shelter Island, N.Y., and Lihan are ranked seventh in the world heading into the London Games. The sailing competition will be held in Weymouth and Portland.
On July 4, Clark and other U.S. Olympians will take part in a special program at the U.S. Capitol dedicated to the Olympics as part of the concert A Capitol Fourth.
I decided pretty quickly that I did want to still try and compete in another Olympics and win a medal. So within not very long of hearing that I had no partner to sail with, I was on the phone calling people to see if they were interested in heading out on a new campaign. I got in touch with Sarah pretty much right away.
The team we were competing against, they were ranked No. 1 in the world. They won the worlds — a great sailing team, Erin and Isabelle. We were definitely up against very stiff competition. Once we moved our results to the point to where we were basically in a tie with them, at that point more funding opened up and the word got out that we could be in it to qualify. . . . We went on to beat our U.S. competition, and we then beat them in every regatta since.
It ended up coming down to the last leg of the last race. Going into that race we were a little bit behind. . . . Part of the way through we didn’t have enough points in the international competition, so at that point we’re not qualifying. The last leg of the race, I quickly looked around. I said, “Oh boy.” I put my head down and sailed the boat as fast as I could.
We kind of knew (we’d get the Olympic bid), but we didn’t fully want to go and celebrate. So it was an interesting moment in emotion. We kind of wanted to be really excited, but we shut it down. It was kind of hard to get that feeling back, that initial moment of just excitement. From there it just felt a little bit like, “OK, well, we qualified. Let’s go to the next step” vs. “Oh my God!”
I’ve definitely been away from home more than I’ve been home the last year. For example, the last 200 days before the Games, we were going to be on the road 150 of them.
There are a lot of places I like to sail, and they don’t put our regattas there. I love sailing in the Caribbean.
Logistically it’s pretty hard to get equipment there. Some of the islands, they only receive 20-foot containers, and a lot of our equipment is shipped in 40-foot containers because our masts are about 6 inches too long to fit in a 20-foot container. It’s kind of frustrating. It makes it a lot more expensive. We don’t race often in exotic locations.