Australian 49ers report from 2007 Worlds

by Ben Austin on 20 Jul 2007 Nathan Outteridge and Ben Austin reach the podium at the 2007 49 Worlds. Only two years into the class after Outteridge recovered from a major car accident and now they are ranked 12th in the World.

Ben Austin reports from Cascais.

'As most of you would be aware, the 49er World Championships finished a couple of days ago in Cascais, Portugal. Nathan and I are extremely happy to report that we achieved our best result to date, finishing third overall after a very tough week of sailing.

We had been training in Cascais for two weeks before the worlds with fellow Australian 49er teams, Will Phillips and Jon Newman, and Dave O'Conner and Iain Jensen. We found the conditions to be very favourable to our sailing - moderate to strong winds which blew offshore and so had plenty of gusts and shifts.

Extensive mast and sail testing had lead us to a combination of mast and sail that gave us a good speed edge in most conditions. Hence, we entered the regatta very confident in both our speed and skills, knowing that we definitely had the chance to do very well in the regatta.

However, as seems to always happen at international events, the weather patterns that greeted us for the racing were very different to what we had trained in. All of our qualifying races were held in extremely shifty, gusty conditions. Wind shifts of 90 degrees were common and the odd cell of wind at 180 to the normal breeze was not uncommon, with the breeze varying frequently and randomly between 5 and 25 knots.

In these immensely challenging conditions, we had long days waiting for races, and when races were run, they were in extremely fickle, random conditions.

In one race, Stevie Morrison and Ben Rhodes (GBR) were in first place and rounded the top mark in 25kn while the rest of the fleet was left in 6-8kn. They went on to lap most of the fleet (including us!) when the last lap was shortened by the race committee.

We even sailed one race that started in 3 knots before building rapidly to 25 to 35kn which turned into a race of survival - only two boats did not capsize and only just over half the fleet finished the race. At the end of qualifying, we had sailed consistently well to be inside the top 10 and had scored a couple of firsts as well.

However, these did not come easily - I pulled a calf muscle while racing one day that saw me have to sail the rest of qualifying heavily strapped.

Then, Nathan managed to do some serious ligament damage to his big toe which saw him having to take a fair whack of pain relief just to be able to limp around the boat park, let alone sail the boat.

Fortunately, two days of racing were lost due to extremely strong winds and unstable conditions, giving us a chance to rest and recover before heading into the finals series.

In the finals, the wind returned more to what we had seen before the regatta. We had 8 -15kn of fairly steady offshore breeze that allowed plenty of passing opportunities both upwind and downwind.

We performed consistently well in the finals, although a bit of bad luck prevented us from really challenging for the world championship. One race, we lead the whole race, only to have an incident at the committee boat while finishing which left us capsized on the committee boat and eventually finishing 24th in that race.

Our protest that we had not been given the room we were entitled to was dismissed by the protest committee.

In another race, we lead by a substantial margin when the race was abandoned due to a 30 degree windshift. Despite this, after the finals series we were positioned 4th with a 5 point gap to 3rd and a 10 point gap to 5th.

The medal race, which features the top 10 boats and counts for double points, was held in a light westerly - a breeze that we had not seen at all while training in Cascais.

The race track had many holes that proved fatal if you were caught in one.

Our strategy going in to the race was to sail a moderately aggressive race, as a top five finish gave us a chance to catch third while insuring we could not be passed. As the race panned out, we did finish fifth in the race and the Italian team who was coming third fell into one of the holes, finishing ninth and so handing us the Bronze Medal.

Nathan and I are extremely happy to have finished third at only our second 49er World Championships. This gives us a massive boost to our confidence going into the Olympic Test Event next month and allows us to start thinking about being serious contenders for a gold medal at the Olympics next year.

We have a lot of people to thank for our success in the last two years, many of you we look forward to thanking personally in the upcoming weeks while we are home before going to China.

Our immense gratitude goes out to our families, and partners Nikki and Lauren for their patience and support. We also owe a lot of our success to our coach Emmett Lazich and thank his family for his support.

Finally, this would not be possible without the Australian Sailing Team and the funding of the Australian Sports Commission, Australian Institute of Sport and team co-sponsors Hamilton Island and Audi.

We would also like to thank The Rivkin Report for their assistance in purchasing the boat that we used at the world championships.

For more information on our supporters, please see www.australiansailingteam.org.au