US Sailing Team's worst Olympic result since 1936

by Rob Kothe & the Sail-World Team on 9 Aug 2012 The United States has finished its quest for sailing medals in the 2012 London Olympics without success, for the first time since 1936.

The last of the US sailors to still be in the medal chase, Women's Match Racing skipper Anna Tunnicliffe, was beaten in the quarter finals by Finland on Wednesday.

A clearly upset Dean Brenner, the outgoing chairman of the U.S. Olympic Sailing Program, said ‘this is not the distinction this team was going for.

‘There is no hiding the results. There is no way to spin it. There is no way to suggest anything other than we didn't perform. There is going to be an enormous amount of discussion.

‘A lot of it is going to be productive and some of it probably won’t be. Discussion on what we did wrong and what we could do better and I am going to leave that with my successor Josh Adams and we are going to look very closely at our program.

‘Make no mistake about it - we are not proud of these results at all. We came here thinking we could compete for three or four medals and we thought the track record suggested that was legit but it didn't happen.’

Tunnicliffe, who won the Gold Medal in the Laser Radial class in Beijing in 2008, was the form skipper in the class going into the Olympic regatta, was upset as she faced the media.

‘We sailed this whole regatta the best we could but it just wasn’t meant to be.

‘Everyone is really tough. Everyone in the top eight, teams that were here had chances to take races and everyone is really good.

‘We have trained together so we have pushed each other really hard.

‘We knew it was going to be a tough battle against the Finns. We expected to meet them in the finals. Unfortunately (because of some earlier losses) we met in the quarters instead of the finals and someone had to go home and unfortunately it was us.’

Tunnicliffe and her crew will now battle in the petit finals for fifth place in the class.