Team Jolly update on Beating the Boys in the Oceanbridge Sail Auckland

by Team Jolly on 9 Feb 2014
2012 Olympic Gold medalists and 2013 World Champions, Jo Aleh and Polly Powrie, update after their win in the Womens and Open 470 class at the 2014 Oceanbridge Sail Auckland Regatta.

Hello to all, been a little while since we have put anything out, so we figured now is as good a time as ever!

We both had a great break over Christmas and the New Year – and hope you all did too!

We got straight back into work mode in early Jan with the arrival of our newest boat – named Grover, which will most likely to be the boat we use in Rio in 2016… We are shipping it to Rio later this year and it will live there for the next two and a half years as our training boat and hopefully eventually our Olympic boat! It took about two weeks of solid boat work to get her ready to go, but we are happy to say she is running perfectly, with the added bonus of winning her first regatta sailed its all good!

So about that regatta… We competed in Sail Auckland last weekend, as our first regatta in the 470 since October last year, we were more than a little rusty at times… But we soon got back in the swing of things and finished the last two days with a little more style than the first half of the regatta! There were only five 470's taking part, three Kiwis, one Japanese boat, and one Korean, the racing was surprisingly close with all of us around the top mark within seconds of each other at times..

The old media loved the whole rivalry between us and the 470 boys team (Paul Snow-Hansen and Dan Wilcox) and we had some great battles on the water, as well as plenty of banter on and off the water! We ended up with a great little headline in the sport section of the NZ Herald 'World champion women’s crew give men a lesson in 470 class'. Haha sorry boys… It is all on for the National champs in Kerikeri in two weeks time!!

So for now its back to work on the water, with a massive training block planned for the next ten days, time to put in some hard yards and make sure we are ready to take on the world at our first World Cup event of the year in early April in Spain.

See more at the Team Jolly website