Tornado European Championships 2010 - Team Red Bull take victory

by Andrew Dowley on 19 Sep 2010 Tornado European Championships 2010 - The fourth and final day provided three races for the sailors in a mixture of conditions between 10 and 25 knots with constant rain.

It was the Greek team of Iordanis Paschalidis and Konstantinos Trigonis who took overall victory sailing their Red Bull, Graham Eeles Tornado. They could not be faulted through the whole regatta with 8 wins from 8 races. Team Gaebler have been hot on their heels but couldn't get ahead to take victory. Again it was a closely fought battle with the Greek and German teams match racing each other to the finish.

With a Northerly wind direction today's racing was tricky because of the shifts produced by the wind coming around the mountain. There were also some large gusts which caused some teams to capsize and unfortunately we had a broken mast today. The racing provided all of the action you expect from sailing the Tornado Multihull with close racing upwind and downwind between the boats.

Speaking about their victory Konstantinos Trigonis said 'It was a great week for us. To be honest we were not expecting to win the regatta that easily, the weather conditions helped us a lot because we favour the windy conditions. Our speed was awesome upwind in all conditions, we won all of the races and we are really happy about it. We stayed focused throughout the whole week and didn't make any mistakes. The race committee did a fantastic job not loosing even one chance to run a race for the competitors. We now have to focus on bringing this fantastic boat back into the Olympic Games again.'

ITA President and World Champion Roland Gaebler also commented saying 'They have our full respect, they were better in speed and also with some manoeuvres. They sailed a brilliant series and they deserve this European Championships victory, their third in a row.'

Video - http://www.youtube.com/tornadoclass
www.tornado-class.org