SB20 World Championship - Russians claim early lead

by Evgeny Golantsev (As Amended by ISAF) on 11 Sep 2014 The first racing day at the SB20 World Championship in St. Petersburg, Russia was long and brought interesting and unexpected results.

Russia's Evgeny Neugodnikov and his crew of Sergey Musikhin and Pavel Kuznetsov had an exceptional day finishing in the top four in all four of the days races. They sit on ten points and have a four point lead over Spain's Hugo Rocha, Francisco Palacio and Alexey Semenov.

'Today we are satisfied,' said Neugodnikov, 'These four races were held with a very weak wind and we did not expect that we will have good speed. It allowed us to control our rivals. Of course, in future we will try to make fewer mistakes.'

The French team of Salomon Matthieu, Quentin Delapierre and Kevin Peponnet are eight points off top spot in third place.

The days race victories went the way of France's Edward Russo, Gilles Favennec and Pierre Alexis Ponsot, Russia's Alexey Murashkin, Kiril Frolov and Egor Ignatenko and the leading Russian and Spanish teams.

Team of the President of the National SB20 Class Association Edward Russo won first race, but was disqualified twice because of false starts. Now they are on 24th place. 'The Race Committee worked perfectly today and I am glad that we were able to held four races,' said Russo. 'In my opinion, wind was strong and races were interesting. At the second race I made a mistake: I didn't pay attention that the Uniform flag was raised and we had false start while I made a maneuverer on the starting line, which eventually led to a loss of Event website