I am campaigning for the 2008 Olympics (to take place in Beijing) in the Laser Radial Women's Single Handed Dinghy. I am sailing for Canada and I have been sailing full time now for about 2 years. It is fantastic, with lots of ups and downs, and a steady learning curve.
Here's how it works:
There is only one Olympic berth for these upcoming games in this discipline and I am up against several determined and hard working Canadian girls.
Our Olympic Trials will take place at the 2008 World Championships to be held in Auckland New Zealand in March 2008.
The first step involved is to qualify the country for the space at the Olympics. This will (hopefully) happen at this years ISAF World Championships in Cascais, Portugal in July.
It would take much too long to get everyone up to speed on the whole last two years, so since it is early in 2007 I thought it would be easy to start from January until now (March)
This year started, as usual, with a trip down to Florida. The main event was the Rolex Miami Olympic Classes Regatta which took place at the end of the month. The event was well attended and very challenging. I was sailing really well for the first two days sitting around 19th/20th. The third day turned out to be a crucial day in qualifying for Gold Fleet, and I managed to botch up everything by having two bad races. I missed the Gold Fleet by only a couple points and I was sitting in first place in the Silver Fleet for the finals. Disappointed, but not destroyed, I aimed to win the silver fleet. It was also my goal, though more for egotistical reasons than anything else, to lap some of the sailors in the gold fleet. Cheeky yes, but not impossible, especially since the wind got much stronger for the last two days of racing. I ended up laping some of the small sailors in the Gold Fleet in the first race of the finals! Yay! I sailed strong and finished the regatta in 1st place in Silver Fleet. So not all was lost. It is very frustrating to be in that position, but I did feel happy with how I sailed. I worked really hard on keeping my mind clear and just doing what I know how to do.
The next event was the Women's Single Handed North American Championships in Fort Lauderdale. This event was also fairly well attended with several of the international girls sticking around. This event proved to be quite interesting with the winds not cooperating much with the sailors! There was always wind for the event, but where it was coming from was anybody's guess! It was all over the place, and the race committee was really having a tough time getting some races finished because of this. With some frustrating situations, and winds that were really challenging I ended up 18th out of 41. Nothing too spectacular. It would have been exponentially more difficult an event if the Lewis Family had not opened their home to me and three other girls during the event... Superbowl weekend sure made it difficult to find hotels there!
The final Event of the January tour was the Laser Midwinters East Regatta in Clearwater Florida at the end of February. My Swiss training partner Corinne Meyer stayed along to train with me between the Ft. Lauderdale event and this one. We had three solid weeks of training leading up to the event with weather ranging from hot and sunny with light winds, to cold and stormy and windy. Our routine consisted of getting up, going to the gym for at least two hours, lunch, then sailing for at least another 2-3 hours. It worked quite well!
Laser Midwinters East was a huge event. This year was the first time ever that they had to split the fleets there. Both the Laser Standard Fleet and the Laser Radial Fleet were broken into Gold and Silver groups. I started out the event all right, standing around 18th after the first day. This event was the first time I have ever steadily climbed the results board. Each day I sailed a little better, and always was very consistent in my results even though the conditions changed dramatically. At the end of the event I finished 5th overall right behind my team mate Lisa Ross. I am very pleased with this result and I hope to keep up the consistency of my results in the upcoming events!
So that was the first round of competitions for this season! Stay tuned for more regatta updates.
