Sailing: Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark pick up two premature start penalties

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On Thursday 8 August, day four of the 470 World Championships in La Rochelle, defending champions Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark (pictured) picked up two premature start (OCS) penalties from their three races of the day, and now face an uphill battle to make the eight-boat medal race on Saturday.

They crossed the finish line second in their opening race of the day, but were adjudged to have been over the startline early, a mistake which then repeated itself in the second race.

The defending champions redeemed themselves to some extent with a fifth in the third and final race of the day, but with an overall 16th position will need some luck tomorrow if their regatta is to continue into the eight-boat final.

“In terms of learning from our mistakes from yesterday and moving forward today, our decisions around the racecourse were much better, we were thinking about things ahead of time which we feel we’ve been quite bad at this week,” said Clark.

“Unfortunately in a three-race day we had two OCSs. We actually felt like we’d sailed a really good day, but we’ve come off the water with one score and two loads of letters so not a great day.

“We’ve got two races left, so still a sizeable chunk of the regatta left, and we know we’ve just got to have a look at the scores really and see what kind of risks it might be worth taking to make the top eight for the medal race, because we’d like to be medal racing on Saturday.

“We’ll see if that’s possible and just kind of weigh that up and see what we can do tomorrow (Friday 9 August).”

Elsewhere, Sophie Weguelin and Eilidh McIntyre advanced to seventh overall with 16,1,7 on the board.

The 470 World Championships continues with two further races from 1400 on Friday (9 August) to determine the top eight boats in each fleet feature in Saturday’s double-points scoring medal races.

Lizzie Flint, Sportsister
The Women’s Sports Magazine

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