Rate it!

0 votes

Britain’s top sailors stayed positive at the end of the 470 World Championships, despite failing to medal at The Hague.

Nic Asher and Elliot Willis (pictured) were fourth while Sarah Ayton and Saskia Clark came fifth at their first World Championship together.

Skandia Team GBR’s medal hopes faded on the penultimate day when leading Brits Luke Patience and Stuart Bithell were forced to sit out two races after sustaining rudder damage, leaving twice World Champions Nic Asher and Elliot Willis to fight for the podium spots in the final medal race.

With gold already secured by Australia’s Mathew Belcher and Malcolm Page, Asher and Willis had a silver and bronze clash with four other boats all within reach.

A fifth place in the final 10-boat double points-scoring race was not enough to see the British pair onto the podium, but Asher insisted he was pleased with their performance.

"I’m pretty happy with that actually. The start of the week in the lighter conditions was good for us - we showed good pace," he explained. "I’m pretty happy, but there’s definitely more to come and hopefully we’ll medal at Sail for Gold."

The 2009 silver medallists Patience and Bithell also made it to the medal race in eighth place, and managed to hold on to the overall eighth in the final standings, which Scotsman Patience said "was not a bad way to go" considering the damage they’d previously incurred.

In the women’s races, Ayton and Clark were in overall fourth heading into the final day but, in spite of losing a place to finish fifth, they were delighted with their first World Championship campaign.

"We’re really, really happy with our result," said the double Olympic gold medallist Ayton.

"We’ve only been sailing with each other for seven months so it’s a massive achievement and really gives us a base now to go away and have a really intense winter and come back next year with a real chance."

Clark added:  "We’ve developed loads this week and the really exciting thing is we’ve also made some really big mistakes - we know what they are and we can go away and work on them.

"I can count in my head 15 points which we’ll go back and work on so we can come back next year and improve."

Fellow Skandia Team GBR crew Penny Clark and Katrina Hughes - who have endured a testing year after a kidney illness to Clark and then injury to Hughes saw them sidelined during the key winter training months - were equally pleased with their performance at the Worlds this week.

They finished eighth, and are adamant that there is more still to come.

"Given the year we’ve had I think if you’d offered us eighth at the beginning of the week we’d have said 'yes please, we’ll take that',"  explained Clark, a Royal Navy Officer.

"We actually feel like we haven’t sailed that great and we should have done a bit better but it’s nice to go away saying we’ve achieved our goal, we’ve come top 10 and we know we can do better.  It would be horrible to be standing here saying that we’d achieved our goal but we don’t think we can do any better.

"We know what we need to work on, we know what we need to improve on and we know we can do it, so it’s been a good week I think."

Eurosport