Volvo

It was brilliant to start the year with a gold medal in Miami, especially as we had to come from 2-0 down in the quarter-finals against new World champion Anna Tunnicliffe to do it, but in all honesty we weren’t actually that pleased with how we sailed all week.
 
In many ways, Miami was actually a stronger fleet than at the Worlds in Perth in December. With the event being the final racing qualifier for countries that still hadn’t qualified teams for the Games, a lot of teams were really up for it and the whole regatta was a battle.
 
It was obviously really pleasing to finally beat Anna in the knock-out stage of a regatta, but even at 2-0 down we felt confident we could pull it round as we had sailed really well in both those races, and were actually leading the whole way round before getting pipped on the line. We just had to keep doing what we had been and we knew we wouldn’t lose.
 
Our semi against Silja Lehtinen (FIN) also went to five and that was a bit tougher because we experienced a range of different conditions, but we dug in deep and ensured we didn’t make things too stressful or complicated and got the outcome we needed. It is a nice strength to have to being able to turn results around at the most critical points. There were a few positives to take from Miami, but probably the biggest was the fact we came away with a gold medal when we felt the whole week had been a bit of a bad day at the office.
 
We got back from Miami last Monday [30th January] and although we were busy unloading our container from Perth and getting everything ready to go out to Cadiz for our next training block, we have been able to reflect a bit on what an incredible 12 months we have had.
 
This time last year Annie was recovering from the nasty fall in Miami that stopped her sailing for two months, we had just hooked up with our coach Maurice and secured our sponsorship deal with Volvo Car UK. We have come a huge way in that time and it is really exciting to think how much we have progressed since then and what we can still achieve.
 
We have done so much racing over the past two months I’m actually really looking forward to a big block of training now in Spain. We will be there pretty much continuously up until the Palma regatta at the end of March. Annie and Maurice know the venue but I’ve never been there before. We have trained in Palma for the past three years but we felt it was important in such a special year to go somewhere new and keep things a bit fresh.
 
This is our chance to pull things apart for one of the final times before we do a lot of racing, including our Worlds, ahead of the Olympics. We are generally really pleased with where we are at. There are certain conditions we know we can make a few gains in but really this now becomes about fine tuning our teamwork and communication in the boat. We have got some awesome training partners coming over to Cadiz to spark against including Nick Rogers, Ian Williams, Andy Cornah and Sally Barkow’s US women’s match racing team.
 
Lucy

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