Olympic Logbook. Day Four

All 2 weeks of the sailing Olympics itBoat maintains «logbook», telling about the main events and achievements of each day.

The main event of the fourth day for all the fans of our national team were duels in the women's match raceso we will pay a bit more attention to them. Yesterday our crew under the team by Ekaterina Skudina. met the most serious rivals - Anna Tanncliffe. и Lucy MacGregor (first and second numbers in the world ranking respectively). The Russian girls, who had only one defeat under their belt and were in second place at the start of the day, had every chance to advance to the quarterfinals through the round-robin system (qualifying match-robin races on the principle of «each»).
An exciting and tense battle started from the very start of the first fly against Tanncliffe. Skudina's crew managed to win it, but she did not make a big enough gap. During the first part of the race the boats sailed nose-to-tail making synchronous figure skating turns, but on the approach to the top mark, the Americans took a three-meter lead. «This defeat did not discourage our girls - they were able to pull themselves together and» to push the American girls on a full-course. With a tactically correct leeward position, Katya led the American yacht astern of the mark and was the first to round the bottom mark with an advantage of four seconds. Ann Tanncliffe was unable to win back the lead.
«Inspired by this success and», in the second fleet our girls put up an aggressive fight against British rivals. «With half a minute to go, Katya even tried to catch Lucie McGregor for a penalty, but she is off the hook». Nerves failed and both racers took a false start. After a general recall, the Brit seemed to get a better starting position, but Skudina outsmarted her and won the start by a good margin. By the first nail the gap was about 20 meters, by the second it had grown to 50.

Our girls went through to the quarter-finals ahead of schedule, finishing second. The Australian crew remained the strongest so far, having also won both their flights.

In other classes things were as follows: finnists had a rest yesterday (remember, Eduard Skornyakov was 16th), men's Laser had a new leader - Cypriot Pavlos Kontidis. The first three in this class (second - Tom Klingsby, third - Tonchi Stipanovic) are clearly shaped, leaving the fourth crew behind by 16 points. Igor Lisovenko occupies the 30th place, everything is clear here and there is no chance. As for the girls, after six races Laser Radial After six races there are clear top five headed by Annalise Murphy of Ireland who seems to be the key for Olympic medals in this class. Svetlana Shnitko is only 35th.
Our situation looks a little better in men's RS:X class: Dmytro Polishchuk occupies the 17th place after four races, lagging behind the first ten by only 18 points, but still he keeps chances of getting into it, and, consequently, the medal race. It seems that after Eduard Skornyakov's failure, on whom we pinned great hopes, Dmitry is the only athlete, on whose success we can still count (except Katya Skudina, of course). Alas, in women's RS:X things are much worse: Tania Baziuk is in last but one place.

Live broadcasts of the sailing races (although without commentary) are available on Sportbox, the schedule of all races and results on the ISAF website, and a daily report on the performance of the Russian national team on the Russian Sailing Federationwebsite.