Pieter Jan Postma has won plenty in the Finn, and here the flying Dutchman shows how to do the more subtle part of Finn sailing in light winds. Smooth, steady body movements, particularly for a big bloke, keep the Olympic singlehanded dinghy moving nicely through the soft breeze...
Laser Olympic Champion Paul Goodison tells Jon Emmett some of his secrets to starting consistently and securing a front-row position up the first beat... "If I'm in the middle of the line and I'm unsure, I'll point the bow of the boat directly at the pin end and line the tiller up in the middle of the boat to see where that's aiming, and look through the tiller to see where that's aiming..."
Giles Scott was struggling to stay down to weight for the Laser. Standing 6’6 tall, Scott was keeping down to 83kg, only with a lot of dieting. His body fatpercentage was down to 6.5%, although he didn’t find it as difficult as it sounded. “Weirdly enough in the last year it was actually relatively easy because I was at uni. I was a lazy student and I didn’t have to go shopping all that often for food. I don’t know, it’s weird, I think you almost get used to living and feeling that way once you’ve done it for so long, and then it actually was a bit difficult when I suddenly got told that ‘right, you’ve got to eat, you’ve got to put on 15 kilos for the Finn.’”
Scott acknowledges that he needs to open himself up to more risk-taking in the medal race. “There are sailors that do take big massive gambles in medal racing and sometimes it comes off well for them. But obviously, the difficult thing about that is that every gamble you win you are going to lose one. Fundamentally I think that you just need to be more aggressive with it than everyone else is.”
The Tomahawk 'People's Foiler' was the talk of the Dinghy Show in North London last weekend. But so too was the Devoti D-1, a Finn for the modern age developed by Finn silver medallist Luca Devoti. But what's the common thread that joins these two very distinct boats? It's prolific Phil Morrison, the face that launched a thousand ships... or something like that...
Audio (8 minutes) and text: Anna Tunnicliffe reflects on a dramatic conclusion to the last Olympics. The Laser Radial Olympic Champion talks about what she's been up to since then, and why she's back on the campaign trail so early for Weymouth 2012.
Jon Emmett demonstrates tacking and gybing in a Laser....
