2017 49er Junior World Champions
It has been a while since our last post, but now we are back with lots to talk about. Over the past 2 months we have been pushing the limits of our training, going non-stop across Hamilton, Toronto, and Kingston. Building off of our Miami World Cup experience we continued to focus on our handling, starting, and decision making skills. Putting extensive time in on the water with some other highly skilled boats, we really felt significant gains in our performance, and it showed. Over June 15th to July 2nd, we claimed second at the North American Championships (bettering our position from last year by 6 places) and won the title of 2017 49er Junior World Champions. This is our first 49er regatta win and we are overwhelmed to do so at such a competition.
Throughout the 4 days we held a narrow 2-5 point lead, showing how tight the level of competition was. We had confidence in our abilities prior to the event and knew if we executed how we like to sail the boat we would have a strong finish. We played a conservative regatta, locking down good placings early rather than pushing for race wins. This built the most consistent score line out of all the competitors and allowed us to use our strengths to our advantage, such as our boat handling and tactical thinking. With a slight points gap on the final day, we positioned ourselves between our closest competitors, ensuring we would finish with one or two boats of each other and therefor maintain our overall lead.
The feeling after finishing our final medal race and being crowned champions was overwhelming relief. It proves our hard work and planning has been successful. We feel we are doing the right things to make us competitive on the World Cup Circuit and hopefully put us in a position to represent Canada at Tokyo 2020. We were able to identify many areas we can still improve upon in our sailing, and we will continue to use our methodology of identifying, training, testing, and re-evaluating to get us to the next level.
In terms of our next steps, we have taken a bit of time off to work and focus on our support side of our campaign. Next, we are headed to Spain for the Junior Europeans and then Portugal for Open Worlds, taking all of August to train and compete against a dense European fleet. Now that our major competition is over, we will be able to focus more on our media front and bring you more updates on our campaign.
Thank you to all our supports, coaches, teammates, and parents that made this Championship a success!
