Team Jolly

We got to Riva del Garda – at the north end of Garda Lake on the 2nd of May, and as luck would have it the Italian 470 National Championships were scheduled to take place two days after we arrived.. so we entered and took part as a bit of a warm up to the EuroSaf event which we had come here for (or cool down as it is absolutely freezing on the water here..).

We were a little rusty, but still ended up 5th place overall and top women’s crew.  Then came the one we were here for, the 2013 EuroSaf event… It was five days of racing, with a total of eleven races sailed – we were meant to sail thirteen races but lost a day in the middle with no wind – day three, and was actually a rather horrible day – it rained all day, it was freezing and there was no wind… We got sent out to the race track, we drifted around for a while.. then came back in… so all in all a great ‘getting very cold and wet’ excursion…

Anyway! We started the regatta in a slightly different way to normal… very simple really… we switched places.  Polly was skipper (steering) and Jo was crewing, for the first two races on day one.  We actually went surprisingly well too!!  We were up in the top few overall, and won the girls division in the first race – although we did get a few laughs around the race track as Jo proceeded to trip over herself during boat manoeuvres and seemed to end up face down in the bottom of the boat more than normal.  Polly got a bit lost at the back of the boat with all the ropes she was meant to be pulling – although she was being ‘helpfully’ reminded by Jo…  Then the wind got up a little, and Jo’s weight on the wire was not quite cutting it, so the second race was not so flash!!  We followed that up with a failed start attempt in the next race, to end up disqualified from race three… (Jo was steering again – whoops…)

To be honest, since then, all of the races have merged a little, they were all rather cold (that we remember…) and we had some good ones, as well as one really not so good one… But it was all good fun!!!

We went into the final day in 2nd place in the womens fleet, with one ‘final race’ left to sail.  The ‘final race’ thing is a new format for this event – and it consisted of the top six boats going into one very short final race, where your regatta finishing score would be the place you had going into the ‘final race’ plus your finishing place in that ‘final race’ – All a little confusing, but anyway, all it meant was that the first four days of racing got condensed into one score (a 2nd in our case) and pretty much to win the regatta we had to step it up and take out the final race as well….

And thats what we did.   The ‘final race’ was sailed in a lovely 12-15 knot breeze, it was sailed ‘theatre style’ – so we were racing between two barriers on each side of the course - basically just meaning that no one could go too far in any direction.  A normal race for us used to be an hour, and now they are getting more like 45 min, but this final race was a whopping 10 minutes!!  It was pretty much a exercise in boat-handling, and luckily we still seem competent enough in that area! A little surprising considering the amount of time we have spent in the boat recently!  We planned the start perfectly, and once we got our nose infront we were off, to take the race win by a comfortable margin, and the regatta title overall.

So not too bad for our first event, we were pretty happy with how we went (most of the time) but more importantly have started working on a few of our problem areas, what can we say, learning is fun!

Now we get a few days off to enjoy Garda (Exploring the rather impressive mountains that surround the lake) and then we are back in the car for a 1400km journey to Medemblik in Holland, where we will take part in the second EuroSaf event of 2013.

It’s that time of year again, and we are about to head off to Europe again for our first few regattas of 2013.  We will compete in two warm up regattas held in Italy and Holland, before we head to the 470 European Championships which will be sailed in Formia, just south of Rome (cue tourist excuses for some days off).  Before building up to our big regatta of the year, the World Championships, which will be held in La Rochelle in July.

It has been a rather different build-up for us this year, with a lot less time spent on the water, and a lot more time spent talking to people, learning, and making plans.  We have started our Rio campaign by creating a solid four-year strategic plan, which we call our TPP (Team Performance Plan).  We want to make sure that what we are doing is extremely well considered; therefore the process has involved meeting a variety of people in and around sport, from management to Olympic champions, so see if they can find any holes in our plan, or things we may be able to do better…

The challenge of our next four years to Rio will be very different from our last campaign.  Four years ago we were new to the 470, and had a mountain to climb in what felt like a very short time frame.  This time around, we are starting from a very different place, we have learnt a huge amount over the last few years, and we are starting from the front end of the fleet rather than the back.  Everyone will now be pushing hard to leap frog us, so its a whole new challenge to try and win a gold medal in 2016 – which is of course our aim.

To make sure we can give ourselves the best possible chance, we know that we need to get the basics right, work out where we can make the best gains in performance, as well as making sure its still an adventure!  We are so used to being the team chasing the leaders that it has been rather hard for us to try and dial it back, and really look at these next four years, and in particular this next year with a bit of perspective!
So this brings us to this year, 2013, the first year of the next Olympic cycle and a huge opportunity for us to take the pressure off, expand our knowledge base, try things we wouldn’t have tried last time (look out for a little surprise at our first event in Garda), and basically just learn and have some fun (keeping the Jolly in Team Jolly!).  With our brilliant coach Nathan on ‘sabbatical’ for part of this year, we are taking the opportunity to learn from some different coaches, as well as going coach-less for our first event – on purpose – to see what we will learn from having to be self sufficient!

Later in the year we are also going to fit in a trip to the Olympic venue in Brazil, to actually get a look at the waters we will be racing on in 2016.  Then Jo is going to follow and ride some of the latter stages of the Tour de France (the good hilly ones!), and then we will go and check out some America’s Cup racing in San Fran (where we will hopefully see the kiwi’s give everyone a good smack down!).

So a busy year (we don’t know any other), but it should be a fun year and that is what we are aiming for!!

Sorry, we have been a little quiet on the information front!

We have been getting back into the swing of things, and keeping rather busy!  With sailing, cross training and all of the planning that has to go in at these early stages taking up a lot of our time…

Anyway, just a bit of an update, we had our first regatta back of the season, which was the Oceanbridge Sail Auckland Regatta, held at the Royal Akarana Yacht Club, where we had a rather blustery three day event!!

We were a little rusty, and did rather a bit more swimming than we might have liked, but still managed to come away with the overall title, taking down all the men’s teams which was fun!!

Since then it has been back into daily training mode, as well as getting things sorted for the next four years. We have our first boat of this next campaign currently being built at Mackay Boats in Silverdale (nice and local) – Proudly sponsored by our new boat sponsor Kingspan – and with our container due to leave NZ bound for Europe in mid March, we have more than a little on!!!

We also attended the 50th Westpac Halberg Sports Awardslast week, which was an amazing event to be able to go to, we had an excuse to get all dressed up which was a bit of fun – not our usual sailing gear and zink…

In other very cool news, we were both recently presented with our lovely new cars from the great guys at Flexi Lease, so we are moving up in the world! and finally both have roof racks and cars that can successfully tow a 470 around!  The cars are pictured below – on one of our team cross training sessions!

So, our first post of 2013…

It has been a rather different time for us the last few months, it’s been crazily busy, but not so much the sailing and training busy that we are used to…

We have visited countless schools and yacht clubs all over NZ, been to rather a few school prize givings, numerous corporate events, a few sports award evenings and even met some royals!  Our medals have passed through thousands of hands, and overall it has all been rather a bit of a whirlwind end of the year!

We have met people from all over New Zealand, and have been truly humbled by the reception we have had everywhere we have been.  We are constantly amazed by hearing from people about how they saw our race on TV, and how emotional it was for them.  It’s probably a good thing we never knew how many people were watching that medal race, or the outcome may have been a little different!!

So when Christmas finally came around, we were rather relieved to finally finish our ‘official duties’ with one last appearance on Breakfast TV, and finally have some real time out, time with our families, and just time away from all the hype that has been non stop since we won gold in London.

But even while we have been recovering, it has been all go, with the announcement of the 2013 New Year Honours, as we were made Members of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM), which was rather amazing, and a huge honour, as well as pretty cool that we have some letters to go after our names!!

A few days later the finalists for the 50^th Halberg Awards were announced, and we are proud to say that we have been selected as one of the five finalists in the ‘Team of the Year’ category, and even better, our wonderful coach Nathan Handley has made the final four in the ‘Coach of the Year’ section.

So now it is back to the drawing board, we have announced our intent to continue towards Rio in 2016, and it is not a decision we have taken lightly, we cannot simply do what we did last time and expect to come home with another medal.  So before we leave

NZ in May, to start our European campaign for 2013, we have a lot of work to do.  Figuring out what we need to keep the same, and what we need to change, after all, we are in a far different place to where we were when we started four years ago, and Rio presents very different challenges to London.

We just have to say how grateful we are for all the support we have received these past few months, for the amazing people we have met, who told us they just wanted to find a way to help us out, and to our new sponsors, we are proud to associated with you, and we look forward to some great times over the next four years!

We are back into training next week, so that means getting back in the gym, back on the bike and back out on the water, which will most likely be a bit of a shock to the system!  But looking forward to it all the same!