Youth Olympics 2010
20 August
Congratulations to RSGYC Member, Sophie Murphy on her placement in the Top 20 at the Youth Olympics 2010 in Singapore.
The medal race concluded the Youth Olympic Games 2010 on the 25th August. The peculiarity of this medal race is that everyone was still racing instead of the traditional top 10 and the fact it was not discardable added up a little bit of pressure.
Sophie was fired up in the morning and determined to do well having reviewed all 11 races and learnt her lessons from them. After a short postponement, the breeze eventually picked up to a lovely 5-7 kts. Sophie was off a good start in the middle of the line but fell rapidly into the leebow of a boat forcing her to tack onto a header. Off phase for a while she fell right back. Her second half of the beat she remembered the lessons of the initial few days and picked the lifted tack towards the lay line. Finding clear air she made her way back up to 17th at the first windward. No gaps had really opened in the fleet and the downwind speed she had shown on previous races was giving a lot of hope for a come back in the spectators stand. She did not disappoint and a superb display of speed and placement climbed her into 5th by the bottom gate. Unfortunately some specifics of the Byte CII caught up with her when she did not notice the mainsheet traveller had moved too far to leeward opening her leech way too much making her loose a lot of a pointing ability. This issue forced her onto shaky decisions and she dropped back to 15th by the second windward. But Sophie was not to give up without a fight and she closed the gap on the group ahead to snatch the inside lane before the 3 boats length rounding the gate in 10th making a further two places on the reach getting her positioning and angles perfectly right.
She took 8th on the line at the Youth Olympics medal race to end her event on very positive note!
Sophie caught right up to the favourites in the second half of the event but unfortunately could not overcome the points dropped on the initial few races. She settled with 17th overall but with a firm envy to experience the Olympics again at senior level. Rio 2016 maybe?
