MARSEILLE, France (AP) — In what sailors called the first “normal wind” day of the 2024 Olympics, Spain and the Netherlands won gold medals in the men’s and women’s skiffs on Friday, while the United States snagged its first Olympic sailing medal since Rio eight years ago.
Fickle winds forced medal races for the skiffs known as 49er and 49erFX — powerful, bird-like two-person boats — to be abandoned on Thursday in Marseille.
On Friday, the women’s race started on time just after noon and had a wild finish for the Dutch team of Odile van Aanholt and Annette Duetz, who entered with the second-best score.
They thought they had cruised past the finish line but hadn’t realized the race committee had changed the course, and the line was on the other side of the committee boat. They quickly corrected course and crossed the right line, but lost time doing so. They looked puzzled and covered their faces for a few tense minutes before officials determined they had enough for gold anyway.
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“When we crossed the finish line we thought we won gold, but we didn’t hear the horn,” said van Aanholt, 26. “It’s been a week of very different winds. It showcases you can’t be a one-start pony.”
Sweden got the silver and France took bronze.
In the men’s race, Diego Botín and Florian Trittel won Spain’s first Olympic sailing gold since London 2012 in their boat “Samatha,” or “calm” in the Buddhist practice they follow.
“Maybe more the effort to be calm, rather than the calm, won,” quipped Botín, 33, who competed in the same class in Rio and Tokyo. “It’s an incredible sensation to have worked so many years for something and to have failed so often on the way ... it couldn’t be better.”
“It was hard to even dream about it,” added Trittel, who sailed a different class in the Tokyo Olympics.
The United States men’s skiff team, Ian Barrows of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Hans Henken of San Francisco, was even more stunned by their surprise podium that stopped a drought for the Americans.
“It was just disbelief, honestly,” said Henken, 32.
“The whole fleet is so good that we knew we had a chance, but we knew things had to go our way,” said Barrows, 29.
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The men’s silver went to New Zealand’s Isaac McHardie and William McKenzie.
“This is something we’ve worked really hard for for the last seven years,” McHardie said. “To come home with a silver for New Zealand is undescribable.”
It’s been challenging for all teams to deal with 12 regattas since Sunday that were often delayed by the lack of wind, leaving sailors to broil in the water for new start times under a punishing sun.
Sweden’s silver medal-winning team of Vilma Bobeck and Rebecca Netzler sang out “amazing” in unison as they walked the beach swathed in their flag, their faces bright red in the hazy heat. They later planned to party with the Dutch gold medalists to the tune of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” — the name of the Swedish team’s boat.
The women’s bronze went to Sarah Steyaert and Charline Picon of France — the “mama team,” as they call themselves since both have children, who cheered them on their fathers’ shoulders from the marina’s breakwater.
“When you do something with passion and determination, nothing is impossible,” Picon said of combining motherhood with Olympic glory.
The French team also got some more hardware on Friday — their longtime partners proposed marriage after the race, as they had promised they would if they won a medal.
“But mine said only gold or silver, so I wasn’t sure,” joked Steyeart, turning the ring around her finger.
Medal races for windsurfing, scheduled for Friday, were pushed back to Saturday because of the variable winds. A windsurfing “marathon” Wednesday was abandoned more than an hour into it.
Also starting on Friday was a new sailing event, the mixed-gender dinghy called 470 — introduced this year to even out medal opportunities between men and women for the first time. And the men’s and women’s dinghies continued their races, too, making for quite a crowd in Marseille’s beautiful, monument-fringed bay.
In sailing, points are accumulated over multiple regattas over multiple days, with the medal races usually counting for double points.
In windsurfing, where the rules are a bit different, two athletes have made it far enough into the rankings to be guaranteed a medal — Emma Wilson of Britain and Grae Morris of Australia. Everyone else is still in the cliffhanger.
The uncertainty makes the delays and abandoned races particularly painful, and the heat also takes a physical toll as athletes try to be switched on for the peak moment of their career — and relaxed enough not to waste physical and mental energy on what they can’t control.
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