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mis-adjustment of the daggerboard rake, less than half a degree, can send you skywards or down the mine extremely quickly.’ With ETNZ back to full strength after the return from the Olympics of Pete Burling and Blair Tuke, the team is focused on a summer of training and development. It will launch its AC50 raceboat early in the New Year and all the refinement and systems that have been developed on the test platform will be transferred to the new boat. Although the team was later with its test boat than any of its rivals, it will make use of the southern summer to catch up, while the Bermuda and France-based teams are in their winter. In August the game made another quantum jump when Team Japan executed a foiling tack, which skipper Dean Barker described as the holy grail. The other Bermuda-based teams, Oracle and Artemis, quickly announced they had nailed the move as well. The goal now is to keep the hulls dry all the way round the track. Coincidentally, the day ETNZ gave their latest progress report they released a video that concludes with a slick foiling tack. The video ends with a smiling Glenn Ashby commenting, ‘I think we are going OK.’ For a team whose very existence was teetering in the balance after San Francisco, there is now a low-key sense of confidence. ‘We are healthy,’ Grant Dalton confirms. ‘Here we are, re-armed, re-energised, re-motivated and re-youthed with talented sailing and design teams, which is sensational. We are way healthy.’ Ivor Wilkins
So many superlatives, but Santiago Lange and Cecilia Carranza Caroli coming back to take gold after two penalties in the medal race made for one of the great moments of the 2016 Olympics
ARGENTINA Legend
Santiago Lange (55) is surely the most respected Argentine sailor alive today. He has always been a special character due to a mixture of goodness and wisdom, as well as being friendly and polite. Lange is a sincere man who connects easily with everybody. He has of course had a long and varied sailing career. He is now far from his three world titles in the Snipe class, or his naval archi- tecture studies in Southampton that culminated in the design of a successful new Optimist and Snipe, then put into production in his native country.
He passed through the America’s Cup with Sweden’s Victory team (Valencia 2007) and then Artemis (San Francisco 2013), and also briefly through the Volvo Ocean Race with Telefónica Black. In Rio he sailed his sixth Olympics, but not consecutively, since his debut in 1988, in four different classes. A year ago, the day of his 54th birthday, Lange underwent surgery for lung cancer in the final stages of his preparations for Rio. Santiago is now back at home in Buenos Aires, and still enjoying his Rio 2016 gold medal.
16 SEAHORSE
Seahorse: Have you seen the video of the medal race? Santiago Lange: I’ve seen it only when I have gone to TV interviews! But now I realise how my friends suffered watching it. I feel sorry for all of them but in the end I think they forgive me. SH: And the tributes… SL: The media interest was tremendous. I have had to attend many interviews for the radio, newspapers and television. Argentina has not won many Olympic medals and achieving a gold medal at my age and after the surgery has generated enormous interest. Now I cannot walk into a restaurant without being recognised. But everyone congratulates me very warmly and very kindly. I still have so many emails I have to reply to… and many of these reach far beyond the sporting world. SH: Over your six Olympic Games, what has changed the most? SL: Obviously it is becoming more professional and teams are much more structured. I sailed my first Games with a boat borrowed from the English team and discarded sails lent to me by John Kosteki. SH: So six Games and four classes – a lot of difficult changes. SL: Well, I consider there have been five classes. The first was the Soling in Seoul 1988, and then the Laser in Atlanta 1996. I raced the original Tornado in Sydney 2000 and then twice more in Athens and Beijing, but now with the spinnaker and two trapezes it was a completely new boat. And of course the Nacra! SH: And your favourite… SL: Each is different and each has its appeal. For me, anything that floats and can be raced is interesting. I prefer racing in fast boats, and both the final Tornado and the Nacra are fast. SH: Do you prefer the old, longer courses to today’s sprints? SL: I have got used to the new formats, because these changes have come in progressively. I prefer shorter courses but with more races in a championship. But I do not like three-lap races with six very short legs, I do not find that technically interesting. Races of 30-45 minutes seem about right for a Nacra. What I also do not like is the medal race. It seems unfair; I think the format with the eight or 10 best teams for a final phase is inter- esting, but not with the current medal race format. It could be better to consider quarter then semi-finals, it is what the public and media already understand. The current arrangement does not seem fair, giving double-points. Perhaps a final of two races is a better option. SH: Was your preparation for Rio especially hard? SL: Of course, the lung operation made us lose almost a year. The recovery was very slow, and not long before the Games it was still physically tough. I also had to work hard to manage my anxiety, because when you’re not physically fit you get nervous. It was certainly harder for me to stay calm in the boat. It was only about three weeks before the Games that I began to feel good. SH: Did you ever consider stopping… SL:Yes of course. For many months my only focus was on my health. I did not care about the Games or if I would even continue sailing. Then after the operation my goal was to start training for the Games which motivated me a lot to speed up my recovery. After missing so much training we restarted in a rush with our ‘tongues hanging out’ as we tried to catch up; but I am proud how much we sailed in the final stretch up to Rio. After the operation we moved to Rio, and I think having sailed so long in Rio was an important part of our success. SH: The day before starting the Games… SL: During a meeting with my team a month before I told them we were one of the seven or eight candidates to win. In the few inter- national regattas we did I could see that we were consistent and had a chance of a medal. SH: And your best conditions in Rio… SL: We were happy with anything. The variety of the conditions was our best weapon. Our key strengths were in difficult races and having the widest possible range of conditions. We knew conditions were going to be unpredictable – but we’d invested so much time training there. We were far and away the team who’d sailed there the most. SH: And when you were penalised at the start of the medal race? SL: We were so focused I did not think anything. We completed the penalty and I immediately started looking for our next opportunities.
SAILING ENERGY/WORLD SAILING
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