Extreme Sailing Series: Americans Larson, Tunnicliffe top standings

(March 20, 2014) – It may not have been high-speed racing on the second day of the Extreme Sailing Series™ in Muscat, Oman, but it was as close as it gets, with the leaderboard reshuffling after every race.

The fleet of 11 elite level teams used their entire tactical prowess to manoeuvre their Extreme 40s around the course, and after a short one lap shoot-out for the final race, the Swiss Alinghi took the lead, setting the scene for the business end of the event and the penultimate days racing tomorrow.

“Today the starts were quite important, occasionally you could come back from a bad start, but coming off the start line in the top three was huge,” shared Alinghi tactician and Olympic champion Anna Tunnicliffe. “Our game plan is to keep it simple and not get involved in any awkward situations. The conditions are so tricky out there, you just have to take each race as it comes, analysing it and generally just stick to our plan.”

Alinghi handled the light wind stadium with equal skill as yesterday’s open water racing, where the reaching starts determined the finishes, and mistakes were punished hard. Nine of the 11-boat fleet were given an OCS throughout the day pushing their Extreme 40s hard to the start line, resulting in a restart, with only Alinghi and Emirates Team New Zealand keeping their noses clean.

“I think you always come off the water knowing a lot of the areas you can improve, but I generally think it’s working out how you can improve your averages across the day,” observed the Kiwi team’s skipper Dean Barker. “You come off the water feeling pretty battered and bruised to be honest. It’s brutal sailing here – you try your best to be consistent but all you need is to have a tough race, or a tough break somewhere and it catches up. Overall we’re pretty pleased with how we’ve been doing 90% of the time, it’s just getting a little bit more consistent.”

After two race wins today, the Kiwi team finish the day in third place.

The defending champions – of both the overall Series and of the Muscat Act – on The Wave, Muscat had their pre-start routine near-perfected from the first of today’s six races, starting the day with a win and rarely finishing out of the top three. The team, who started the day in fifth, sailed a smarter course and less distance than the rest of the fleet according to the SAP analytics, and have rolled up the leaderboard to second place, three points behind their 2013 rivals Alinghi.

The Danish SAP Extreme Sailing Team led the fleet overnight, but unfortunately where some teams rise others will inevitably fall, and the Danish finished the day in fourth place – but well within touching distance of the top three, just five points behind Emirates Team New Zealand. Franck Cammas’ Groupama sailing team are a further 11 points behind the Danish, with everything to play for over the coming days.

J.P. Morgan BAR, a team that includes three Olympic champions, claimed three-second place finishes today, upgrading themselves from eighth to sixth place, as the British squad started to really get to grips with the stadium racecourse. The team’s headsail trimmer Pippa Wilson, a gold medallist from Beijing, was positive after racing. “It was a good day for us today. We had some really good starts, and then some really bad ones, but overall a really good and positive day for us. We worked well together as a team and it was really nice for us to be at the front of the fleet.”

The Aussie team on GAC Pindar, who sits at the bottom of the rankings, remains optimistic. “It’s like we’re on this vertical learning spike, which is great,” commented the Aussie skipper Seve Jarvin. “We just want to keep improving, and today we just seemed to get better and better. We learnt a lot and there’s a lot of stuff we found out about these boats just from today’s racing which helped us a lot. So hopefully tomorrow we can just keep getting better!”

Racing continues daily through March 22.

WATCH: The live online broadcast is Friday at 1530-1700 local time / 0730-0900 EDT. Click here to view.

Standings after Day 2 (13 races)
1. Alinghi (SUI) Morgan Larson, Anna Tunnicliffe, Pierre-Yves Jorand, Nils Frei, Yves Detrey; 88 points.
2. The Wave, Muscat (OMA) Leigh McMillan, Sarah Ayton, Pete Greenhalgh, Kinley Fowler, Nasser Al Mashari; 85 points.
3. Emirates Team New Zealand (NZL) Dean Barker, Glenn Ashby, James Dagg, Jeremy Lomas, Edwin Delaat; 82 points.
4. SAP Extreme Sailing Team (DEN) Jes Gram-Hansen, Rasmus Køstner, Thierry Douillard, Peter Wibroe, Nicolai Sehested; 77 points.
5. Groupama sailing team (FRA) Franck Cammas, Sophie de Turckheim, Tanguy Cariou, Thierry Fouchier, Devan Le Bihan; 66 points.
6. J.P. Morgan BAR (GBR) Ben Ainslie, Nick Hutton, Paul Goodison, Pippa Wilson, Matt Cornwell; 63 points.
7. Red Bull Sailing Team (AUT) Roman Hagara, Hans-Peter Steinacher, Mark Bulkeley, Nick Blackman, Stewart Dodson; 60 points.
8. Oman Air (OMA) Rob Greenhalgh, Tom Johnson, Will Howden, Hashim Al Rashdi, Musab Al Hadi; 59 points.
9. Realteam (SUI) Jérôme Clerc, Arnaud Psarofaghis, Bryan Mettraux, Thierry Wassem, Nils Palmieri; 58 points.
10. Gazprom Team Russia (RUS) Igor Lisovenko, Paul Campbell-James, Alister Richardson, Pete Cumming, Aleksey Kulakov; 57 points.
11. GAC Pindar (AUS) Seve Jarvin, Troy Tindill, Ed Smyth, Sam Newton, David Gilmour; 33 points.

Report by event media