Martine Grael and Kahena Kunze, 49er.FX Olympic champions at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, attested to their favoritism by winning the third class race this Tuesday (27) in Enoshima and moving up to third place in the overall standings. Robert Scheidt also took third place in Laser, which already has six regattas, with three of them disputed this Tuesday, in sequence. The competition continues until Sunday (31), when the medal race will be held, a kind of final with the best eight in each class, for the medals decision.
Rough seas and shifting winds made it difficult to compete, and Martine said that was why speed wasn’t the duo’s focus. “Conditions were so changeable, and changing so quickly, that at any moment we could fall behind,” he commented. For Kahena, recovery was important after the disastrous 15th. place in the first race when they had a problem with the sail, and fifth in the second.
Robert Scheidt, during the men’s Laser regatta at the Tokyo Olympics
Image: Peter PARKS / AFP
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Robert Scheidt had problems in the first two days of competition, but showed how important experience is to recover throughout the sailing week. At 48 years old and in his seventh participation in the Olympics, race in a class that physically demands a lot from the athlete. With five Olympic medals (two golds, two silvers and one bronze, between Laser and Star classes), in Tokyo-2020 the Brazilian is only behind leader Pavlos Kontides, from Cyprus, and Australian Matthew Wearn in the classification, already with the discard the worst result.
With two races held so far in the Finn class (which says goodbye to the Olympic Games), Brazilian Jorginho Zarif is in 13th. overall, with a seventh and a 15th. places. The leader is Turkish Alican Kayner, who won both.
Marco Grael and Gabriel Borges are the eighth duo in the 49er. class, which had only one race and is led by the winner, Irishman Robert Dickson.
In RS:X (sailboard), Patrícia Freitas is 11th. after six races, with French Charline Picon in the lead.
Brazil still has crews in the mixed Nacra 17, with Samuel Albrecht and Gabriela de Sá, and in the women’s and men’s 470, with Fernanda Oliveira/Ana Luiz Barbachan and Henrique Haddad/Bruno Amorim, who await the opening of the competitions. Of the ten Olympic classes, the Brazilian team does not have representatives in Laser Radial (female) and RS:X male.
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