Follow Your Dream!!

While the Rio Olympics are over its great to hear from Athletes that attended and competed in the event and as always we follow Nikola and Luke.

This is from there Olympic experience in Rio and we thank them for the update.

We apologize that this report isn’t as timely as we would have liked it to be. It’s taken us some time to decompress, collect our thoughts and process them.

It’s still hard to put to words all the craziness that has happened and how it ended so quickly for us.

Day 2 brought big breeze with 25 knots at times out of the west, although at times we saw the wind drop below 5 knots randomly across the course, so it was far from being straight forward!

We had races where we were heading downwind doing 20 knots in a big right hand puff, pointed the same direction as someone doing 20 knots in a big left hand puff, and some poor boat stuck in 5 knots of wind in between us!

However it was also a situation like this where we were in the top 5, got stopped dead in our tracks while those minutes behind were able to blow by us.

Not only are these types of races frustrating, but with 4 – 3 lap races that day, it was one of the most physically and mentally challenging days of our four years sailing together!

We had our ups and downs but finished relatively consistently, in a very inconsistent breeze.

We ended the day still in the top 10 and very close on points.

One thing was clear that this regatta would be a battle of consistency and we were still happy to be well in the running.

Unfortunately Luke came in from that day of racing with a pounding headache and that night and throughout the next day, which was luckily our lay day, it became clear that something was seriously off with Luke.

After a few visits to the doctor, Luke was started on a course of antibiotics for a stomach bug.

No one knows for sure where it originated from but the suspicion was it started from ingesting too much bay water on day 2.

The bug left Luke with really bad stomach pain day and night and with that zapped all of his energy – it took almost everything Luke had just to make it to the start line on day 3 of the regatta.

Regardless, we tried our best to battle through 3 windy and wavy races on a tough racecourse.

In a fleet where a single mistake will cost you huge, we made a few too many mistakes and dropped right back in the standings to 18th.

On day 4 of the regatta it was the first day which was more typical “Rio” conditions, a 12-14 knot sea-breeze from the Southwest.

Still suffering from the bug, but feeling better we were able to get off to some good starts, but weren’t able to connect the dots up the first upwind legs, having us round just outside of the top group.

We battled back all day and pulled up to 15th in the standings. Unfortunately this was the last day of fleet racing and we just ran out of time.

We failed to make the medal race and with that we had to accept that this is where our regatta would end. Once the race was over, we decided to sell our boat and split the earnings between everyone on the team. A friend of mine mentioned that GraysOnline is a great place to sell a boat but we haven’t listed it yet. It needs a good clean before we try and put it up for sale!! I’m going to be sad to see it go since we all have lots of great memories in it, but I think it’s for the best.

Never having anticipated that we wouldn’t make the top 10, we were in shock that our Olympics were over just like that – an entire four years of preparation had gone into this event and in four days it was all over.

While the regatta was not at all what we had envisioned for ourselves, we regret nothing. Sailing will always be impossible to predict, and we made decisions and committed everything we had to giving ourselves the best possible chance to win.

Of course along the way we made mistakes, everyone does, but it was overcoming these mistakes which made us stronger as a team, it has been an unbelievable journey in which we have had incredible experiences, made lifelong friends, and learned more about ourselves, and each other then we ever could have imagined.

We came out of everything as a team and as friends and we are proud of that regardless of the final result.

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