The new game

While Skandia Team GBR is looking in good shape in classes such as the Laser, Finn and Star, Lucy Macgregor and her Elliott 6 women’s match racing crew of Annie Lush and Annie Martin have also been having their fair share of success. Last season they were second at the Skandia Sail for Gold regatta, and won the Delta Lloyd Regatta in Medemblik as well as the Busan Cup Women’s Match Race in Korea and were second at the ISAF Nation’s Cup. This year they finished second in an unfortunate final against Anna Tunnicliffe team at Rolex Miami OCR and today they are successfully through to the quarter finals at the Trofeo SAR Princesa Sofía Mapfre in Palma (while Tunnicliffe is out). As a result earlier this year Macgregor finally managed to topple Clare LeRoy from the French match racers length tenure in the top spot of the ISAF Women’s Match Race standings – although this was all too brief. “They changed the ranking criteria and how much the World Cup regattas counted for,” says Macgregor told thedailysail. “So we slipped down without us or Clare doing any racing.” This week conditions in Palma have been mixed. On windy Tuesday the women’s match racing was one of only two events to hold racing and this took place in a corner of the Bay tucked away to port immediately out of the harbour entrance and over the course of racing the breeze went heavily right and dropped to 10 knots. “We have made some silly mistakes so far in both the group stage and on Tuesday we made a couple of pretty big errors, but generally good and today felt really good,” said Macgregor yesterday. “It is interesting looking at the results, because in the gold fleet, all the results are really close -