Six straight bullets for Belcher and Page

As France moves ahead in the Women's and more countries qualify at the 470 Worlds

Tuesday at the 470 World Championships was a tense and enthralling day. Seven nations secured their right to be at the 2012 Olympic Games in the Men's and six in the Women's division continue to fight their way for the remaining five nation places.

All fleets completed two more races to determine the teams proceeding through to the Men's gold, silver and bronze fleets and the Women's gold and silver fleets. The breeze was not quite as strong as forecast, around 10 knots and shifty.

470 Women

After the perfect scoreline of the Dutch over the opening two days, so today it was the turn of the French to move ahead with Camile Lecointre/Matilde Geron leading on 12 points, ahead of team mates Ingrid Petitjean/Nadege Douroux one point behind in second.

Despite last night's bicycle injury, birthday girl Jo Aleh of New Zealand and crew Olivia Powrie still managed to notch up a race win and fourth place to end the qualification series in third overall. “I think it all merges together a bit,” Aleh laughed, referring to her injury, birthday and race win. “I gave myself an early birthday present last night by doing a face plant flip off my bike and decided to grate up my face on the concrete. I spent six hours at Barcelona hospital, which was hard after such a big day on the water yesterday. So yes today, I thought we had to win a race because it was my birthday. It was tricky out there. The wind didn’t do what anyone thought it was going to do and shifted around a lot.”

But where the tension really lies is in the remaining berth left open for London 2012. Five places are available and six nations - Austria, China, Croatia, Denmark, Poland and Russia - have still to qualify.

If Croatia’s Enia Nincevic/Romana Zupan achieve their goal, it will be the first time Croatia has qualified for the 470 Women's class at the Olympic Games. The pair were really disappointed not to secure qualification at Perth 2011. “It has been a very emotional day," Zupan said. "We are feeling great and we hope that we will continue sailing like this. We worked really hard for this, and I think that we managed to correct things that were not good before and we are not afraid of anything that might come our way. We are now second among the nations that are trying to qualify for the Olympics and we hope that the ones behind us will remain there.”

Austria's Lara Vadlau/Eva-Maria Schimak were the last of the six teams to make it through to the gold fleet. Alongside her gold medal at last year’s ISAF Youth Worlds, Vadlau also won gold in the one-person dinghy event at the inaugural Olympic Youth Games in 2010. A relieved Vadlau said: “The first moment when we came ashore we were down as we thought it was over, but then I saw my father dancing and I realised that we were still in and have a chance. I hope we can stay in this game as we have sailed well over the last three days. ”

Denmark’s Henriette Koch/Lene Sommer have accelerated their chance of Olympic qualification and are the top placed nation within the gold fleet after a solid 5,2 scoreline today. Koch said, “We are feeling really good. It has been a tough day, but we remain focused on one race at a time.” Sommer added, “I think it is nice to have a good race, we are sailing well and feel in control.”

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470 Men

A new 470 World Championship record performance is on the cards from the Australian defending World Champions Mat Belcher and Malcolm Page, who notched up another more two victories to make it six bullets in six races. An unprecedented achievement, but the team remain respectfully modest.

“Today was another great day for us, rounding out qualifying with a perfect scorecard, six wins from six races,” said Belcher. “We’re obviously really happy with our performance across a range of conditions.”

Page said that the pair was very pleased with how their World Championship defence had started. “You’ve got to take days like these whenever you can. This is definitely the first time that Mat and I have won six straight races at a World Championship and the first time that I know of in the 15 or 16 years that I’ve been following the class. Our coach Victor doesn’t know of any times when it’s happened while he’s been involved in the sport so that stretches it out to about 25 years which all three of us are thrilled with.”

While the scoreboard may look like the pair is doing it easy at the front they had to fight for both wins on Tuesday. “Today was really tricky and we certainly had our fair share of luck to come away with the win in race five,” said Belcher. “We were fighting hard down the run and second work after rounding in around 13th to catch the leaders. The wind shifted in our favour and we managed to position ourselves to take full advantage and just got the win from the Israelis. In the three to eight knot southeasterly breeze we had today anything can really happen so to have this consistency has been great.”

On Wednesday the 2012 470 World Championship enters the finals series with the top crews facing off against each other for the first time.

“While we’ve had a great run so far our streak is certainly going to end tomorrow with the first day of finals,” said Belcher. “Things will certainly get interesting with everyone fighting hard. We only have a six point buffer and you can lose that on a bottom mark rounding so we have plenty still to do.”

Belcher and Page currently lead Portuguese pair Alvaro Marinho and Miguel Nunes by six points with Finnish crew Joonas and Niklas Lindgren a point further behind.

“These regattas are won and lost in gold fleet racing,” said Page. “We haven’t made a wrong step so far but the top five or six boats will probably be saying the same thing. We’re starting from scratch tomorrow and you could say that the marathon is only just reaching it’s middle point so we’ve got to be patient and take each race as it come."

In 470 Men, Olympic nation qualification is now wrapped up after six races to deliver the final seven nations who have qualified to be at London 2012. The team having the day of their lives was Chile’s Benjamin Grez/Diego Gonzalez who went into today in 42nd overall and 10 places off the gold fleet cut. Some superb racing rewarded them with two top five finishes and national qualification, which will see Chile making their first Olympic appearance in the 470 since 1984.

Joining Chile in securing nation qualification to the 2012 Olympic Games (subject to ISAF ratification) are Canada, Ireland, Korea, Russia, Turkey and South Africa.

The highest placed team to secure nation qualification were Korea’s Gunwoo Park/Sungmim Cho who ended the qualification series in 14th overall. A thrilled Park said after racing, “The wind was lighter than we expected, but our speed wasn’t too bad and we chose the right side of the course, so we had a good race. This is my first time to be at the Olympic Games. I am so proud and happy to be able to represent Korea.”

On the leaderboard, South Africa was the final of the seven nations to qualify and, with points margins extremely close, their celebrations were on hold until all the protests had been dealt with, giving an anxious wait for Jim Asenathi and Roger Hudson. The pair spent much of the evening patiently sitting outside the race office waiting to receive the final nod, before they could really celebrate. Their story is impressive as the pair only teamed up together just over a year ago. Hudson admitted the day was tough, commenting, “we really struggled in race 4 and had a discard. We were having a great race 6 and picked up from about 9th in the first rounding to 7th and then had a disaster in the last run to finish 15th. It was devastating as we knew that could affect the outcome for qualification.”

For Asenathi today was a dream come true. “I am speechless to be honest, but I am really happy. We worked so hard to get here and this means a lot to me and shows the hard work we have put in. We are continuing to improve on the technical side of the boat and race faster."

Meanwhile several teams are having their own in house battles to determine who will be selected for the Olympics. This includes Greece's Panagiotis Mantis/Pavlos Kagialis and Panagiotis Kampouridis/Esfstathios Papadopoulos and Japan's Ryunosuke Harada/Yugo Yoshida and Tetsuya Matsunaga/Kimhiko Imamura.

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