As the ocean racers enter their final day of the Extreme Sailing Series Act 1, there’s no clear leader at The Wave in Muscat - which means the last push is going to be a hugely competitive one…
On the penultimate day of racing in the Sultanate of Oman, the action came thick and fast, with both Red Bull Extreme Sailing and Team New Zealand delivering the most outstanding performances of the day.
“We are almost beginners and it’s the best result so far, I hope we can continue”
Roman Hagara and his Red Bull Extreme Sailing crew moved up two places from fifth to a third-place podium position ahead of the final day. “We are really happy now we are third overall, it’s great for us,” says Roman. “We are almost beginners and it’s the best result so far, I hope we can continue. We have a lot of experience in the Extreme 40 already and [bowman] Craig Monk is really strong so he can do a lot of things that we can not handle without him and those last-minute calls are a bit easier, so overall we made a good improvement.”
Dean Barker and the Team New Zealand boys had a good day too as they climbed from seventh to fourth place in the rankings: “Today everything fell into place really well and we had a fantastic day on the water and managed to get some good solid results which was very pleasing for all of us,” says Barker. “We might have started the regatta slow but each day it feels like we have improved a little bit and if we can carry on improving then we’ll be satisfied.”
A total of eight stadium races were staged off The Wave in Muscat that saw six different teams claim at least one race win, Team New Zealand scored two first places and the all-Italian team Niceforyou grabbed their first race win of 2011. Groupe Edmond de Rothschild were consistently good enough today to hold on to their top place ranking, just 7 points ahead of Terry Hutchinson’s Artemis Racing.
With 11 points for a win, and 22 points on the final race tomorrow, it’s wide open in the top half of the leaderboard. As Dean Barker summed up: “There’s a lot of points still on the table going, so it’s going to be hard.”
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