Nic Asher and Elliott Willis have clinched the 470 World Championship crown in Austrialia for the second year running.
As Nic and Elliott celebrate their success, they insisit that they will now be concentrating on helping Great Britain win gold at Beijing.
Their World Championships had looked in doubt when they were involved in a collision and Elliott was out of action for 24 hours with severely brusied ribs, which meant that their scores for races 8, 9 and 10 were calculated as an average of their results from races 7, 11 & 12.
But they came back in style in the medal race with the bit between their teeth and took the Gold.
Congratulations to Team Asher/Willis on their success.
Happy New Year from Team Asher/Willis!
We have been out in Miami for most of January for some training and for our first regatta since the World Championships. Just before we went out to Miami, we were at the Greenwich Maritime Museum as finalists in the Yachtsman of the Year Awards. Unfortunately we did not win; the accolade went to Dee Cafarri.
The first part of our time in Miami was very frustrating as our slot gasket kept falling off the bottom of our boat. This is the part that stops the water coming up the centreboard case. After putting 4 on in 4 days we found out that the glue we use had changed. When we had it sorted we had some good training in 25 degrees. We also managed to go to see Miami Heat (Basket Ball team) play just before the Regatta. Which is definitely a must if you go to the USA.
We struggled to start in the first half of the regatta and were not race sharp after our break. We were very quick which is pleasing but we made some silly racing mistakes. All the top 470 sailors in the world were there so we were quite pleased to finish 9th. We now have some training in Palma to work or our starts and sharpness ready for the European regattas.
Hello all, sorry for not updating you for a while, but after our Bronze Medal at the Pre Olympics and our Gold Medal at the World Championships, a proper break away from sailing was needed.
We received our new boat supplied by Contract Personnel at the start of October. Unfortunately that was a little later than expected due to container trouble. This meant that we had no time to race prepare her before we had to compete in the National Ranking series held in Weymouth. However we still managed to win the series for the third year in a row.
We then had a sit down with our coach and decided the areas we thought would be important to work on to retain our World Championship in Cascais in 2007. Luckily we had some windy weather for our several weeks in Weymouth, which was perfect for our training plan.
We then had a month of awards for our Gold Medal. Firstly we had the Skandia Team GBR Annual Dinner, where we received our performance bonuses for our medals and then the BBC Sports Personality Awards, which was a great night.