Biggest, Most Diverse Fleet in Olympic Sailing Gets Ready to Hit the Water

Matt Wearn, of Australia, poses for a portrait before men's dinghy practice at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, July 25, 2024, in Marseille, France (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Matt Wearn, of Australia, poses for a portrait before men's dinghy practice at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, July 25, 2024, in Marseille, France (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
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Biggest, Most Diverse Fleet in Olympic Sailing Gets Ready to Hit the Water

Matt Wearn, of Australia, poses for a portrait before men's dinghy practice at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, July 25, 2024, in Marseille, France (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Matt Wearn, of Australia, poses for a portrait before men's dinghy practice at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Thursday, July 25, 2024, in Marseille, France (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

The biggest and most diverse fleet of the 2024 Olympics' sailing events, the one-person dinghy, is scheduled to hit the water Thursday in sweltering Marseille.

The small, white-sailed boats — formerly known as lasers, now called ILCA 6 for women and ILCA 7 for men — go slower, sail deeper into the water and have a less spectacular design than many other vessels in the Olympic marina.

But to the sailors who race them, they are the purest form of the sport, The AP reported.

“It’s very pure and it’s very close — you’ve got to work for every inch,” said Matt Wearn, 28, of Australia. “You’re not looking to win by a mile, you’re looking to win by a meter.”

Wearn is seeking to defend the gold he won in the event in the Tokyo Games — and so is Anne-Marie Rindom of Denmark, 33, who in addition to a gold from Tokyo has a bronze from Rio de Janeiro and first competed in the London Games in 2012.

“It’s all about the sailor in the boat,” said Rindom, whose parents first took her sailing when she was 2 weeks old. She competed in her first regatta at age 9.

In this class, boats are provided to Olympians only about a week before the Games, leveling the playing field. That makes consistently nailing the smallest tactical detail — an inch of advantage at the starting line, catching a sudden wave to surf ahead, balancing for the additional weight of branding stickers on the sail — the key to medal.

“All these little accuracies make a huge difference,” said Micky Beckett, 29, of Britain. “Being on top of your mental game is absolutely everything.”

That’s also because the boats are so versatile and “basically unsinkable,” in Beckett’s words, that they can — and do — sail in any kind of weather, for hourlong regattas.

Not that physical strength is negligible. In big swells, with spray coming straight at the athletes’ bodies, races can be “quite battering, like being thrown into a washing machine and spat out the other side,” Wearn said. So far in Marseille, the challenge has been the opposite: very low winds under a scorching sun, which can also be draining.

The boats are relatively inexpensive to buy and transport, designed to fit the top of a car. So they’re the star of World Sailing’s development program, which aims to support athletes from nations without long histories in Olympic sailing, from El Salvador to Fiji to Mozambique.

“It’s cool to see it’s not always the same five nations,” said Nethra Kumanan, 26, of India, who qualified for the Games in the ILCA 6 at the so-called last-chance regatta under the program. “We hope we can give them a fight.”

And a fight it is, because the event features almost twice as many boats as the other sailing categories — more than 80.

“It’s the hardest to win, it’s very equal,” said Tom Saunders, 32, of New Zealand, whose brother also was an Olympic sailor but in the two-person boats.

“It feels like it’s not over till the very end,” echoed Maud Jayet, 28, of Switzerland, who learned sailing on Alpine lakes and competed in the Tokyo Games.

Like her and most sailors in this category, Marit Bouwmeester, 36, of the Netherlands, enjoys shouldering all the responsibility alone for racing strategy, unlike in two-person boats.

Her tactics have been paying off — she’s medaled in the last three Olympics, snagging silver in London, gold in Rio and bronze in Tokyo. In Marseille, however, she’s trying something new — competing as the mother of a 2-year-old daughter.

“It’s a challenge to do motherhood and top sports,” Bouwmeester said, especially to find the time to train hard and then recover, but there’s also a mental advantage. “If I have a bad day, I can go back to being a mother.”

Pavlos Kontides, 34 and the first athlete from Cyprus to win a medal — for the then-laser in 2012 — is coming back for his fifth Olympics, also with a toddler in tow who changed his perspective about the relative importance of medals. Not that he doesn’t want one.

“The fire is burning,” he said. “When you’re on a boat, you’re in a different world. You have your own reality on the sea.”

Independence, simplicity, accessibility — for many athletes, that’s what Olympic dinghies represent.

Having started sailing by his village in West Wales when he was 5, Beckett says he’s still grateful for his parents’ sacrifices driving all around the UK and camping out to bring him to regattas. He hopes the Olympic spotlight can interest more children in taking up this streamlined version of the sport.

“(Sailing) is not as confusing or expensive as it looks,” he said. “You don’t have to be genetically anything — sailing has a home for anybody.”



Ireland and UK Clean up after Unprecedented Storm Brings Record Winds and Damage

 A man takes a picture of a fallen tree, after Storm Éowyn hits, in Phoenix Park, Dublin, Ireland, January 24, 2025. (Reuters)
A man takes a picture of a fallen tree, after Storm Éowyn hits, in Phoenix Park, Dublin, Ireland, January 24, 2025. (Reuters)
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Ireland and UK Clean up after Unprecedented Storm Brings Record Winds and Damage

 A man takes a picture of a fallen tree, after Storm Éowyn hits, in Phoenix Park, Dublin, Ireland, January 24, 2025. (Reuters)
A man takes a picture of a fallen tree, after Storm Éowyn hits, in Phoenix Park, Dublin, Ireland, January 24, 2025. (Reuters)

Emergency crews began cleaning up Saturday after a storm bearing record-breaking winds left at least one person dead and more than a million without power across the island of Ireland and Scotland.

Work was underway to remove hundreds of trees blocking roads and railway lines in the wake of the system, named Storm Éowyn (pronounced AY-oh-win) by weather authorities.

In Ireland, wind snapped telephone poles, ripped apart a Dublin ice rink and even toppled a giant wind turbine. A wind gust of 114 mph (183 kph) was recorded on the west coast, breaking a record set in 1945.

A man died after a tree fell on his car in County Donegal in northwest Ireland, local police said. They named the victim as 20-year-old Kacper Dudek.

Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the Republic of Ireland, neighboring Northern Ireland and Scotland, remained without electricity on Saturday,

“The destruction caused by some of the strongest winds on record has been unprecedented,” said Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin, adding that “every effort is being made to get high voltage transmission lines up and running, homes reconnected and water supplies secured.”

Schools were closed and trains, ferries and more than 1,100 flights were canceled Friday in the Republic of Ireland and the UK City centers in Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow were eerily quiet as people heeded government advice to stay home.

Part of the storm’s energy originated with the system that brought historic snowfall along the Gulf Coast of the US, said Jason Nicholls, lead international forecaster at the private weather company AccuWeather.

Éowyn became a bomb cyclone, which happens when a storm’s pressure drops 24 millibars in 24 hours and strengthens rapidly. The storm was so powerful that meteorologists say a sting jet developed, meaning Éowyn tapped into exceptionally strong winds higher up in the atmosphere.

A sting jet is a narrow area of winds moving 100 mph (161 kph) or faster that is drawn down to the Earth’s surface from the mid-troposphere and lasts for a few hours.

Scientists say pinpointing the exact influence of climate change on a storm is challenging, but all storms are happening in an atmosphere that is warming abnormally fast due to human-released pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane.

“As the climate gets warmer, we can expect these storms to become even more intense, with greater damage,” said Hayley Fowler, a professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University.