wright does no wrong
Ed Wright from Great Britain took out the Finn class at the 2010 Rolex Miami OCR in style after winning four races in the 11 race light air series this week on Biscayne Bay, in a very competitive fleet of 35 Finns.
Wright won last year’s inaugural ISAF Sailing World Cup after a pretty much dominant series and has started his 2010 campaign in the best way. However, he is still looking for his first Finn Gold Cup win, which this year is being sailed from St Francis YC in San Francisco. Wright would clearly like to make amends for last year’s disappointment in Copenhagen, when as one of the favourites, and in the overall lead of the regatta, he picked up a black flag mid series and lost all chances of the world title.
Second place in Miami was Wright’s team mate Giles Scott. Scott was the only sailor who could take the gold medal from Wright going into the medal race, but he needed to be six boats ahead. Wright is renowned for sailing great medal races, so that was unlikely to happen. A seventh place in the race was enough for Scott to hang onto silver.
However the battle for the bronze provided the interest of the day with USA’s Zach Railey starting the day in third and then losing out against both Scott and fourth placed Gasper Vincec from Slovenia to drop one place to fourth, while Vincec, who has returned to the Finn after nearly a year out, took the bronze medal by a slim one point margin after a second place finish in the double scoring medal race.
Railey, who had spent all week in the medal zone, went home with nothing. The current Olympic silver medalist – who also took the silver medal at last year’s Gold Cup in Copenhagen after losing the title on the medal race by just one point to the Dane Jonas Hoegh-Christensen – will also be looking to take his first world title later this year in San Francisco as the most successful US Finn sailor for nearly a generation. More at: www.finnclass.org
