Joe Glanfield has vowed not to give up on a medal at the 470 World Championships in La Rochelle despite admitting that his and Luke Patience’s chances of doing so are now slim.
Glanfield and Patience, who have three Olympic silver medals between them, saw their hopes of a podium finished dented with scores of 15 and a discardable 33rd on the penultimate day.
Third at the start of the day, Glanfield and Patience, competing at their first worlds together, are now 13 points from the medal positions heading into the eight-boat double-points final races.
Glanfield’s former helm Nick Rogers, with whom he won two Olympic silvers, won’t sail in that with new crew Elliot Willis, finishing in tenth, while Mike Wood and Hugh Brayshaw were 16th overall.
And Glanfield said: “It’s a bit of a long shot. In many respects our chance of a medal was sorted out and unfortunately we’re a long way off, but never say never.
“As we saw people can rack up some big points quickly and I’m sure that will be the same in the medal race. We’ll just try and have a rest and recover, get our heads in gear and do the best we can.”
In the women’s fleet Sophie Weguelin and Eilidh McIntyre went from seventh to fifth, ten points off the podium, while Olympic silver medalists Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark finished 12th.
Fellow Brits Amy Seabright and Ann Carpenter were 21st with Weguelin vowing to concentrate on her and McIntyre in the medal race and none of the other boats around them
“We’ve had some good races, some bad races and we’ve learnt a lot of lessons along the way so far this week so we’re really happy to be racing again,” she said.
“The points are very close around us so I guess we’ll just need to sail our own race. We’ve done a lot of medal races this year, and I think we just need to take confidence from how well we’ve done so far this season and turn that into something hopefully.”
© Sportsbeat 2013