Vita's 470 Campaign - 2023 Update
Cecil Wright & Partners are delighted to sponsor Vita's campaign to make the 2024 Olympic Games.
It’s been a while! With and uncertain and chaotic time I haven’t felt able to write with any updates as I’ve been constantly unsure on what’s going on myself! So now i’ll fill you in…
There’s been some big changes.
Since spring, Ryan and I weren’t making the progress we needed to, so decided to part our separate ways and begin new partnerships.
After a short break I then teamed up with 2 time Olympian Chris Grube (commonly known as Twiggy!). It’s been a fast and furious whirlwind since then; putting a campaign together that would take us up to the World Championships in just 5 weeks time!
With Twiggy's immense experience (4 Olympic cycles in various classes) and skills, it meant we were very well positioned to construct a successful partnership if we could structure our campaign right. I felt very privileged to be sailing with such a legendary 470 crew and my slightly drained motivation and energy for the campaign shot right back up there! I was so excited about all the learning opportunities from Twiggy's experience and the possibility of building a new campaign with all the learnings from the previous one. A blank sheet stretched out in front of me. Let’s get to work!
We decided to plunge ourselves fully into the deep end; flying out to Marseille to go straight into a coaches regatta. We wanted to expose the priorities and see what the ‘big hitters’ would be. I can say we successfully exposed all of them in this short 4 day block! It proved more of a challenge than expected…
Twiggy, having been out the boat for 2 years, had to find his feet again. It’s very easy to take for granted the specific fitness, flexibility and muscle memory on skills that you use whilst sailing full time. Movements and processes that you could do with your eyes shut become a conscious effort and take up a lot of bandwidth. So it was a brutal first week! But amongst the frustration we could clearly see what areas we need to tackle to catapult ourselves up the fleet.
Both of us have had to make some major adjustments to our previous sailing styles and figure out how we want to run this new team together. A lot of brain power goes into creating a new team from scratch; you have to think about every single detail. Before you get in the boat together even. From how you rig the boat in the morning, to who makes which decisions round the racecourse, to how you're going to run your programme. Then when you start you are constantly evolving and making adjustments to your strategy and priority’s
After this initial baptism of fire, we then set about structuring our 5 week lead-up programme to the World Championships. Obviously making adjustments and evolving our strategy after every day in the boat together.
World Championships:
After a tricky start to the week, we stuck to our routines; analysed and adapted our strategy every day, finishing the week with a cracking days racing; including a win!
So it was very rewarding to finish 13th overall and 1st Brit after pulling together this campaign in such a short period of time. We felt very proud of ourselves that we’d created a clearly effective programme and felt satisfied that we’d done all we could to cover all the bits we needed to before
the event came around.
We are very much racing now, rather than just getting around the course!
The pressure of selection is obviously becoming increasing pressing; with a chance to select the nation for the Olympics at this years Worlds, we missed the cut by 1 place! So we will now wait for another chance at the worlds in Feb next year. Our GB selection will also take place at next years’ spring events. So a big winter ahead! We need to get our strategy for this block of training right, I’m sure it will involve constant review and adjustment.
We are in need of a new boat and have managed to secure a build slot for October. This will be the boat we use for our trials next year. Hopefully she’ll be a rocket ship!
If anyone is interested in helping out to fund the new boat, it would be massively appreciated. Please get in touch if you want to chat about it our want to know more about my campaign in general.
