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January 2002

Here we are 2002! This will be an exciting year for us we have a lot of big events at some interesting places. Last year was a good year for us, we managed medals at 3 grade 1 events (out of 4 that we intended), this included a 2nd at the World championships, which we are very proud of. We also managed to get to the top of the ISAF World rankings, which was great, and won the National Inland championships, despite missing the first race! We have learnt a huge amount about 470's technically, and also about our own sailing and regatta preparation. We have more resilience as a team now, and have a good ability to pull a result out when it looks as though we have blown it.

This year we have thought long and hard about our program as we want to attend lots of regattas, but we also have many ideas we want to try and work on during training away from the stress of competition. We will be doing close to double the amount of sailing days we did last year, starting with a lot of training and then a fairly heavy regatta program into the summer. On top of our annual 470 World and European championships we have the ISAF World championships in Marseille, which only take place once every 4 years, last time we came 12th, it was our first ever international championship together. On top of this we have a Pre Olympic event in Athens during August, so a busy summer!

Next week we are training in Palma, we are going to leave our boat there throughout the winter months and fly back and forth for trainings, flights are cheap and the training is much more effective when it is slightly warmer and lighter till later on. We will come home for 5 days then fly back out and take the boat to Villamoura in Portugal where we are going to do a training camp then a small 3 day event; there will probably be about 5 good boats so the racing will be good. I will send a report on the 13th February and let you know how we got on our first event of the New Year.