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March 2008

Nick Rogers and Joe Glanfield Olympic Diary

We are now well into our final preparations for the 2008 Olympics. After our trip to Australia we spent some time at home resting, doing fitness training then generally getting ready for the season ahead. Looking back at Australia we felt as though we sailed pretty well especially on the light wind days and just let ourselves down with one poor days racing during the World championships that cost us hugely. We started badly in both races that day, shortly after the start there was a persistent shift to the left and we struggled to find any opportunities back to the front. On the positive we were pleased to win Sail Melbourne and learnt a lot from the World championships that we can now build from and practice in training.

We have just completed our first training camp in Valencia where we are sailing with the rest of the British 470 squad. We are very fortunate to have such a strong group of boats to sail against. We are sailing with the women’s team Christina Bassadone and Saskia Clarke and the two men’s teams of Luke Patience and Chris Grube and Nic Asher and Elliot Willis. Everyone is fast and it means every day is a challenge to win the training exercises and races. We are also working on our equipment making some changes that we believe will make us faster in the light conditions we are expecting in China. Nick and I have been dieting since Australia as it will be important to be light for China, we are lucky that we are both quite small and can be lighter then most of our rivals giving us an advantage in lighter conditions. We have a planned diet and fitness program to help us reach our targets without losing strength or getting ill, its just a matter of being disciplined and sticking to it!

Our next championship is Hyeres, which will be a good test, all of our rivals will be there and you usually get a good mix of conditions. After that we are doing some training in the U.K with our squad, which will be nice. The conditions for sailing are good in the U.K during spring and it makes life very easy when we are swapping equipment around and testing things. We have also got our European championships during June in Lake Garda, Italy and some training camps at Qingdao the Olympic venue before the Games itself during August.

Thank you for you support

Kind regards

Joe

On behalf of Nick Rogers and Joe Glanfield