Aussie sailors win bronze on final day of World Championships

Australia has secured a bronze medal at the Nacra 17 World Championships in Auckland, despite Jason Waterhouse and Lisa Darmanin finishing last in the medal race.

The NSW Institute of Sport sailing duo had done enough earlier in the day with an eighth and a third in the last two gold fleet races giving themselves enough of a buffer over the fourth-place team that they were assured of a podium finish.

“The medal race wasn’t our best race,” said Lisa.

“It was pretty windy, pretty choppy, quite shifty and we were under a big volcano. So it was tricky and we kind of got it wrong unfortunately. Then we just threw the dice a few times to see if we could get back in the game.”

Jason referred to the fleet as being “super hot” with nobody dominating and reiterating that they were going for gold.

”We went into the medal race with an opportunity to win which was what we set as our goal at the beginning of this week.

We had nothing to lose – couldn’t lose the bronze – so we thought we’d go high risk and unfortunately it didn’t pay off. It wasn’t the result we wanted but in another way it’s exactly the result we needed this week so we’re very happy with a bronze medal and looking forward to Geelong.”

The Olympic silver medallists are now turning their attention to the 2020 World Championships at the Royal Geelong Yacht Club in February.

“We’ll head down to Geelong early to play with everyone who’s down in the southern hemisphere.” Darmanin noted.

“We definitely want to go two better.  It’s all eyes on Tokyo really, so we want to keep learning as many lessons as we can.”