Yesterday
Unexpected finals in Croatia
On June 2, in the Croatian city of Rovinj, the second stage of the RC44 Cup was completed, in which three teams participated under the Russian flag. According to the results of the competition, the victory was celebrated by the French team Aleph Racing, and the best result among Russians was Nika Prosikhina’s “Nika” – the sixth line.
The RC44 class fleet first visited Rovinj back in 2012 already. Then here was the title of world class champions. Amazingly, seven years later, the first three of the championship returned to Rovinj to continue to compete. But not everyone managed to repeat or at least come close to past successes. World champion 2012 Penninsula Petroleum from Gibraltar, their fellow countrymen British Team Aqua (silver of the championship 2012) and Slovenian Ceeref (bronze) did not even enter the top three Adris 44 Cup this season.
In turn, the Istra peninsula has not changed itself. As in 2012, the same light unstable winds, which became the main cause of unstable, and sometimes unpredictable results of teams.
By the way, the Slovenes headed the standings of the stage during the first two days of the competition, but then lost stability and finished fifth after the unsuccessful final day of June 2.
The victory on the stage unexpectedly, after nine years of effort, was won by the French team Aleph Racing, Charisma (Monaco, winner of the 2018 season) finished second, Artemis Sweden's veterans were third.
Three-time world champion RC44 Vladimir Prosikhin completed the 2018 season with the second, and the second opened the new racing season in April in Montenegro. Then "Nick", it seems, entered the losing streak, and in Croatia, the titled team did almost nothing. If the beginning of the stage gave hope for a positive result, then in the middle of the competition, “Nika” fell out of the troika and fixed on the bottom lines of the table. We managed to improve the situation a little on the final day, when the 2nd and 5 parishes placed the St. Petersburg man’s team on the sixth line.
The crew of the St. Petersburg Yacht Club seemed to wait for the right moment to surprise everyone. The team of the double-bronze medalist at the RC44 World Championships, Kirill Frolov, opened the stage with a third parish, and then everything did not go according to plan. Unimportant starts alternated with technical difficulties, and when the team finally headed the fleet in the third race on June 1, this race was canceled due to a change in wind direction. The situation could not be fixed on the final day. The same 5th and 6th parish left only the eighth line at the disposal of the Frolov’s crew.
“We somehow constantly create problems for ourselves, and then heroically solve them,” Kirill Frolov comments on the stage. “This includes several false starts at this stage, the failure of the backstay unit, and so on. Then the whole team concentrates on minimizing losses and we succeed. We always play 2-3 positions during the race. But I want to change this trend, especially since there is speed and the crew’s skills are sufficient. ”
"Dembelsky chord" was marked by newcomers of the series, Yekaterinburg "Tavatuy" Pavel Kuznetsov and Yevgeny Negodnikov. Let the team take the last line, it managed to win its first race in a new class for itself exactly on June 2.
“We had chances to do it before, but still the stars did not converge, for example, on the 31st we were in the lead but were implicated in the incident with Nika and missed the chance, and so it was a few more times,” says Yevgeny Neugodnikov – but the main thing is that we have proved that we can win. ”
Competitions RC44 Cup will continue in July. For the umpteenth time, the world championship will take over the “mecca” of Swedish sailing – Marstrand Here in 2017, “Nika” won the second title of champions, and “Battleship” was the third.
Alexey Zhirov
PR-director of the Yacht Club of St. Petersburg
Results Adris 44 Cup 2019 –
https://44cup.org/results
54 Yesterday # 9063
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