The starting signal for the Sailing World Cup will be given at the Trofeo Princesa Sofia in front of Palma de Mallorca on Monday. More than 1,000 boats gather on the Balearic island for the first location determination in the pre-Olympic year. The Austrian national team has two boats each in the 470, 49 and Nacra 17 classes, and is also represented in the KiteFoil and iQFoil.
Sailing: Hussl and Bildstein start the season
The red-white-red top boats around Lara Vadlau/Lukas Mähr (470), Benjamin Bildstein/David Hussl (49) and Laura Farese/Matthäus Zöchling (Nacra 17) hope to make it into the Medal Race. In addition, important insights are to be gained for the World Cup in August in The Hague, where the first Olympic tickets for Paris 2024 are available. “The upcoming comparison primarily serves to find further insights into the material. We’re never there. We’re on the way to preparing as best we can for The Hague, so we don’t neglect any detail and want to use every little thing to our advantage,” said Mähr.
The Nacra boats were assisted in the preparation by Thomas Zajac. “He knows every move on the Nacra 17, has played through every movement on the boat countless times and was able to give us a lot of input for improvement,” says Farese. Tanja Frank, 2016 Olympic bronze medalist with Zajac, is also grateful for the input. “We were again able to adjust many details that only became visible through his perspective. We were able to make changes, especially in the start and pre-start phase and in boat handling, which will result in a further increase in performance.”