Sailing-Swedish women dominate America’s Cup group to book semi-final berth

BARCELONA, Spain :Sweden dominated their women’s America’s Cup group to make the event’s semi-final on Tuesday, with the Dutch and Spanish teams also qualifying in testing conditions off Barcelona.
The Swedish team, who have been able to get more practice on board the AC40 foiling boats than some other crews, set the pace with a controlled performance in a shifty Mediterranean breeze.
At the end of the eight-race series, Sweden topped their group, which also included Australia, Canada and Germany, to make the six-boat semi-final scheduled for Friday.
“We’re super happy with our performance and I’m so proud of the girls, they really gave their all,” Swedish co-helm Vilma Bobeck told Reuters.
“I really enjoyed it, but in conditions like today you really need to be on your toes and know what’s coming next because it’s changing so fast,” Bobeck said.
Canada, who had a dramatic nose dive and near capsize in Tuesday’s first race, then suffered equipment failure on their high-tech boat which put them out of the remainder of the event.
The Canadians were “gutted” not to be able to continue to show how they were improving, their co-helm Isabella Bertold told Reuters when the crew were safely back ashore.
“I’m really impressed with our team for putting the boat down as they did and keeping everything safe,” Bertold said of the moment when she said a bolt had sheared and caused a loss of control of the hydraulically-operated foils.
This damage also had repercussions for the other side of the draw between Britain, France, Italy, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States, which had to be delayed by two days.
Because the 12 teams in the event share boats, the damage to the AC40 being used by the Canadians meant that Britain would not have been able to race on Tuesday afternoon as scheduled.
As a result, the organisers rescheduled the group’s fleet race to Thursday to allow time for repairs “in the interests of fairness to all competitors”.