Laser - World Championship 2010 - Hayling Island GBR - Day 5 - an avalanche of 39 Black-Flags

Let’s face it: Leading a world championship on the first day of the finals and getting sacked with a BFD hurts. Just ask Tom Slingsby AUS who experienced that yesterday on the first day of gold fleet racing at the Laser Worlds. Slingsby survived the day with the lead and got a smidgen of relief by the fact that defending champion Paul Goodison GBR and red-hot Michael Bullot NZL committed the same blunder and paid dearly for it. However, Slingsby won’t feel smug, because despite his 13-point cushion on Andrew Maloney NZL, he’s living on the razor’s edge with both discards occupied by fat scores so he can’t afford any mistakes from here on out. It was edgy out there yesterday in moderate breeze and glorious sunshine, but a strong current from leewards produced and an avalanche of 39 BFDs handed out by the RC across all three fleets in both races. One who kept clean was Nick Thompson GBR, who used a 4/2 to move from 7th into 3rd (tied for 2nd) with a tidy score line that includes only one ugly finish at the moment a 25th, which he managed to discard. Slingsby and Maloney will watch for him. In 4th is the intrepid Pavlos Kontides CYP all of a sudden eight points ahead of Goodison, who only managed a 17th in the second race after tangling with a French sailor on the second beat.
After the eight qualifiers finished in the Junior World Championships, Francesco Marrai scored two more bullets to build a 10-point lead over Thorbjoern Schierup DEN and Alex Mills-Barton GBR, who also won both of his group races.
The report, all results and the video summary.