Unforuntely it has been very light air this year and several sailing events have been postponed or canceled. The Tornado class was able to get their first race out of the way, although the wind was mostly mild for the first round. Since the Tornado races were a bit lacking I uploaded some videos of two Olympic teams out in some great wind. Check out the video section for the NZL Tornado Team and the SWE Tornado Team in action.

Tornado Olympic Class - After 1 Race

1 ESP Fernando Echavarri, Anton Paz Blanco
2 GRE Iordanis Paschalidis, Konstantinos Trigonis
3 NED Mitch Booth, Pim Nieuwenhuis
4 UKR Pavel Kalinchev, Andriy Shafranyuk
5 AUS Darren Bundock, Glenn Ashby
6 GBR Leigh McMillan, Will Howden
7 FRA Xavier Revil, Christophe Espagnon
8 CAN Oskar Johansson, Kevin Stittle
9 CHN Youjia Luo, Xiuke Chen
10 GER Johannes Polgar, Florian Spalteholz
11 BEL Carolijn Brouwer, Sebastien Godefroid
12 AUT Roman Hagara, Hans Peter Steinacher
13 ARG Santiago Lange, Carlos Espínola
14 USA John Lovell, Charles Ogletree
15 ITA Francesco Marcolini, Edoardo Bianchi

So Gary Jobson, the NBC Sailing Commentator got right back to me to let us know that they were planning on covering one Tornado preliminary race and then the Medals race. The prelim race was cancelled, so we will not get to watch the Tornado race until Wednesday night (20th Aug) at 11:00 PM at http://www.nbcolympics.com/sailing/resultsandschedules/ or anytime after that on demand.

Unfortunately, Johnny Lovell and Charlie Ogletree of the USA team are not doing that hot this year. After their silver medal in Athens 4 years ago, they were really gunning for gold. They even designed a new spinnaker sail that was supposed to be really fast in the light wind conditions of Qindao. It is so small and flat that they can use it upwind and downwind. However, once they committed to using this sail, they cannot change back to the standard spinnaker. I think that the conditions have not been exactly what they were expecting, so using the sail has hurt them more than it has helped. The famous duo of Australia Darren Bundock and Glen Ashby are currently dominating in the #1 position. Best of luck to team USA on their final few races!