Olympic Sailing 2024: Steyaert and Picon regain lead in Women’s Skiff ahead of Medal Race

The twists and turns in the Women’s Skiff continued to entertain as Sarah Steyaert and Charline Picon regained the lead heading into tomorrow’s Medal Race.

On another unpredictable day on the water, the French crew did enough to edge ahead with two finishes in the top ten.

The Dutch pair of Odile van Aanholt and Annette Duetz had their least productive day in Marseille so far, but a fourth placed finish in race 11 puts them just two points off the French leaders.

Sweden’s Vilma Bobeck and Rebecca Netzler held onto third overall following a brilliant day of sailing, confidently winning the opening two races.

It is still a wide-open field heading into the Medal Race tomorrow. The top three crews, alongside Norway’s Helene Naess and Marie Roenningen and Germany’s Marla Bergmann and Hanna Wille, are all still in with a chance of picking up a gold medal.

Picon said: “It was a critical day with the same winds as yesterday – they were quite unstable. We missed the first one because we made a bad decision with strategy as we thought the right would pay.

“But we can be proud of the reaction in the two next races. We can be proud to be top tonight.”

Van Aanholt said: “We are a little disappointed about how we sailed today so the biggest takeaway is that we want to sail decisively, in our style and hopefully end it nicely.

“We do a lot of training races throughout the year with ten boats so it’s fun.”

Duetz said: “We sail the best when we sail confidently and we missed a little bit of that today.”

Netzler said: “I think tomorrow we’re just going to go out and enjoy it and make a good start and go very fast and then we’ll see how long that takes us. We’ll just do our best and see where we end up.”

Roenningen said: “This is what we came for, to fight for a medal and we’re very happy to be in this position right now.

“Tomorrow we’re just going to go out there and do what we’re good at and what we know we can do and see what that means in the end.”

Wille said: “It’s absolutely crazy, we’re speechless about it [being in the Medal Race]. It’s so much more than we expected of this event.

“We fought hard today and it’s just amazing that we could keep it all together until the end.”

How it works:

Medals for the Women’s Skiff (49erFX) will be decided by the cumulative results of the 20-strong fleet over 12 races. The boat with the lowest total will rank first.

Athletes will be able to discard their worst finishing position after they’ve completed three races.

At the end of the Opening Series, the top ten boats in the fleet will qualify for the Medal Race, which is worth double points.

The score in the Medal Race cannot be discarded. The crew with the smallest overall points total will win gold.