By Alexander Smith
MARSEILLE, France (Reuters) – Perched on an outcrop somewhere above the bay of Marseille, British weather expert Simon Rowell has spent much of the Olympic Games trying to give Britain’s sailors an edge.
For Rowell, and the other weather wizards hired by big sailing nations such as France, Germany and Sweden, the breeze across the Mediterranean Sea has been a brain teaser, made trickier by a long, hot spell.
With the south of France Olympic venue hemmed in by cliffs, mountains and rocky islands, teams say conditions are in some ways more akin to sailing on a lake or lagoon rather than on the sea, with the intense heat off the land also disrupting the breeze.
Apart from one day, the racing has been characterised by gentle and fluctuating winds, testing the nerves and patience of race officials, sailors, spectators and television commentators.
“The organisers have done a really, really good job of making do with what we got,” said Line Flem Hoest of Norway, who won bronze in the women’s dinghy on Wednesday.
“You can’t do anything about the weather, you’ve just got to do your best,” Hoest said during a press conference, her sentiments echoed by silver medallist Anne-Marie Rindom.
Long delays, abandoned races due to big shifts in the direction of the breeze and extreme heat have meant sailors needing to take measures to cool off physically and mentally.
“The timing of the Olympics is, call it ‘unfortunate’. Early August is often less windy here and with the heatwave coming in as well,” Norway’s Hoest said.
Some sailors revel in big wind and waves, others in light weather and many in a mixture of conditions which test their abilities in mastering the Olympic classes.
Ultimately, the winners are usually those who achieve consistency over a long and gruelling series of races.
For Marit Bouwmeester of the Netherlands, women’s gold dinghy winner, the time before the birth of her now two-year-old daughter offered the opportunity to study meteorology.
“People say that Marseille was very unpredictable and hard to read … I felt that you could read the course; it just switches a lot, but (it’s about) knowing which system was going to work,” she said after the medals ceremony.
And the winning formula for the woman who was this week crowned the most successful Olympic female sailor?
“Very good tactics” devised with her coach, Bouwmeester said, had produced “some very stable results”.
(Reporting by Alexander Smith; Editing by Clare Fallon)
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