Waves crash down on Annalise’s Olympic dream

Annalise Murphy suffered one of Olympic sport’s deepest disappointments when she emerged from the toughest, most exciting medal race of the 2012 Olympic Games Sailing regatta.

The Irish helm arrived ashore distraught. Murphy’s disappointment was heightened because she had led the double points showdown at the first mark and for four of the six legs she was in medal positions which subsequently swapped between silver and bronze.

In the end she lost bronze to the ever-consistent Belgian Evi Van Acker who just had the measure of the Irish sailor in downwind. Murphy attacked and gained, sailing smartly on the upwind legs but on the tight, short downwind legs she consistently lost out.

The smooth sailing of Lijia Xu won her gold, an unerring confidence in her decision making and great speed in the moderate breeze on the difficult medal arena, to become China’s first sailor to win two Olympic medals. She confirmed later that the experience of winning bronze in 2008 in Qingdao made a big difference to her.

Murphy made a less than perfect start but still managed to lead the fleet around the first turn. She picked a lane of lighter breeze on the first run to round ninth at the leeward turning gate. Once more she sailed the upwind perfectly and rallied back to second but on the next beat she came head to head for bronze against Van Acker, and the smaller, lighter sailor – world cup winner and world number one – was just faster to the final turn.

To have come so close, the medal slipping from her grasp on that final run made it all the harder for Murphy to come to terms with. She may take some solace in the number of sailors who have gone from fourth to gold in consecutive Olympic Games such as Shirley Robertson and Paul Goodison but that will be in the future.

“I am pretty devastated at the moment,” Murphy said, only just containing herself.

“That is how sport happens. I just was on the wrong end of the four of us today and that is going to be really, really tough. I will have to try and get over this.”

She made the best start to the Olympic regatta of any sailor at these Games, winning four back-to-back races, but she remained inconsolable.

“At any other regatta if I came away with these kind of points I’d probably be winning easily buy there are three other girls who had amazing events, so it was always going to be really tough to beat them. Fourth… if you’d asked me a year ago I’d definitely have taken it. Now it is so hard.”

The sudden death, 30-minute medal race, proved once again an entirely different sailing event to the preliminary races.

“I was first around the windward mark and then lost out by going left on the first downwind but I guess just trying to keep your eyes open I maybe made a few decisions which were not great. That maybe cost me in the end.”

But despite the anguish, she pledged to carry on for another quadrennial cycle.

“I am only 22, the youngest in the top 10 by a good bit. So I will work really hard over the next four years and hopefully come Rio, perhaps I’ll be able to give this a better shot.

“I think fourth is probably the hardest place to finish. You are so close. I think it will push me to train harder and work harder overall.

“Because the four of us were only a point apart I tried to sail my own race and have good speed. And I think I did that but it all started to fall apart downwind.”