On the 26th of February the Andalucía Olympic week kicked off in the Bay of Cadiz, Spain. Forty-three men and women came into action to try get their hands on a podium place. We Spoke with the 19-year-old, Luc Schmitz who finished in 3rd place in the men’s overall results.
Luc: “This winter we, the Dutch talentsquad from Team Allianz, went to Aruba for 2 months to prepare ourselves for this season. The Olympic week is our first event this year which gave us a good opportunity to see how we are doing. During the races the level was pretty high with guys like Sebastian Koerdel (GER), Huig-Jan Tak (NED), Steven van Broeckhoven (BEL) and even former PWA World champion and now our class director Gonzalo Costa Hoevel (ARG) it wasn’t your average training regatta, the level was high”.
“The bay of Cadiz is known for not being the easiest place to race with the often-strong winds and big waves. Fortunately for us the big waves stayed away during the regatta and we only saw one day that was constantly over 25 knots of wind. It was great to see how well the equipment and windsurfers handled the strong winds this day, however there was a lot of crashing. Not because of the wind being too strong but because of the many fish that day. It was very funny but also scary at the same time, because we couldn’t see the fish. In the downwind I changed my tactic of looking for the best gust to also check where the birds are diving, because that’s probably where the fish are. If you hit a fish you lose about 5 to 10 places, this didn’t make it unfair however, as literally everyone had the same problem.”
“During the first 3 days we did 4 course races every single day, on day 4 we were only able to do 1 slalom race due to light wind. For me, this was the perfect regatta to kick of the season with fun racing on a proper high level.”
Top 3 Women:
Top 3 Men:
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